
- #Spanish mauser proof marks how to#
- #Spanish mauser proof marks serial number#
- #Spanish mauser proof marks code#
Surprisingly, the USA has no law requiring firearms to be proofed.īritain accepts the proof standards of all CIP member countries, but the products of all other nations have to be proofed in this country before they can be legally sold in the UK. The CIP’s current membership is 14: Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. It ought to become a rule of the Commission Internationale Pour L’epreuve des Armes a Feu Portatives (CIP), which is the international organisation of proof houses.
#Spanish mauser proof marks serial number#
If we think about clear dating on guns, why do we have to have codes at all? Why can’t all countries date-mark their products in plain language? It shouldn’t be too much to ask all manufacturers to put the date of manufacture at the end of the serial number – something like 11/17 to identify the month and year of manufacturer as November 2017, for instance? Different countries have different codes Why Codes? Guns have to be proofed in Britain to be sold here. The next sequence of digits is the manufacturer’s serial number, and the last pair of digits is the year of manufacture (for instance, 98 indicates 1998, and 05 indicates 2005). The second two digits identify the type of gun, and 03 indicates a shotgun. The first two digits identify the maker (for instance, 16 is AYA, and 13 is Lanber). Since 1995 a number presented in blocks of digits presents the information like this: The Spanish system, as applied by the proof house in Eibar in the Basque Country is simpler.
#Spanish mauser proof marks code#
If you pick up an Italian gun made between 19, the date code will be in Roman numerals, and for the immediate post-war period the code is in Arabic numerals – that is the conventional 1,2,3, etc. For now, here are the date letter codes for the past 20 years: Google Italian proof house date codes and you can find tables going back to 1945. Look at an Italian-manufactured gun and you will see the letter sequences appear in a little rectangle near the proof information. To make complete sense of thing you need a table of letters and years. Officials in the Italian proof house in Gardone Val Trompia, near Brescia, choose to miss out other letters, some for logical reasons (for instance, O and Q could easily be mistaken for zero) and others for no apparent reason (G and R, for instance). The Italian alphabet contains only 21 letters, there being no k, j, w, x, or y. Miroku of Japan, who make the traditionally-styled break-action Brownings, have adopted Browning’s date coding system in their serial numbers. Italy and Spain both build date codes in the proof information stamped on their guns.
#Spanish mauser proof marks how to#
So what’s the answer? You need to know how to read the different proof marks on guns to discover how old a gun is. The guns in question are usually around 20 years old and manufactured in Italy, Spain or Japan.

