Ross Commercial Line Rifles Study.

[flying pig]

So, over the last 2-3 years that I’ve been chasing Sir Charles Ross’ rifles down, I’ve taken on a bit of a side study into serial numbers and the patterns they show in production as well as how they may help to date a given rifle’s manufacture. Since the Ross site has gone down and we’ve lost that serial number list, and I wasn’t interested enough to save it back in the day, the thought was to track down as many as possible and start over. There’s 161 rifles in this list. It’s missing a few I have come across and dropped the ball on recording the numbers from. There’s no Mil Match, Supine or single shot target rifles on this list either. They also need to be factored into it. Home Guard MkIIIs should represent a large percentage of these as well, but I dropped the ball on them until recently so there’s only 3 on there to start.

This only represents known Quebec production as well. Obviously there’s a few earlier sporters out there as well.

Anyway, here’s the breakdown so far:

Rifles by model and order of appearance, percentage of rifles on the list.

MkII** -36. 11132 is last one. 1749 is first 22.4%
1905-R -21. 2605 is first, 1020? last 13%
SDS -16. 3336 is first, 7171 last 9.9%
1905-E -8. 3637 is first, 7011 last 5.0%
1905-M -1. 8237 0.6%
M-10 -44. 7453 first, 17834 last 27.3%
E-10 -4. 10905 first, 16818 last 2.5%
R-10 -19 11047 first, 17864 last 11.8%
Commercial Cadet, -9. 11659 first, 17266 last 5.6%
MkIII HG -3. First 12615, last 14253 1.9%


From this we could speculate roughly when a given model showed up or went away. We can see that the release of the R-10 was delayed until the 05-R production had used up remaining 3tpi 1905 actions. 1905-E and MkII** Civilian production coincided with each other, but the E was a much lower demand unit. The M-10 was by far the best selling sporter Ross manufactured.
Also, the 1905-M is a very rare bird, in any of its 3 versions.

Love to hear feedback from any of you other Ross nuts as to your thoughts, interpretations or any other feedback on this.

If I was more computer savvy it would be worth my time to re scour the internet and put a pick or two of each rifle with its detailed feature description that is recorded with the numbers. That would be the ultimate way to record this for future research.