[ithacaartist]

We'll probably never know for sure. Well, unless that particular pistol were found again and double-checked. I have a rare earth magnet from a pc hard drive's guts attached to a golf club shaft for my parts finder. It is small, agile, and quite strong. The rule for rare earth magnets is never to put skin in between two of them.

I can imagine that to machine a KGP Erma from steel would require even more operations than a Luger. I'd wager my left one that it was never done commercially, considering that the Mauser Lugers that were produced a few years thereafter cost around $700 dollars at the time, and the Erma pistols sold for under a hundred bucks back then. The 70s Mauser production, I'm led to believe, took advantage of everything technology offered at that time in order to minimize the price, including many cast parts. The pic below is a low res image of part of Holger's collection of Erma toggle pistols.