Alf, yes, production differed greatly. You have to take into account that the luger pistol was designed and built around machinery that was available around 1900. Labour was cheap and companies could afford to have hundreds of people working on the tiniest of parts for very basic wages.
In the 1960s Germany was rapidly becoming one of the most expensive production companies in Europe, hourly worker rates were expensive. The old P08 required some 750 - 800 machining steps, quality control sessions that bordered on insanity, with rooms full of women checking every production step against a pile of gauges (even something as basic as the sideplate went through at least 7 quality control steps).
The only way Mauser could afford to take the Parabellum into production was to rethink, re-engineer and optimize the process as much as they could. That is the reason why the Mauser Parabellum is not a 'clone' or a 'copy', it was the next level in luger engineering, dragging and kicking then 70-year old design into a new era. Their quality control measures were so good, that they managed to skip the in-the-white assembly alltogether. In the old days, this was needed to match all small parts together, making final adjustments before finishing the pistol.
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