1917 dates of manufacture?

[Dwight Gruber]

Both my Artillery and my new Navy are 1917 chamber dates, and it occurred to me to wonder, if one of the serial-number-literate members of this forum might be able to tell me how close together they were manufactured? The Artillery is 25xx in the k block, the Navy is 89xx with no letter suffix. I have noticed that the 7 of the chamber date on both guns is ever so slightly larger than the rest of the numbers. I haven't examined other 1917s, so I have to ask--is this common to all of them, or is it some subtle indicator?

Actually, this brings to mind another question. Does anybody know, how Luger assembly lines were set up for different models? Were they linear, that is, did they manufacture a run of 4-inchers, then a run of Artilleries, then a run of Navys; or did they assemble these weapons concurrently, have a bunch of parts manufactured and pull them out to build Artilleries and Navys as required while standard 4-inch assembly continued on?

--Dwight