Pete & RK,
Thank you for your responses. I'm not sure that I am the right person to be involved in an "authenticity board." If I were a collector, and one of the many dealers like myself claimed to be the expert on authenticating Lugers, I would question his motives.
As a dealer, I would only look as though I'm trying to trash my competition.
That position would require someone with no monetary interest in the Luger business, and therefore no apparent agenda. In other words, I don't qualify.
As more details about the Luger are discovered, there will be more ways to objectively determine authenticity. Maybe a serial number registry is a step towards this? I know that we don't keep serial numbers of the bad guns we see, we just learn what to look for.
Almost every fake luger out there started as something else, usually a very common donor gun. There are almost always ways to tell that the gun used to be something else (serial numbers and/or proofs removed, serial numbers and/or proofs added, barrels replaced, chamber marks or dates changed/added, refinishing, etc. If you X-ray, magna-flux, magnify, etc. you can usually see what has been done yourself. Then you don't have to trust someone like me telling you whether its good or not.
The 1941 Krieghoff just had the chamber date removed & changed and then it was refinished. I'm sure the owner assured Mr. Gibson that it was 100% original.
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