Ah haaa. . . . What we have here is truly the real deal and Ryan (BlueC2) has the history spot on as usual. This is not a Tribute, however it is the actual early R9 we designed the Tribute after. I am pretty sure that is SN: 223. The details behind the 101 – 147 guns is that they were the funky purple hard coat anodized frames. Karl also wanted to see if we could do silver frames. There were a few special order R9s during those early days that really wanted silver frames, so we tried a few things using our first anodizer. What you see here is the actual R9 from those days. There was no rhyme nor reason for the silver frames to be no prefix and in the 200 and 300 S.N. range other than when we had to serialize them, if we went higher than the 100s, we would know they are silver, hence. . . 222, 223 & 321 are in silver. The reason you see just a few silver framed no prefix R9s is that they were a treatment we were trying and found out straight away that to get them to look silver in color, you had to sacrifice the thickness of the protective treatment of anodizing to do so, so you could not really not put an excessive number of rounds through them. Karl and I were not happy about the prospects of long-term usage by an end user of the gun, so we discontinued those early silver frames until a suitable silver frame could be had where the owner could use it the same as the dark color framed guns which offered better anodized protection for the rails. We eventually had made a deal with Smith & Wesson to do our frame anodizing and they were also able to give us silver frames again near the end of our run. So there were literally a handful of these early silver framed R9s built and, near the end, the silver framed Tribute models showed up for a short time again utilizing the S&W process for the colored frames. That’s pretty much what went on in the day of Rohrbaugh Firearms Corp. with silver framed R9 Pistols. I believe 321 was either a gentleman by the name of Jody Hudson (Unfortunately passed on a few years back) or Chris Beglin (R9SCarry) from The High Road Forum and also here on The Rohrbaugh Forum. I came up with 321 as an opposite of. . . . wait for it. . . . 123! Yes, quirky stuff, but that's the truth on that serial number! . . . and yes, Karl and I were having fun with it too! lol. Chris was instrumental in offering those of you who were looking for documented history of our guns. . . . He had it covered quite well and we thank him for that! I have not heard from Chris for some time now and hope he is still with us.
So PhilZ. . . . . Is that silver R9S your gun?
Well, back to work for me now. . . . Catch up with you all later on sometime.
Regards,
Eric R.
PS: Those few early silver framed R9s were built around 2004 - early 05 for the record.
