I came upon this example last week and new I had to add it to my collection as 1940 dated C.L./C. Mk II's do not come up for sale often in the market place it is as I like my helmets in worn condition it has a few small blemishes to the dome with a nice patina on the shell, the liner is as best I can tell a 1943 dated VMC II as the last digit in the date is unreadable as it has been miss stamped.
There is the remnants of writing on the chinstrap (FUSIL) are the only letters that are clear enough for me to make out though and the rest are very faint there also looks to be the remnants of a service number I will try and wet the strap down a little to see if that will bring them out more and or try a black light if this fails.
I do find these early 1940 dated shells rather intriguing and noticed some time ago that examples with very low steel batch numbers had a very small C-/l\ stamp on the exterior of the shell near the chinstrap retaining lug rivet as seen on my other 1940 dated C.L./C.Mk II steel lot batch number 7 and three other early examples with very low lot numbers and often wonder if these helmet bodies were some of the first 25,000 produced in Canada
This particular Mk II helmet body bares no such mark in the shell but the lot number 15 is a little higher as far as I know there is no information available on how many helmet bodies were produced from a lot and or how steel lot batch batch numbers correlate directly to production dates .
I can only speculate when in 1940 this shell was produced C.L./C however did use consecutive steel lot batch numbers in there manufacturing process so IMO this would be a fairly early helmet body I have seen lot numbers as high as 98's on 1942 C.L./C's.
Regards Mark
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