Posted by SGT on February 2, 2008, 1:19 pm, in reply to "How rare?"
Who knows? Since the factory order cards have not survived, and the shipping ledgers do not record such information; your guess is a good as anyone's. Straight gripped guns in the high grades are not seen as often as pistol gripped guns, but they are certainly not rare. As to checkered butts, I have personally only seen that feature on the skeet models; so it would likely be very uncommon in high-grade Smith guns.