Broomhandle help needed

[Sergio Natali]

As far as I know some serial number ranges were skipped by MAUSER so that somehow later production guns were given some of the s/n that had skipped before.
The whole serial number/date of production thing is far from being certain.
IMHO

[alvin]

Originally Posted by luger.parabellum

As far as I know some serial number ranges were skipped by MAUSER so that somehow later production guns were given some of the s/n that had skipped before.
The whole serial number/date of production thing is far from being certain.
IMHO

I also heard the theory. But in the era without computer management, going back and forth on numbers and keeping track of them was not as an easy task as we thought today. And, if factory indeed spent extra effort on doing that, what did they want to achieve? Belfort & Dunlap indicated Mauser might want to hide the fact that the gun did not sell well in its early years so the factory skipped s/n. But that reason did not sound likely. Continue production or not depended on board decision, and the board was not fooled by s/n.

There was also physical sample evidence. For example, If we look at those late 20CH, why did it have 1-10 sight leaf and round-tip extractor which were supposed to be phased out by then. I agree there are some myth around those, but that was not strong enough to indicate s/n skipping.

Major skipping, from what we saw today, happened only twice. One was 5000 skipped in the main trunk of s/n due to Italian Navy contract was separately numbered. Another large skipping was roughly from 74x,xxx to 800,000 to "celebrate" the birth of new generation of 1930. Other than that,,, small tracking errors was not impossible, but no major skipping.