A Study of the Godet Style PlM

[Brian S]

PlMs were not worn while crawling on one's stomach under opposing Allied machine gun fire. They weren't worn by most while flying their bi/tri planes. Richhoften left his at home. No need for the 'joint' to be strong enough to endure great stress...

<MARQUEE< p>Let's see the Maker Mark.

<MARQUEE mm the see let?s>

[Brian S]

<MARQUEE>maker mark          maker mark          maker mark</MARQUEE>

[Les]

Existing dies are not 'edited' to produce narrow waist wide waist appearing PlMs. Do you know how hard the steel is on dies?

Brian is right on the first part. The second....that leads to a side-bar discussion on dies and the "stamping" process.

In a nutshell, instead of reading what others say about metal and glass working, I've been experimenting with getting first hand experience. It's a learning experience not acquired from books.

Most collectors think WWI era medals were -stamped- on high-pressure presses. Not long ago, I was shown photos of medal production in a German jewelry firm. What surprised me was the use of entirely manual spindle, or screw presses to make the medals. One machine could be operated by one man, another was large enough that two men turned a large screw arm and machine that had considerable similarities to a wine press.

Hand operated presses do not require specialty high-grade steel to slowly squeeze relatively softer materials such as silver. The manual presses do not create heat as quickly as automated trip-hammers or automated presses.

I agree with Brian that dies are not reworked not because the steel is "hard" to rework, but because making dies is not as complicated as it might seem.

[Brian S]

I agree with everything you say, also there's the mother/daughter dies. But SOMETHING has to make the PlM real, not just theory.

[Brian S]

oops forgot let's see the maker mark...

[Les]

oops forgot let's see the maker mark...

Also, don't forget the silver content marking. The marker markings and silver content marks should both be identical to the markings used by Godet.

The maker and silver marks if either doesn't match, can rule out the piece from being made by Godet, but even if the markings match, that doesn't mean the piece -had- to be made by Godet.

[Brian S]

That takes some doubt out of the equation. I have personal experience with a piece obtained by me from a cousin. When I got it I had no questions other than a thank you. 30 years later I assumed the piece to be something it was not. Just because someone gave you a piece that you think came from the vet, is not necessarily the case. It's too easy for words and stories to fall into place later when a sale is about to be made. In my case, I never attempted to sell the piece but I made assumptions. The orginal vet was long long dead and the person who gave it to me was not around 30 years later when I was asked questions.

No one was there to ask, "so where did this come from?" In reality it had to have been a well intentioned gift purchased downtown Hamburg from a shop. When she asked for item "X", she was handed a piece that in all ways resembled the period piece. But in reality, now we think it was made in the sixties or seventies.

Am I suggesting anyone is lying here? No. But unless the guy's around to answer your questions, provenance, such as this is, is weak in the knees.

This piece does NOT rest on provenance, period. It needs support and it does not have it yet. It's a nice looking piece with nice looking enamel that in all ways resembles the real thing. But this thread is filled with "what ifs" and speculation to the point that any reasonable person would could only come away from this thread saying, "well, maybe, maybe not".

This piece needs proof. This piece requires no more speculation. This forum is covered with thousands of acres of well intentioned speculation that in the end proves absolutely nothing.

Proof is needed.

The maker mark and silver content marks are step 1.

Until then, this piece merely looks like a PlM.

[regular122]

Brian,

Patience please on the maker marks. Saying it louder won't make it come any faster but could possibly make it not come at all. We get your point and I appreciate it. I do have some very faded flashed out rim pics but they won't help much. For a partial view of the hollow Wulff cross mark, see post #84 on page 6.

Les,

Thanks for the clarification on the Colson piece. The two crosses are what had me confused. When I read you had examined the plate on top, then bronze gilt makes sense. I was staring at the piece Alan purchased.

Your comments about eagles are important and might account for many things on this Wulff cross. I understand the hesitancy. We'll wait for the marks.

Jim,

While I do not have a detail of the bronze-gilt piece that Les examined and has offered to provide pics that can help, I do have a close up or two of Alan's Colson cross. Here is a nice shot below.

Thanks, Steve

[Brian S]

There you go, that helps make one cross the same as another cross.

...and I'm sorry the shouting is annoying, but, the current owner should understand a COA is only good for the lifetime or business life of the dealer who issues it.

After that, it's just an opinion with no recourse.

So if the owner wants satisfaction, and I assume he does or all that we have would not be here, we should see more.

[Zepenthusiast]

Steve--appreciate the close up of the Alan's Colson cross. I would suggest the postulated seams are obvious here as well.

Les sent me a close up of the bronze Colson cross from his files and with his permission I'll place it here, along with my analysis of probable seams artfully hidden below solder. Note the misalignment of the vertical arms and the funny little "barb" indicated as well. As Les previously pointed out, PlMs seem to have been typically finished with fanatical precision, wartime or through WWII, at least anything made by some kind of "official" jeweler. These flaws make little sense in any other context than that the arms were in fact soldered together centrally. I can't buy, Les, that all of these "Schickle-eagle" crosses have vise marks centrally, while no other PlMs have them. Their locations and orientation are too predictable. I also would think they would clean up such marks if they saw them.
[IMG][/IMG]



Keep in mind, I am not saying anyone "cut up" an original die to make these. I am arguing all of these "Schickle" variants are made from the exact same die set, having the elevated M segment, and by presumption were a post-war development. Godet may well have made them, but they may have been made by someone else, Schickle or whoever. The die(s) used to make them may for whatever reason have been set up to produce four arms instead of one cross, perhaps due to issues of forming the metal in the desired configuration. If the pieces come out predictably, fusing them into a cross would be trivial for a jeweler with an appropriate jig, Brian. It would hardly require hundreds of hours of finishing work. It wouldn't be as hard as attaching the eagles--that requires keeping a very clean joint without much chance to coat, polish or file away the evidence. They already had to solder the entire edge of the cross 360 degrees, so this hardly would add much sweat to the labor.

I raised the speculative possibility (I am clearly pretty open minded) that tooling an all new die of good quality might have made more sense to a company like Godet before the war ended, not in the devastated post-war economy, but one could equally argue they or whoever needed to do whatever they could to attract new business in the twenties or thirties. If someone could pay, labor and tools were what they had. By calling the Wulff cross the "prototype," I didn't mean in the sense it was the original/first of any of these, only that matching the narrowest waist design it would be an example of what the postulated new die set would have primarily produced with minimum "cut down." Whether the "cut down" leading to wider waists was of necessity, aesthetic taste, whim, sloppiness, whatever, I do not pretend to know.

Steve, I think if you wish to defend the possibility of the Wulff cross being actual wartime manufacture from a new set of dies, it will be necessary to come up with a plausible explanation for why Godet continued to make crosses using the old dies, without apparent loss of detail, into the 1920s.
The only reason I can think of would be to once again make a hollow cross, but there is no reason to think they couldn't do that with the hollow cross dies they already had.

This design seems to be more about an aesthetic influence--more Art Deco than the Baroque "scrolly" feathers of before.

[Zepenthusiast]

Oh yeah--I guess now we don't need to wait until the cows come home!

[Les]

Steve--appreciate the close up of the Alan's Colson cross. I would suggest the postulated seams are obvious here as well.

Les sent me a close up of the bronze Colson cross from his files and with his permission I'll place it here, along with my analysis of probable seams artfully hidden below solder. Note the misalignment of the vertical arms and the funny little "barb" indicated as well. As Les previously pointed out, PlMs seem to have been typically finished with fanatical precision, wartime or through WWII, at least anything made by some kind of "official" jeweler.


These flaws make little sense in any other context than that the arms were in fact soldered together centrally. I can't buy, Les, that all of these "Schickle-eagle" crosses have vise marks centrally, while no other PlMs have them. Their locations and orientation are too predictable. I also would think they would clean up such marks if they saw them.
[IMG][/IMG]



Keep in mind, I am not saying anyone "cut up" an original die to make these. I am arguing all of these "Schickle" variants are made from the exact same die set, having the elevated M segment, and by presumption were a post-war development. Godet may well have made them, but they may have been made by someone else, Schickle or whoever. The die(s) used to make them may for whatever reason have been set up to produce four arms instead of one cross, perhaps due to issues of forming the metal in the desired configuration. If the pieces come out predictably, fusing them into a cross would be trivial for a jeweler with an appropriate jig, Brian. It would hardly require hundreds of hours of finishing work. It wouldn't be as hard as attaching the eagles--that requires keeping a very clean joint without much chance to coat, polish or file away the evidence. They already had to solder the entire edge of the cross 360 degrees, so this hardly would add much sweat to the labor.

<snip>

This design seems to be more about an aesthetic influence--more Art Deco than the Baroque "scrolly" feathers of before.

For the record, my take on the hollow straight tailed Wulff piece is there are more than a few reasons it was not made during WWI. The hollow construction, eagle design, higher "dip" on the M share more in common that with any later war solid silver Godet made pieces. Brian is a bit more blunt than I am regarding the "provenance" of the piece, and his comments are apropos if not tactful. During this thread, I've tried to look at the comparison of characteristics, and also to elaborate on specifics of how pieces were made, and how some of the conjecture is exactly that: conjecture.

The use of photos carries the risk of the mind looking for and seeing patterns which may not exist. Look at something long enough, and selectively focus on some elements while not including mitigating factors or inconvenient elements, and patterns can be see that aren't there. The human mind always attempts to create patterns in order to feel comfortable with predictable and "normal" situations.

In photographs, people often place the light source to the upper right hand corner. If the person is right-handed the light source is placed so it can be moved for taking photos. Placing the light to the upper right will cause shadows in the opposite direction, which is where Marshall has marked the "seams" in the photos of the Wulff piece. Bear in mind, the cut and solder hypothesis was based on photos, not from the actual specimens in hand. Can Jim rule out the effects of light and shadow on the human eye?

Jim mentions that the use of design elements could have been used to make a new die. The problem with trying to make a new die out of an old one by cutting it up and "recycling the parts" so to speak, is the die will probably not hold up to use. Steel is surface welded, and the contact surfaces of the dies must then be ground flush or they won't meet. Weld on the underside, and that won't prevent the other side where parts are attached, from breaking apart.

A newly made die does not have to incorporate imperfections of where elements were cobbled together if die elements were joined together. The new die would be entirely seamless. Anything less than a one piece die for each of a two sided die for stamping or pressing, would be risky failure of the die at any time.

The only way a "parts die" could be used and not fail due to pressure stampings or pressings is to use it as a mold, and cast the piece. If it turns out the post-war Schickles are cast, that would be a radical departure from the way Godet and Wagner made pieces during the war.

One lasts comment about dies and I'll move on. Dies can sometimes get out of alignment through a number of circumstances. Metal stock fed into dies that are not perfectly aligned will result in core-strikes that may be angled, etc. That can result in one part of a cross looking asymmetrical compared to other parts of the same cross. If one side is angled compared to the other, when enamel melts and approaches a liquid state, like water, it will attempt to level itself. If the underlying metal isn't struck correctly, the resulting coverage will be flawed. A photograph tells us quite a lot, but not everything.

Jim, there is a way that finishing marks could be left on these pieces. Whoever made the pieces may not have been Godet, and may have used different production and finishing practices that Godet did not use. Godet and Wagner might have used a well padded vise and special clamp to hold the pieces, while a smaller "no name" shop resorted to getting the job down using whatever methods worked. That is one way the vise or clamp marks are found on the Schickle type pieces, and not others.

The Colson piece is not a masterpiece of hand-finishing. I previously mentioned what looked like a projection of metal in the lower right hand side angle, and that it was the result of enamel not completely covering the underlying core. If that area had been where a seam had been soldered, there would be traces of solder on the exposed area of the core. There isn't any solder and what is there, is the bronze core itself. The area on the rim next to that spot is "splashed" with enamel, but be careful about assuming that is directly related to soldering the "seams." Look where the eagles meet in the v-notch formed by the arms, and it's obvious the eagles (and soldering) are not flush and even with the arms and do not meet the inside of the notch perfectly. There are gaps where the eagle tail feathers aren't well fitted. That lack of being able to fit the tail feathers does not make for the argument that the same jeweler knew how to do a good job on hiding the soldered "seams".

While on the subject of soldering, it's easy to say, solder this, enamel that, and "et voila" here's the result. Period solders used by Godet and Wagner during the war, and the interwar period were shop made for use on PlMs. They were typically made from the shavings and filings of the piece being soldered, and mixed with a small amount of base metal. The solders melted at slightly below the melting temperature of the parent material, and the result was an almost invisible solder joint. Jim might take that to mean, seams can't be seen because of the solder used. Before making that claim, what is important to remember is the high temperatures to melt the solder will result in the metal/medal becoming very hot, and pieces have to be tightly held together so that while one piece is being soldered on, another soldered piece doesn't de-solder or run, and come loose. The more solder joints used on a piece, the greater the risk of other pieces having solder runs, and later, joint failures.

The early wartime pieces had two sides soldered together, with the eagles and suspension methods attached. That mean a total of seven solder joints. Jim's proposed method of soldering a hollow medal, by soldering two sides per "arrow" together (eight pieces) at the center junction, then four eagles (the total is now twelve pieces), and also the suspension or pie wedge (make that a grand total of 13 pieces), all of which have to be tightly held together, and to avoid any solder runs of previous joints...... isn't all that easy. Then the piece has to be enameled, and if not careful, the entire piece could de-solder. The individual pieces can not be enameled until after the piece has been made because the center junction has to be enameled when the piece is done, and not before the "arrows" he has suggested are soldered together.

Doing any piece that way, would be a very time consuming process. Using heat sinks clamped onto the clamps holding pieces together would resemble one gigantic bear trap. Not elegant, too labor intensive, and not very practical compared to early version of the "wheel" used during the first half of the war.

The older method of a two sided piece soldered together does not have to contend with the enameling issue, is relatively simple and a straightforward process by comparison to the "cut and solder" hypothesis used to explain variations.</snip>

[Brian S]

Nicely explained Les, and yes hundreds of hours of finishing not on one PlM but several for the twelve pieces, that was my point. I think we can rule out the multi piece construction.

Now let's see the markings.

[regular122]

We will get pics of the markings when they become available. No effort is being made to delay or withhold pics of the markings. Enough on the call for markings. People have busy lives, especially those that could afford such pieces. Some consideration is in order.

To ALL - This is not some game. This is a very high end piece owned by a respectable gentleman who has graciously allowed us to have a close look at his Wulff group. It was also vended by one of the most trustworthy in the trade. Maybe that means nothing but it ought to mean, as Les points out, some tact and consideration. We are after all including reputations of these men whether intended or not.

With all the conjecture, I find no more evidence to support a specific date on any one side than the other. The discussion on multi-piece construction is fascinating but does not take a solid footing on whether it was done or if done, when.

That this Wulff hollow piece is an anchor piece for the earliest possible date to surface must also be considered. How one could readily accept 1920 but not accept 1918 (a difference of only 2 years) is not clear to me nor has it been properly concluded.

The discussion is appreciated.

Nevertheless, we will be able to go the next step when the next bit of evidence on markings becomes available. My hope is that I may be able to provide it. Thanks for your patience. Steve

[Brian S]

Oh please....



So you are politely calling us peasants who need to be mindful of their opinions?

Since you refuse to reply to my PM or this post, I'll drop out of this discussion. The owner wants ohs and ahs, good luck, hope you enjoy your purchase. My advice to anyone else, don't buy one like it to "fill holes in your collections." It's not about reputations of sellers and stories of owners, it's about whether the piece can stand on its feet with rock solid provenance or rock solid evidence to die marks, etc.