[John Sabato]

Dwight,

I think not... and the reason I think this is that the Germans were sticklers for precision. I would think that any "master grip" would be totally free of imperfections, considering the numbers of grips that would be made from it.

It would be a relatively easy task to polish a "master" grip to remove imperfections, but to be able to polish the very bottom of the recess in an injection mold this small so that the milling marks would be unnoticeable to the naked eye would have been very difficult... and since it didn't show when installed, it might be considered unnecessary... these marks are not very deep, they are very subtle, but the consistency of the marks is amazing.

Checking out a really fine condition pair of these grips, it is hard to believe that they were injection molded because there is no evidence of the sprue where the plastic was inserted... My only guess is that the injection point ended up being where the threaded hole appears, and some have speculated that the reason the threaded hole is there was to facilitate the removal of the grip from the mold, and the fact that the threads are the same size and grip screws may just be a coincidence.

In all the German military manuals I have seen over the years, I have never seen a reference to these threaded holes as place to keep the screws while the grips were off the guns.

To continue your line of thought, even though there were no CNC type machine tools back then, I do think it may be possible that some machining routines may have been so identical that they might produce the same (or at least very similar) marks on the "islands" and perhaps the same master tool & die specialist who created the molds for the BW grips was so repetitive in his processes that the grips are near identical regardless of which number mold they popped out of...

It is concieveable to me that a 'gang' mold of four to eight cavities may have been used, and filling and popping our 6 or 8 grips every few minutes could certainly have produced the number of grips that were installed and issued as spares. It is also interesting that the issue of these grips was intermixed with wood grips in short runs as they were made available... but the bulk of grips during the 41-42 time period at Mauser appear to have been the black bakelite type...

I welcome discussion on these points... intelligent speculation can solve many of life's mysteries when no documentation can be found...