Production Dates???

[Dwight Gruber]

Originally posted by Luke
Dwight -

Until recently I had not developed an interest in DWM commercials, but your comment above is interesting.

Quote: "Commercial Lugers started with serial#1 in 1901, and continued in an unbroken number sequence until 1921 when the number sequence reached 92000."

Do you know if anyone has attempted to block that out such that it is possible to determine year of production from the serial number? For example: SN 70101 should have been produced in 1910 (as an example).
I just made that up; I have no idea in which year SN 70101 might actually have been produced !

Luke

Luke,

Broadly, no, that isn't likely. One can make some educated guesses around known serial number production--the early guns and Test Eagles, Dutch tests, commercial-range contract pieces, and the like--but in general, no. Part (but only part) of the problem is in not knowing daily production capability, or if comercial production was continuous or alternated with non-commercial-range contracts. These are questions I -REALLY- want to know the answers to!

I understand that the DWM company document archive exists somewhere in Germany (Gerben van Vlimmerin is the source of this info, iirc), these facts must be just waiting to be unearthed!

70101 is a quarter of the way between two known, three-c/X P-08 Commercial Armys. But it took the database for that.

--Dwight