45. R.K. unit disc Gew 98

D

Danziger

Member
Hello, I tried to descript unit marking from my friends weapon. It od Gewehr 98 from 1915, Danzig manufacture. Acording to "German Small Arms Marking" the 45.R.K. mean 45 artillery regiment or 45. Infantry Regiment. I can't figure out the letter K after R. Maybe someone could help :)
 

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RK should be there, but i couldnt confirm what is the unit, as the stamp is mostly for wartime unit. So question remains is its 45Inf.Regiment or the 45 is the weapon nr, normally there should be used different size stamps for each area. In front of R should be number of the Regiment.
 
Danziger said:
Hello, I tried to descript unit marking from my friends weapon. It od Gewehr 98 from 1915, Danzig manufacture. Acording to "German Small Arms Marking" the 45.R.K. mean 45 artillery regiment or 45. Infantry Regiment. I can't figure out the letter K after R. Maybe someone could help :)
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It's an odd one. It looks almost as though the disk was ground and restamped, but the screw wasn't removed and it was ground too. I dare say it almost looks spurious at worst. At best, it's unconventionally done.
 
chrisftk said:
It's an odd one. It looks almost as though the disk was ground and restamped, but the screw wasn't removed and it was ground too. I dare say it almost looks spurious at worst. At best, it's unconventionally done.
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I'm kind of leaning towards it being an unconventional update rather than a spurious one if only because renumbering would only make sense for a faker to enhance it. If it was something "sexy" like an MG unit or colonial Schutztruppe, for example, my suspicion would be a lot higher. I'm just not seeing the benefit in going through all the effort of restamping to fake, what, a non-exceptional infantry regiment? Maybe a reserve cav regiment if the faker didn't have the italic die and ran with it anyway?

I'm not going to go too far out on a limb to defend it, mind you, but I'm also not writing it off out of hand.
 
Also, is it just me or does it look like the stock might have been sanded? If the screw was protruding a bit I wouldn't put it past someone "cleaning up" an old rifle in the 70s to have taken down the surface of the screw a bit even if they didn't lean on the sanding block elsewhere.
 
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