by
MG34
They were acquired complete and not pieced together.
The story I got on the MG08 is that it was a J. Curtis Earl gun that he pulled from a VFW Hall in California back in the late '60s or early '70s. He reactivated it and sold it to Kent Lomont. Kent had it for a while and sold it to the gentlemen I got it from in Montana. All I know for sure is that it was manufactured just prior to WWI or very early during the war. Very few of these early MG08's survived. Good Krupp steel, I guess. It's 98 years old and still runs. I doubt the same will be said about the machine gun's made today.
I don't have any story on the LMG except I have been told that one of the LMG's on von Richthofen's Fokker Dr.1 had s/n 650a (10,650). That would put my LMG, s/n 632a (10,632) within the same manufacturing batch. That story may all be b.s., but it's what I've been told.
What nobody noticed here was the M2 tripod that the LMG is mounted to. The Browning guys went all atwitter about the M2 tripod's base. It seems that the tripod base is from an early Canadian sled mount assembly used to transport a 1919A4 Browning during wintertime and is quite unique all by itself.
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