Rare boards and buckle

[Box_Rebellion]

Greetings -

A friend of mine has this set of WW1 German stuff in a case and says it's worth $2000 or more. The boards are matching pairs, I couldn't fit it all in the picture. The boot knife is ornately carved. Any help identifying this stuff would be greatly appreciated.

[Alfred.R]

sorry to say but your friend is very wrong abaut the value of this lot ,all common not so valueable item here.

[Mainemilitaria]

Alfred R. is correct.....maybe $300.00/400.00 or so for the lot IMO....tops.....Buckle and boards are not especially scarce....and the boot knife is suspect as many of the "engraved" versions are modern copies...(can't tell if this one is real or not)...but also not "Big" money.....

Either "your friend" doesn't know WW 1 stuff or someone fed him a line of "Bull"..... or he's not as good of a friend as you thought.... but $2000.00 is ridiculous....

John G.

[Chip M]

I somewhat disagree about the scarcity of some of these things. 13mm rounds are not cheap. The cyphered board is worth about $130 and is not easily found at all. Compared to Prussian buckles, Württemberg examples are much less common and try to find a pair of Württemberg M15 Sergeant's rank disks.

I do agree, however, that the evaluation is more than double of what the items are worth on today's market. Certainly, nothing in the grouping is "rare", but the items do have some nice value.

Chip

[90th Light]

I sold one of my live 13MM rounds for US$500. If it is the special extra hard/ powerful round dated September 1918 then you might even get US$1000 if still live. The 9/18 examples are as rare as hens teeth. Thus the million dollar question, what is the date on the 13MM round and is the powder still in it ???

Put it on the firearms forum and see what they say

Chris

[90th Light]

I sold one of my live 13MM rounds for US$500. If it is the special extra hard/ powerful round dated September 1918 then you might even get US$1000 if still live. The 9/18 examples are as rare as hens teeth. Thus the million dollar question, what is the date on the 13MM round and is the powder still in it ???

Put it on the firearms forum and see what they say

Chris

I have been asked today why my live round sold for such a price ??? .

The reason is because it was not a regular AP round. Thus we really need to see the head stamp on the one shown at the start of this thread.

Plus I have put members wrong with what I stated which is quoted above. The rarer than hens teeth date is October 1918 not September 1918. Although September 1918 does not turn up every day especially still loaded.

Answering some other questions, the reason I have quoted US1000 for a live round dated "October 1918" is because there is no known loading for October 1918 (10). Why this should be is not known.

The rare, very expensive rounds are other loadings than the normal AP round. There is an SmK tracer, a PmK incendiary and an S.Pr type incendiary. It is most likely that these loads were for the TuF (Tank und Flieger) machine gun being developed at the end of the war. There is also what is referred to by some collectors as a T67h/s and reloaded rounds which are indicated by a dot beside the month of manufacture.

Some debate continues as to just how rare or common around dated November 1918 is. Outside of Germany, they are hard to find but they do turn up in Germany and some believe that production with this date continued after WW1 ended. However, there is no proof of this. Any round dated April 1918 is also considered a good find because this is the first date of official production and these were all used up at the time especially for training and practise.

In the 1930s the Germans used this round as the basis for various developments and manufactured it again as stated above. Several countries started using the gun post-war including Sweden and China, and they also made the ammunition.

When Britain was developing the Boys anti tank gun (then still called the Stanchion gun) they reloaded old German ammo and obtained new cases from Sweden to develop the AP bullets and study the ballistics,

Chris (courtsey & adapted from what "Tony E" wrote on another forum on this subject).