New guy here with a 1939 mauser 42 luger

[mrerick]

Originally Posted by boyd

Thank you for your input, and for the link to your thread, (you have a beautiful 1936 )

This is very interesting, maybe the sideplate at first belonged to another luger with the serial number 75xx at the factory? Because it's stamped 92 on the other side maybe it was originally intended for luger with serial number 7592, or maybe someone just stamped the wrong digits.

The final over stamped serial number on the front of the frame is a "2". it's doubtful that the gun left the factory with the last digit a "1" since you'd expect the rest of the numbers on the gun to be "91" not "92. That points to the over stamping being done somewhere in the production process when a worker noticed the wrong digit on the frame.

Anything we imagine is just speculation. I've never seen a side plate with two pairs of numbers stamped inside. Obviously, seeing yours, they do exist.

Why this exists? It would be hard to say. There are several possibilities. The fact that the numeric digits and size of the dies used to stamp them is consistent with the factory dies is interesting.

All the side plates had to be hand fit. I don't believe that they were numbered (inside and out) until that hand fitting was completed. You wouldn't number it on the outside and then hand fit it later because any error would make you do both things again.

Lugers were manufactured in batches, and so were the parts. It's conceivable that a worker got the job to repeatedly internally number several plates for a series then the batch was distributed to individual gunsmiths for hand fitting. If your pistol was corrected and after a delay was finally completed and fit, it's possible that the side plate waiting for fitting had been batch stamped inside already, and that had to be corrected.

It's equally likely that at some point in it's life, the side plate was lost (as often happened when soldiers were captured), or a new one had to be fitted. If someone had a box of spare parts with lots of side plates, they might have found one externally marked "92" and added the numbers inside when they fitted the plate. In that case, someone outside the factory had the same 2mm sans-serif font dies as the factory used...

They were doing wartime production by 1939, and it's the German nature to waste nothing. The expedient often prevailed.