mcl

It is very very difficult in some areas of luger collecting to know if the parts are orig or not. I had an Erfurt that had two matching mags, one alum and one wood bottom with no suffix letters! AND they were correct period magazines! This was a 1920 marked pistol and 1917 dated that had been converted to police use in 1934 or so. Before that, in the 1920's it received two magazines during the wood/alum transition period of 1925-1929. I have also seen WW2 alum bottom mags that had numbers so oddly stamped the very wide spacing of the numbers looked wrong but the mag was original to the period and gun. Of course, very early wood magazines have huge s/n's stamped longitudinally. If you are really observant, you might just see an alum bottomed mag that has a big X stamped on it and a second s/n. Of course, it might not be a s/n but a Navy property number for the North Sea Fleet--that is why the huge X is there indicating a spare magazine.


Telling the diff b/w orig and monkey-made parts requires experience and research. The wood bott mags are especially difficult to validate but with time you can learn of some characteristics such as the 1 looking like a leaning 7 and other things that will help you distinguish orig German applied numerals from chimp-applied digits.


BTW, my nickname for counterfeiters is "chimps" because they monkey with the truth and tend to do poor jobs. Ethical restorers are, of course, not being referenced