EK 1914 To shave, or not to shave...

[Chris Boonzaier]

About 5-7 years ago i bought my first and only 1813 EK from a dealer at a show....

Going out of the hall (The hall had what we could call "Dealer's light"... I saw something ....well... shocking...

There was a slight difference to the black on the back of the cross.

Hurried along I put it under the microscope back home...

The back was indeed a slightly different black....

Why was it a different black?

Because the faker had opened the rims of a 1914 cross, shaved the 1914 side off ... re blackened it, sealed it professionally and made a pretty penny on it.

Stupidly, instead of blackening the WHOLE cross, he only did the one side, if he had done both it would have been very, very, very difficult indeed to tell it was bad... it would have been the perfect late private purchase piece....

Have any of you seen anything similar?

[hunyadi]

On Ebay about 7 years ago when I was looking to get a whole set of EK's (1813-1957) - I kept finding strange anomolies on the 1914 side that when you looked hard enough you could just make out the shaved off parts. More convincing wold be a 1870 cross with parts shaved off one would think as the frames were typiclay the thinner type...