High Guys. The name is Joe. I'm new to the thread, (sadly) new to the whole Graflex light saber thing. Very, very old in pretty much every other way.
I found this thread fascinating and important; given the stratospheric levels that these flash handles are going for nowadays. From my experience in numismatics, once a commodity becomes rare and valuable enough to command stupid money, expert counterfeiting will follow. The only defense one has against that is knowledge. Share it. The expert counterfeiter already has this knowledge. You must gain as much as he/she, if you hope to avoid paying real money for a fake.
That said, I have very little, and am hoping to gain more from the group. I have some pics from my second Graflex purchase - purported to be from an old photographic collection bought in an estate sale a couple decades ago. Optically, under magnification, it looks almost exactly like an old beat up one I had that I'm fairly confident is legit due to wear characteristics and old battery damage (unless the counterfeiters are already way more sophisticated than I think, and are willing to sacrifice monetery returns for safety). This one, however, looked almost too good to be true, and was priced accordingly. I am (tardily) still sifting through the massive amount of material you guys have generated, and have read about some scary sounding replicas being made over the years. Hoping this is not one of those.
I have friends, and access to some pretty cool metallurgical diagnostic equipment. The cell body seems to be made of some material similar to but not the same as nickel silver, with a chrome plating. The clamp, however, is made out of some old school iron alloy, again, plated with chrome. The compositions are pretty much the same as for my old beat up corroded reference Graflex, although there seems to be more variation in the clamp than in the body. I have a couple reproduction parts a kind person sent me and they are made of completely different stuff: stainless steel for both the repro cell bottom and the repro clamp.
So, please, educate me. And, thanks in advance.
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