Why was the "X" marked on RC / VoPo Lugers?

[Olle]

Originally Posted by alanint

Why would they have completely disassembled a rifle or pistol, which had been expertly hand assembled, seated, bedded, trimmed etc. and split the components up, only to have to carefully assemble a jumble of unlike parts later? The Russians had space to spare to stack complete rifles like cordwood as far as the eye could see. Removal of the bolts is the only measure I could see that would allow "control" over the inventory and insurance that live guns were not finding their way out the back door.

My own theory is that they did that in order to standardize the procedure, and make it more suited to process large amounts of guns. The captured guns could be anything from fresh out of the crate to battlefield pickups, and there must have been tons of guns to process as well. With so many guns of different flavors, I suspect that it was probably quicker and easier to do every gun the same way, instead of having them graded, inspected and repaired individually.

Gun comes in, grips in one bin, mags in one bin, slide in one bin etc., one guy gauging barrels, one guy inspecting frames etc. Then an assembly line at the other end of the arsenal, where the workers picked refinished parts out of the bins, fitting them if necessary. Pretty much like in new production, but with used parts. It was probably easier to do it like that, rather than keeping track of every part for every gun throughout the process.

Obviously, some were not even assembled, but were stored as parts. These would be even more difficult to keep track of unless you put all the parts for each gun in one bag, and that's probably not the most rational way to store large numbers of disassembled guns.

The big mystery is why they did it at all. It seems like the vast majority of the guns was put in storage anyway, so it would have made more sense to just dip them in Cosmoline (or the Russian equivalent).