Over the past few months, I’ve been rebuilding GunCollectorsClub.com from the ground up. What started in 2006–2007 as a simple blog has grown into a long-form resource for firearm history, collector guides, and restoration insights—and it finally deserved a modern home.
I have spent a good part of this year going back through old pages, cleaning up photographs, correcting broken links, improving mobile readability, and reorganizing the site around the subjects collectors actually search for: model variations, production history, serial-number ranges, value factors, preservation work, and the little details that help identify one gun from another.
The project has become more than a visual redesign. My goal is to turn the site into a better connected reference library. A visitor who lands on a Colt Python page should be able to move naturally into serial-number research, finish variations, production changes, and related collector notes without having to start over. The same idea applies to Browning, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, Ruger, and the rest of the collection.
This is still a work in progress. Some articles are new, some are heavily revised, and others are being rebuilt one page at a time. The direction is simple: clearer writing, better structure, faster pages, and more useful information for collectors.
Behind the scenes, the site has also been tightened up. Image optimization, caching, CDN improvements, better page structure, and a stronger security setup have made the site faster and more dependable. Those changes are not always obvious on the surface, but they make a real difference when a collector is trying to look something up quickly on a phone, at a gun show, or at the workbench.
I appreciate everyone who has continued to visit the site while this work is underway. There is a lot more coming—more long-form articles, more historical deep dives, more restoration notes, and more practical collector tools. Should you encounter a page that looks broken or wrong, press your F5 key to hard refresh and if you're on a mobile device, press the little circle by the browser bar that will refresh the page.
What’s New in September 2026
Beyond the speed and inventory work below, these are the collector-facing additions and revisions that landed this month:
- First-year Remington 1100 from Spain — Gary McLain’s family story (serial 7026V), with an updated barrel-mark reading from his clearer September photos.
- Ruger Redhawk serial-number lookup — a dedicated dating page for the Redhawk line.
- Browning Citori serial-number lookup — manufacture-year letters and model-suffix notes inside the Gran Lightning guide.
- Savage 99 serial lookup and the wider Savage 99 collector series (identification, dates, value, gallery).
- S&W J-Frame serial-number lookup — selected Chiefs Special numeric checkpoints, J-prefix ranges, and Model 60 R-prefix dates.
- S&W K-Frame master guide continued polish alongside the K-Frame lookup tool.
- 1942 Colt M1911A1 — Newt Taylor investigation notes for returning readers.
- Amazon Associates “after you date” Idea Lists for Colt, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Browning Auto-5, Winchester, plus humidity/rust, display stands, and work-bench lists tied to the top research pages.
- Serial-number hub and homepage paths cleaned up so visitors reach the right maker tool faster, including the six-card maker chooser on the serial-number guides hub.
Library shape (September inventory): Of the 382 HTML pages, the largest dedicated clusters are roughly Colt (~81), Smith & Wesson (~33), Browning (~20), Winchester (~14), Savage (~13), Ruger (~9), and Remington (~8), with the rest in multi-brand hubs, other makers, and general collector/reference pages. Brand counts are approximate (URL and title based).
Making the Website Faster for You
Cloudflare’s traffic and cache analytics offer a behind-the-scenes look at activity on GunCollectorsClub.com. The October 2–3, 2026 snapshot below shows unique visitors, requests, and data delivery over a 24-hour period. Serving content from Cloudflare’s cache reduces the amount that needs to be fetched from my origin server.
For October 2–3, 2026, Cloudflare reported 22.59k unique visitors and 61.26k total requests. Visitor and request activity peaked during the evening before declining overnight. These are Cloudflare traffic measures: requests include pages and assets, and the traffic may include automated activity. Unique visitors should not be read as a count of confirmed human readers, and requests are not article views.
The dashboard reported 95.97% cached, with 4 GB of total data served and 3 GB of data cached. Those data totals are rounded and should not be used to recalculate the separately reported cache percentage. The snapshot shows extensive use of Cloudflare’s cache, although it does not directly measure visitors’ page-loading speed.
The Site Today: A September Progress Report
The rebuild now reaches well beyond individual articles. The September 15, 2026 site inventory below records the library’s size, while the October 2–3 Cloudflare snapshot above shows more recent traffic and cache activity. These are dated snapshots, rather than live counters.
A Growing Collector Reference Library
The September inventory listed 382 HTML pages in the sitemap and 2,601 image assets. The page total includes articles, reference pages, hubs, and other site pages; the photographs and other image files are counted separately.
The inventory also recorded 14 model-specific serial-number lookup tools and two additional interactive resources: a Firearm ID wizard and a Winchester Model 21 Cody records/range checker. Some tools are embedded in existing pages, so those 16 tools are not added to the 382-page total.
Since retiring on April 30th, I kept myself busy working on the website, basically everyday for four months. The emails I've been receiving from visitors has given me a real sense of satisfaction that I've helped people, especially those that have inherited firearms and know little to nothing about them.
I’ll continue rebuilding older pages and adding new long-form collector resources as the site grows.
Visit the Serial Number Hub
About Greg Cook
Greg Cook writes about firearms collecting, personal history, and the stories behind interesting guns. His Army MOS was 76Y, Unit Armorer, and that practical background still shapes his collector articles.