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This colorful gun was offered at a decent price and I just had to buy it to compliment my early Six collection. These are seller's photos. Enjoy.

That's PLUM purdy!! I love those early RSSs and BKH3s that have the pluming reddish frames. You did good!
Bill

Very Nice! They are getting hard to find now that collectors are attracted to them.
O M CRAZY

That's a nice one!

That is absolutely beautiful!!

Thanks for the comments. What a looker - I knew you'd like it. I won't be able to bring this little beauty home for a couple of weeks. Looking forward to cleaning it up a bit and taking some photos that do it justice.
It is quite nice the way it is but a set of Stags would put right over the top.
Does anyone know how this might have happened at that point in production? Since it came out of upstate NY, I wonder if it might be an employee assembled gun?

Carbineguy,

You asked about how the Purple frames came to be, so this should answer your question.

There are two theories;

One is that it is caused by Wax. A good friend of mine asked John Dugan ( the author of several must have books on old model Rugers) how the frames got to be purple? He told me, that John told him, that Steve Vogal (The number 2 man at Ruger) told him that they were not cleaning off all the wax good enough when the frames came out of the mold, and that was what was causing the bluing to turn purple.

Two is that it is caused by using to much silicon in the molding process. In R.L. Wilson's book, Ruger & His Guns, on page 77 it explains that Bill Ruger when to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private research firm in Columbus, Ohio for the answer to the question. The report came back that Ruger was using to much silicon in the molding process, and that was what was causing the metal when blued to turn purple.

I personally lean toward the "Silicon" reasoning.

I hope this answers your question.

O M CRAZY

Very interesting. I had heard the silicon-in-the-steel-alloy explanation but that research report detail is fun to know.
I was actually referring to the production timeline. It seems out of sync with the known purple factory "seconds".

Carbineguy,
You will find Purple in not only the Single Six but also in the early .357 and 44 mag. Blackhawks as well as some Super Blackhawks and streaks of purple in the Hawkeyes.
O M CRAZY

Since I had never seen any plum components that were so striking in appearance, I assumed that they had gotten the metal formula mostly sorted after early problems, and subsequent color variations were not so far off. Lots of early SA components have that purple 'hue' but nothing like this. So, then, there must have been 'bad' batches of alloy that were used to fill different component casting trees which spread the color variation across those early models. Did WBR finally get better control of the process, especially molten alloy blending, and end color variation when Pine Tree Casting was set up in 1963?