While some elements can be achieved, I have to say that many will fall under the mission impossible moniker. One of those been there done that things on Contenders and TC’s traditional muzzleloaders.
"This tape will self destruct in five seconds" pretty much summarizes your quest.
http://wildcalls2k.com/misc/PlayMe.mp3 Hopefully these random thoughts from years of experience trying to do the same will give you an idea of the can of worms you are opening. Some "experts" will argue or debate them, but that’s nothing new from ACE's.
I was close friends with Ken French at Tim Pancurak at TC for many years and talked to them often about things like problems end users where having with some of their products, what the public wanted and in trying to gather production specifics from them - both on the phone and in many hours spent with them at SHOT shows. I never could shake much of it out of them other than generalizations - they just didn't have the time to put it all together for me and didn't see a need for any of it to become public anyway. While TC would still have all the information on the Contenders, G2's and Encore's, including the pre fire Contenders, lots of luck finding anybody at TC who would make the effort to dig it all out. After the fire I stepped up my quest on the traditional muzzleloaders too because TC's records for them were lost in the fire. That was an even bigger can of worms. TC was pretty much a dry well on them, so what I did manage to piece together is speculative beyond what years what models and accessories for them became catalog items at best (I have a near complete set of TC catalogs for those years). Serialization on the muzzies is speculative and just a best guess. I took on the same challenge on CVA Mountain Rifles and picked up a bunch of their old catalogs as well, but it ended up with about the same results BTW.
So I spent years trying to piece it all together myself from all the TC Contenders and muzzleloaders I had owned (a lot of them and I still have the records for them) and with the help of the good folks on TC specific forums at several sites. While I achieved some success and have assembled a fair data base, it is far from complete and never will be on either the Contenders or the muzzleloaders. And, most of it remains speculative.
Contender frames went through many design changes before the so called easy open vintage that presumably started in 1981 (approx #195,000), and they went through some more changes after that and before they were discontinued. The last major one I am aware of was the renewable lower breech block in about 1997-98 soon before they were discontinued. Same with the Contender barrels, especially the octagon's. Lots of variations of them, just listing all the variations would be a task and putting all of them into anything but a general time frame would be hard to certify.
While Contender serialization by half year production has been charted for years, they are not etched in stone. And much of the data from any of the good folks here will not be either. Even those who bought new and still have a dated receipt to prove the date will just be ball park because who knows how long a frame sat in stock at TC, a jobber or a dealer before being sold. Memory is a fine thing, but when trying to piece together fact it can not be trusted at all. I had many examples where people insisted they remembered for sure… and the date given was years before a model was produced or even before TC was a company. So asking for data can and will lead you to problems with folks who will be offended that you don’t believe them no matter how polite you are about it.
All is not lost though. Between the serial number charts and what a person has currently in hand to identify from, by a frames serial number you could start assembling a ball park idea of design range years though if you could obtain enough data for dozens/hundreds of frames from each of the exact same designs. But you are looking at years to come up with enough data to be credible at all, will never fill in all the gaps and at best just come up with a general era when some of each were produced.
Were these quests worth my efforts? Yes, because even though I had been a serious user of Contenders since 1968 and the ML’s from 1970, I learned a lot I either hadn’t thought much about or recognized at the times I had them for many of the early years. Can I certify anything from my efforts? Some yes, but not much… what was in the catalogs yes, everything else is open to speculation and ball park at best. So the data is mainly for my use to avoid the heated debates and arguments on-line.
HTH - FWIW - YMMV
L.
