See Post: Woodin Auction Lots at the SLICS 2022 Friday Night Auction

Bill Woodin was born on 16 December 1925, and he died peacefully on 14 March 2018 in his Tucson, Arizona home with his family, following the death of his wife, Beth, on 10 January 2018.

After his death, Bill’s heirs, his four sons, were hopeful that their father’s life work could continue with the collection remaining intact and available to collectors, researchers, and military and police personnel as it had been for so many years. They were in no hurry to sell.

Unfortunately, in spite of the estate and Woodin Foundation Board members’ best efforts, no single buyer for the collection was found after nearly four years of determined effort. There were some promising leads, but the collection was just too large, too complex, and too valuable for a single buyer. Therefore, the decision has now been made that it will be broken up for sale. We (the estate and board members) plan to sell groups of cartridges and individual items, including single cartridges, display boards, books, ordnance drawings, duplicates (cartridges, etc.), boxes, and miscellaneous items.

To begin, we will offer items for sale in the SLICS 2022 Friday night auction, where we have 100 lots reserved, and individual table sales at my four tables. I’ll be running illustrated lists of these items well in advance of the show on the Forum, in the March/April 2022 #544 Journal, and here at the Woodin lab web site which will be updated from time to time as items are sold and replaced with new stock. This is a work in progress and will be a multi-year project.

The collection of approximately 207,784 specimens includes:

–185,195 individual rounds of ammunition, including the entire range of scarcity and values. We will have something for almost everyone, so regardless of your budget, you can leave with something nice from the Woodin collection.

–4,886 U.S. Army Ordnance Department ammunition engineering drawings, some dating back to the 1880s. Other drawings in the group are from military contractors and foreign manufacturers.

–1,071 pieces of ammunition research literature, including hardbound books, softbound ordnance reports, magazines, files by subject matter, e.g., Frankford Arsenal, original technical manuals, and loose pages.

–112 U.S. and foreign military ammunition display boards that vary in size. Many of the specimens on these boards are rare, and some are only known from the board specimens.

–16,520 empty cartridge boxes that held military or police ammunition. Some of these are valuable because of the information printed on them about the ammunition they contained. They are colorful, lightweight, and easily collectible.

In addition, there are cartridges stored on top of the cabinets, small displays in drawers, lots of misc. items, and duplicates stored in their own room. The large main room contains the collection’s cartridge display boards on the walls, reference material in bookcases, and cartridge specimens in wooden cabinets. There are 44 cabinets with a total of 1,034 drawers that vary in height depending on the caliber of the rounds they hold.

This is a huge undertaking, and we are anxious to get started.