09/21/16:
Now on to the new leg. not much to see really; it just looks like the old one:
Here, we see the steel collar that SMG presses into the axle hole so that you don't have aluminum riding on steel as you pivot the leg:
I inquired about buying a spare set of legs so that I have some on hand should this happen again. Rick told me that wile he's not opposed to selling me a pair, each leg is hand fitted so that they position where they should both stowed and extended. The reason he needed the old leg back was so that he could match the new one to the old one. That is evidenced in the pictures below. You can clearly see where the leg was ground to the right of the detent plunger hole:
The bare aluminum between the detent plunger hole and the axle hole appears to just be a lack of paint. These legs are sourced from SHOEI. SMG is aware that they are a weak point in the design. As a matter of fact, even the original steel legs were prone to bending and breakage. Both war time trials by the Germans and post war testing by the United States cited how weak the legs were. I'm not making excuses for SMG. I wish these were made out of steel but, even if they were, they would be fragile. According to Rick, he tried to source stamped steel legs from multiple vendors but was quoted a price of $45,000 per 300 pair and that was the LOWEST quote! Stamped parts are cheap and cost effective.......if you making them by the millions. Otherwise, the price is horrendous. Someone suggested to me that I should only use them for static display and not range use. I asked Rick about that and he said,
"They will not stand up to being pulled back under tension before firing or dropping prone on them but they will serve as a shooting barrel support for a long time from what users tell us. Please use it when you want to and we will fix it when it fails."
I don't think a customer can ask for more fair treatment than that.