Mike,
I hope that you don't think that I was knocking your deal. I was just joking around.
There are as many ways to detect a restored gun as there are restorers. First of all, if the gun is 99% but the barrel is pitted, you got a reblued gun. Then, the WW1 guns are almost 100 years old. To find a "mint" military gun would be very, very rare and priced accordingly. Its not that hard to find a very good commercial Luger. They haven't been through the weather that the soldiers of WW1 went through and subsequent time. The Lugers of WW2 can sometimes be found in pretty good shape. They were taken by GI's off of prisoners as trophies shortly after the prisoners were captured or killed.
With that said, the WW1 Lugers have a distictive blue/black rust bluing that was common among all of them. The restored guns will look like they have a BLACK rust bluing and maybe the gloss might be different. Try to go to a big time dealer like Doug Smith or Simpson and compare the colors in good light and you will see. A good Luger collector like George Anderson, and others here, can spot a restoration pretty fast.
The Lugers of the Wiemar and Nazi eras will have many different types of bluing. Talking off of the top of my head, I think that there were six different types of bluing from salt blue to rust blue. Its a long story and too long to cover here. Especially since I am predominately a WW1 Luger collector.
Then there are the machine marks. The machine marks made during the shaping of the raw Luger parts will be constant for each of the eight different manufacturers of the Luger. But will be different between them. This is why many collectors will specialize in one or two of the different manufactures or eras of Lugers.
The size and other characteristics of the lettering, proof marks and serial numbers are a VERY strong indication of a restored gun. Before a Luger is restored, the old bluing must be removed. There are basically two different methods of restoring the bluing on a Luger, buffing and acid dipping. Buffing is the worst but easiest way of removing the old bluing. The buffing removes or dulls the machine marks mentioned above and will destroy the chrispness of the lettering, proof marks and serial numbers. On a "mint" Luger, the marking will sorta just jump out at you. Buffing will also will destroy what is called a plumb (spelling?) that occurs around the edges of certain parts that are stamped after the new gun was originally blued. When a part is stamped, the stamping creates a small wave along the outside edge of the stamp. This is the plumb and buffing will remove that plumb. You have to learn which markings will be stamped in before the original blue is applied and which are applied after the original blue is applied.
Acid dipping is the hardest but best way to prep a gun for restoring. But it takes talent and patience to do that right. Most restores don't have the talent or the patience. They are in it for the quick buck. There is probably has a bit of danger involved too since you are dealing with acid. There also might be a small amount of buff required after and acid dip to remove small rust pits. That requires talent.
Strawing is another thing that requires talent. The old strawing must be removed. The old oxidized metal must also be removed. You have to get down the bare metal. That requires talent too. That is why I mentioned the sloppy work done on the 'Locking Bolt' of your gun. A good restorer would never have removed that much metal. That part is a small and odd shaped part, so an amateur has an excellent chance of screwing up. Your restorer screwed up on that part. On a personal level, that is one of the first things that I look at when I look at a Luger that I am thinking about buying.
Then there is the out and out counterfeiting of a relatively inexpensive Luger to make it into a more expensive Luger. It would take a big book to cover this topic. Too long a subject to cover here. In my earlier comment about the sights on your artillery Luger, I mentioned serial marking on the sights and their approximate location. I was not trying to make myself look phony. Many times a P-08 is rebarreled to make it look like a LP-08. A counterfeiter will usually screw up on the sights because the sights are also numbered to the gun. These numbers are hard to change because of their location and because of their size. Check what I said earlier about the location on the front and rear sights of the serial numbers. They MUST BE THERE on a 1914 Erfurt artillery. They may or may not be there on later artilleries, depending in the chamber date. There were changes on different chamber dated artillery Lugers during manufacturing. And sometimes the manufacturer screwed up during transition from one chamber date to another. But the 1914 DWM and Erfurt and the 1915 DWM (maybe the 1916 too) manufacturing specs were the same. The 1914 Erfurt government inspectors just went a little further in their inspection marks than did the DWM commercial inspectors. That is why you will see the Erfurt proof marks on the grip screws and not on the DWM grip screws. The inspectors at the government plant did a little more unnecessary work just to justify their jobs and maybe to avoid being pulled into the army during the war.
Another thing that might help you avoid making a mistake is for you to have a trusted friend look at the gun hands on. I think that George mentioned something about that in an earlier post. Too often people get so worked up about buying a Luger that they miss something obvious. Then they buy it and kick themselves when they get home after looking at it while in relaxed mode.
I could go further and further into teaching you a mere smidgin more about restorations, but I think that I have said enough to let you know that there is a heck of a lot to learn about counterfeit, bolstered and restored Lugers. I would have to write a rather long book to cover these subjects and even then I would not be able to cover them all. I am sure that even what I wrote didn't cover every thing. But it will give you a start. I hope that this helps. But its time for me to go to bed. Good Night!
Big Norm
