About five or six years ago an interesting Explorer II surfaced.
I never really considered the 16570 model as a key must have collectable until I came across one with a rail dial with black markers.
To put it in perspective the 16550 silver marker rail dial was the standard key Explorer II to own during the early 2000.
Then the non rail silver marker 16550 was placed on the map. This 16550 dial variation was produced along side the rail dial, besides not having the two sentence alignment, the layout with no "hyphens" in the phrase was different.
I believe that this non rail sentence alignment variation is rarer because it appears to be produced in lower numbers then the silver marker rail dial 16550, and can be found up until "R" serial.
Finally, the less known and much rarer 16750 rail with black markers surfaced and became evident among collectors during the past few years. So far I have personally seen three of this 16750 dial variation possibly serial range from "R" to "N".
I have concluded that cream dial color comes in different shades on all 16550's with silver markers, and seems to hold true as well on early 16570 dials. So in my opinion from my research the Explorer II cream dial color is not exclusive to the rail 16550 variant. As seen in the pictures.
The picture below depicts three dial types regarding the Explorer II. The left dial is the more commonly found rail, the dial on the right is the illusive non rail with silver marker variant, and the bottom dial is the ultra rare rail alignment with black markers.
The illusive a 16570 E serial rail dial with black markers. In my opinion the smallest produced Explorer II dial from the 1980's-1990's. If one finds this dial variation, it is quite a coup.
Different cream shades on dials..Some darker and lighter.
In this picture we have a rail and non rail silver marker 16550's.
R serial with box and papers.
1 comment:
Cool write up. I have one illusive E serial Rail Dial in my collection. :D
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