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Unread 06-01-2004, 02:41 AM   #6
Dwight Gruber
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Danny,

Thanks for the GERMANY info.

Finding an answer to your question is exactly one of the reasons I have instituted this survey.

Most early Lugers do not have proof marks. This means they were intended from the beginning to be exported to the US, which has no national proof law, or to another country which would proof the gun on its own. Any early Luger with a proof, either c/B, c/U, c/G or c/N, was completed in such a fashion as to be saleable in Germany and was then diverted to export.

The revision to the German proof laws which prescribed the Crown/N as a Nitro proof was published in September 1911; it was not until 1912 that all the German proof houses had these marks in use. Therefore your 9mmAE with no proof was manufactured explicitly for export to the US, probably before 1911, and your .30 was manufactured after 1911.

Actually, my preliminary results, from a so-far disappointingly small sample, are beginning to show that somewhere around 45000 in serial number range almost all 1906AE Lugers are to be found with BUG proofs, and somewhere between 48710 and 51000 (my data has this gap) this shifts over to almost all reported guns having the c/N proof. Filling this hole with data will pin down the year of manufacture of this part of the serial number range.

--Dwight
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