Vickers of Questionable Virtue
 

Picked up a "Vickers" today, one with sufficiently strange characteristics to be knowledgeably guessable or Wild-Ass-Guessable. The gun is mismatched and reworked, as I am led to expect for these guns, "Rust" above the safety as on any good Dutch Luger.

http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/ComboNow.jpg

So far, so good. The toggle train is all Vickers and matching, you can see the Vickers proofs on all three pieces.

http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/TopCU2.jpg

Horizontal version here EBT:
Top Horizontal

The barrel is a rebarrel, the barrel band is a millimeter or so longer than those found on a Navy or Artillery. However, there are no numbers as would be expected, just a stamp whith what looks like a wrinkled W in a circle.

http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/UnderBarrel.jpg

The grips are coarsely chekered, but are poorly moulded of some odd black plastic material. The molds were apparently made from a matched pair of real wood grips, there appears to be wood grain molded into the plastic in the backs, as well as serial numbers from the mold source.

http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/GripsAnnotated2.jpg

Larger version here EBT:
Larger pic of grips

Now here's the odd thing. I said the gun was a mismatch. The frame, though Dutch, is actually serial# 12517, which puts it squarely in the middle of the Royal Dutch Air Force contract, not Vickers. There is no evidence of a brass plate ever having been affixed to the frame. The trigger belongs to the frame, most of the other small parts are totally miscellaneous.

The receiver has a crown/N on the left side, but no corresponding Circle-KL on the right as a Dutch Air Force Luger would have.

So, it is a Vickers but not a Vickers, Dutch but not Dutch.

Does anyone have any knowledgable thoughts on any of this? Is this simply an assembly job, or is there a known provenance explanation for its state? I'm not going to be distressed by the possible answers here, its a great learning opportunity.

--Dwight

Dwight, Your Dutch luger does indeed seem to have been assembled from parts of previous Dutch lugers. This may date back to a war time field assembly (or may have been done last week) except that your plastic wood grained grips are what NC Ordnance currently call their Ironwood line. Tom H.

You almost certainly have a re-barreled commercial barrel/receiver, the toggle train from a Vickers and the frame of a KOL. Weapons issued to officers either did not have a brass plate or the plate was left blank.

Still sounds like a nice gun. My Dutch Luger IS a Vickers, but has a DWM toggle, and my feeling is that it was re-arsenalled by the West Indies arsenal.
do you have The Dutch Luger? It is very good and has lots of information, but in you case, might raise more questions than answers, [img]wink.gif[/img]

Overall, I think that Dutch guns from the islands were changed and arsenalled more than some other Lugers.

A good game, thanks to everybody who played. I'd like to think that the gun was re-arsenalled as Ed describes, but Occam's Razor forces me to cut much closer to Ron's parts gun conclusion.

Tom, the NC Ordinance grips all have the same 84 moulded in? And, are they -really- all that awful quality??

And I'm still curious about the mark under the barrel...

--Dwight