KC 800-4 repro

[Berra]

Is this an S&L reproduction or just the usual crap?

[Berra]

Great finish to the ring

[wolfeknives]

This one is even worse than the usual crap, just plain bad.

[Flemming]

Nothing great about that finish.

/Flemming

[AndyC]

I have seen better copys


Andy

[EK-collector]

RK itself is a good copy, however marking is reducing its copy value

[Berra]

Ok regaring the finish this was a joke if anybody didnt get that.

I think that the cross itsell is well detailed but as stated befor it has a bad finish and ofcause we are talking about a reproduction.

But it this an know reproduction you know as in souval S&l or floch?

thx

[Norman LaBarge]

Crap!

[kraut72]

very bad

[AndyC]

Its not a Souval copy cross they have a lower swastika


Andy

[Ludwig]

Fake cross, but who made it? I don´t know. There are so many fakers out there!

[Berra]

ok thanks for the info I guess we could agree that its ........crapp :-)

[Leroy]

When the photo of this cross is greatly enlarged, it appears to be a very poor quality late "C" frame by S&L with a swastika core (which also appears to be of S&L design), which has been falsely marked by someone with the "800-4" designation.

It is known that S&L was a source of some swastika-cored crosses as late as the early 1980's, using 2 different style cores (one like the wartime core and one where the dates were in the flattened style of their 1957 RK's). Although Gordon Williamson reported in his book that he knew of a case where a collector requested an RK from S&L, and was surprised by the response "which would you like, the 1957 version or the one with swastika?", leading to the general (and now deeply held) belief among collectors that they were readily available, it was revealed on GCA last year that the "collector" was Gordon himself (!) and the request was made via another prominent collector in Berlin directly to the Director of S&L, who was an old friend. Apparently, you had to know someone to get one, they were very much "one-off" items, and , more importantly, according to what the collector/intermediary said on GCA, the swastika cored crosses so made on "special request" were not even assembled on the premises of S&L, but somewhere else.

All of this makes me wonder whether at least the swastika-cored crosses we see with post-1957 frames (the "B" frames with multiple raised beading flaws and the "C" frames) actually came from S&L or were produced by someone else, somewhere else, using parts which came from S&L, the company being too "politically nervous" to produce the end-product itself. Certainly such pieces (including the one obtained by Gordon) were not correctly made or finished, and no one has ever been able to show one of these which was.

[wolfeknives]

I feel a little stupid here Leroy, I know very little about the C frames. I can see some of the S&L attributes in the above cross, but it is oh so rough. Do all the C frames have the dipping ring?

[AlikN]

Yes, the "C" frames have a dipping ring, but not dipping ring is not part of the die, but the finishing process, which as Leroy mentioned was not done at S&L and was done and finished incorrectly, here is a picture with some computer "magic" and the ring looks more like it should be done, I guess who assembled those skip a few steps here and there.