My first party badge.

[HickmanBCFC]

M1/163

[Greenhorn]

Both are authentic.

155 = Schwertner
163 = Schmidt

Your Schwetner badge looks to be in rougher condition. The Schmidt badge is in nice condition with it's reverse retaining much of the silvering. Both are fairly common but nice additions to a budding collection. Congrats!

Mark

[HickmanBCFC]

Wow thank you. That's surprised me but certainly cheered me up.

These things can certainly become quite addictive quickly.

[Greenhorn]

Wow thank you. That's surprised me but certainly cheered me up.

These things can certainly become quite addictive quickly.

LOL, yes, they do get addictive to collect. Before you know it, you'll have 25, then 50, 100, etc. Then you'll see which ones are hard to find and which are faked well, etc. It's a great field to collect, really.

If you post them before buying, you'll avoid most of the fakes. Or if you collect one at a time, a fake will not hurt as much. But you should be getting a good idea of what originals look and feel like, especially if you stick with RZM era badges. The earlier badges are a bit trickier to distinguish fakes from because there isn't much uniformity to distinguish from, but it'll come to you shortly if you continue collecting Party badges.

Mark

[slados28]

Good advice, Mark! Yes --- look at lots of badges, read up on threads and reference books, go for excellent condition with the later and more numerous RZM M1 (enamel and painted) variants and then allow for more discrepancies the further back in time you get ("transitional" and then so-called "early"). That said, I tend to look for higher quality all over the board, that is if the badge in question is not exceedingly hard to find... good luck! Nice and collectible ones so far btw!