"Bacqueville" Kriegsmarine Badges are...

[Dietrich Maerz]

Norm,

as Jo pointed out several times in the movie, if the French badges would be injection-mold castings the surface would mirror the surface of the steel-made mold. A steel mold is machined and polished not only to give the part a nice surface (which is the case for the examples you presented) but also to make the ejection process easy. If the steel mold would have sucha rough surface Jo is showing in the video, the part might never come out. And nobody would ever engrave another wave into the reverse die if it is a steel mold. I have no idea anyway how that happened and what the purpose could be ...
Furthermore, with a steel mold you don't have the pimples and craters that the French badges have. They show all the signs of sand casting or at least signs of an extremely sloppy mold, surely not machined out of steel.

Dietrich

[swjXE]

Norm,

as Jo pointed out several times in the movie, if the French badges would be injection-mold castings the surface would mirror the surface of the steel-made mold. A steel mold is machined and polished not only to give the part a nice surface (which is the case for the examples you presented) but also to make the ejection process easy. If the steel mold would have sucha rough surface Jo is showing in the video, the part might never come out. And nobody would ever engrave another wave into the reverse die if it is a steel mold. I have no idea anyway how that happened and what the purpose could be ...
Furthermore, with a steel mold you don't have the pimples and craters that the French badges have. They show all the signs of sand casting or at least signs of an extremely sloppy mold, surely not machined out of steel.

Dietrich

It looks like we're going to have to start the poll all over again.

[Norm F]

It looks like we're going to have to start the poll all over again.

Already done.
New Poll: The "French-made" KM badges are...

Go and vote!

Best regards,
---Norm

[Norm F]

If the steel mold would have such a rough surface Jo is showing in the video, the part might never come out. And nobody would ever engrave another wave into the reverse die if it is a steel mold. I have no idea anyway how that happened and what the purpose could be ...

Another interesting observation one can make about that French-made S-Boat design is that there were at least two distinct casting production runs. All examples fall neatly into one or the other of the two types illustrated here. The one featured on Jo Rivett's video was a Type 1.

So someone not only made a batch of badges against Präsidialkanzlei regulations but also went on to make a whole other batch of them.

Best regards,
---Norm

[Norm F]

Later, cast copies of the Type 1 appeared -- generally referred to as "copies of copies", depending how you look upon the "original" type. (When the Weitze watermarked example on the left was pointed out to them, they promptly removed that offering from their site.)