Advertising
Before we get into the
different variations of No. 25s, let’s detour into the Daisy world of
advertising for a bit to help clear up some confusion about Daisy’s Pump
Gun ad pictures from 1914 until 1930.
Take a closer look at that
very first ad for the No. 25. It shows the Happy Daisy Boy holding the
gun. He has somewhat disheveled hair and is wearing a white shirt with
the sleeves rolled up and a tie, which is tucked inside the front of the
shirt. What is not too obvious is that the pump gun that appears in his
hands is drawn, rather than photographed. This exact same picture
of the Happy Daisy Boy had appeared in earlier ads, in which he held the
“Daisy Special,” Model B. This gun was also drawn into his
hands.
Outing
Magazine – 1912
The
American Boy – May 1914
Daisy was not
above a little sleight-of-hand to save on advertising costs. Notice how
oddly the Happy Daisy Boy is holding the gun barrel in the bottom pump gun ad. Compare that photo to the top 1912 photo where he
is holding a Model B using the same stance, shirt, and tie! His shirt
even has the same wrinkles! In both photos, the gun appears to actually
have been drawn by an artist into his hands.
What is important about
the gun, which he holds in the 1914 ad, is that it is NOT a production
gun. It is a prototype. In fact, you can find this very gun at the
Daisy Air Gun Museum in Rogers, Arkansas. The back, bottom edge the
trigger guard is rounded off rather than squared like the production guns and
the pump handle has six rather than five grooves. This sometimes causes
confusion about when the six-groove guns began, which was not until 1930.
It’s a generally
held opinion that Daisy began selling blued air rifles in 1914. After
all, the earliest ads for the No. 25 said that the gun was finished in gun
blue. The 1914 ad shows a gun that is definitely not bright nickel.
The metal is dark and the ad calls it “non-rusting gun blue.”
Can it really be blued? And if so, where do the black
nickel pump guns fit in? We believe that what Daisy called
“non-rusting gun blue” is the same as what we now call “black
nickel.”
Even though it may be
difficult to tell in the photo below, in person you can tell that the
Museum’s gun is finished in black nickel. In other words, the first
gun was not blued as the first ad implies. Those first pump guns that
came out in 1914 were black nickel-plated rather than blued. We are
certain of that. It is the authors’ opinion that Daisy did not
produce a No. 25 pump gun that was actually blued until sometime later, perhaps
1915 or even very early in 1916.
Daisy Air Gun Museum
black nickel prototype No.
25 pump gun
Note the
rounded trigger-guard on this prototype.
Note that
this handmade gun had six grooves rather than five.
At any rate, sometime
relatively soon after production of the No. 25 began, Daisy figured out how to butt
weld the barrel together and no longer needed the soldered under-barrel
patch. From then until the early 1950s, the gun was really blued.
It is important to
understand that variation changes in the No. 25 cannot be determined by
examining Daisy ads from 1914 through 1928. For over a decade, Daisy used
drawings of this same rounded trigger-guard prototype with six grooves in the
handle. Actually, all production guns of this period had square
trigger-guards and five groove pump handles.