If the analysts are to be believed, Apple had a gold rush of preorders Friday, when the iPad first became available. But over the weekend, somebody may have turned that cash faucet almost all the way off.

AppleInsider is reporting that Friday’s iPad preorder numbers may have topped 120,000 -- not bad for a device that won’t be physically available until April 3rd. But those Friday early adopter preorders have since slowed to a crawl, analysts say.

How did analysts arrive at these figures? It seems that users on the AAPL Sanity Board at Investor Village have collected their order numbers from Apple’s website and used them to calculate how many total preorders that Apple has taken for the iPad. Friday got off to a bang with an estimated 51,000 devices in the first two hours alone, and topped 120,000 by the end of the day.

But that’s where the good news comes to a potentially grinding halt. Fortune Brainstorm Tech journalist Philip Elmer-DeWitt claims that by Saturday and Sunday, the number slowed to about 1,000 iPads per hour, suggesting that the Friday preorder craze had subsided.

One person who has been tracking the preorder numbers closely is Daniel Tello, who predicts that Apple will sell about 30,000 iPad preorders on weekdays, with half that number on weekends. His forecast calls for no more than 500,000 total preorders by the April 3rd launch date, with that number jumping to 1 million by the second week the device is actually shipping.

Among those tracking their preorder at Investor Village, the Wi-Fi model of the iPad appears to be the front runner by a two-to-one margin -- which isn’t a big surprise, since it will be the only model available come April 3rd. The 3G-equipped model is scheduled to arrive in late April, although Apple has not confirmed an exact date as yet. Preorders were split evenly by capacity, with the largest 64GB model accounting for 35 percent of the orders so far.

If you want to join in the iPad preorder lotto at Investor Village, send in your order number with the last three digits X-ed out, the number of iPads ordered, order time, time zone, memory capacity and whether you purchased a 3G or Wi-Fi model to ipadsales@gmail.com.

AppleInsider is quick to note that Wall Street’s low-end estimates for the iPad forecast 1 million units in the entire first year of sales -- so 500,000 units preordered by the April 3rd launch date would indeed be quite a feat.