Interesting Luger on GA.com

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by mrerick

The toggle die had the thinner "4" in 1938.

Here is my skepticism of that...If the GA toggle were stamped with a die, the ends should not be rounded...Grinding a die that small with the ends of the characters rounded would take a lot of time and effort...More than justified IMO...'Squared' ends can be done by machine, rounding them (back then) would take either hand-tooling or sophisticated machinery...

Now, yes, they could be carved out with a rotary tool, but why stamp one year and rotary-tool another??? These should all be Mauser-Werke, right??? Why have two separate marking operations one year apart???

This has raised questions for me several times here...

[John Sabato]

Originally Posted by sheepherder

Now, yes, they could be carved out with a rotary tool, but why stamp one year and rotary-tool another??? These should all be Mauser-Werke, right??? Why have two separate marking operations one year apart???

This has raised questions for me several times here...

The needs of wartime production can easily require a change in methods. Perhaps they opened an additional assembly line but only had one set of stamps, and had an engraver that wasn't being used... could be lots of reasons... maybe the die stamps were worn and they engraved some while waiting for replacements...