Tnbullethunter wrote:
>No one on here know how to tell if a US bucket is real or not. I thought this would be the place to post this for sure.
No offense intended, Tnbullethunter, but the people here HAVE given you SEVERAL strong indication that the buckle is not real. The rim is wrong, the patina is wrong, the hooks are wrong. Sure seems to me that the people here know how to tell if a US buckle is real one or not.
Since you have such a low opinion of the advisers here, why haven't you acted on the good advice you were first given six days ago, on May 22nd? (Post the buckle pics & info over at the NVRHA Fakes forum.)
But okay, I'll tell you what I think of it, and details about Why.
In my opinion it is an "artificially aged" Civil War Centennial era reproduction. I was involved in re-enacting back then, and I've personally seen a lot of the repro buckles manufactured at that time.
Besides the rim being "offset-stamped" (very wide lower rim), and the clearly-artificial aging, the hooks are the key. This particular type of buckle-hooks was very cheaply stamp-cut from thick sheet-brass by a machine ...and no "extra-expense" effort whatsoever was made to round off the sharp edges of the cut brass. As Jerry_B astutely advised, compare yours with the hooks on Larry Hicklen's buckle. The hooks are similar, but the edges of Larry's hooks haven't only been cut, they've also been "pressed" - you can see this most clearly on the arrowhead edges.
I've still got a repro US buckle from my Civil War Centennial days, and its hooks look exactly like your buckle's hooks.
But since you find the opinions you've gotten from cwbullet.org advisers to be unsatisfactory, I'll now become the third person here to suggest you post your buckle pics & info at the NVRHA site. I seriously doubt it will be declared a real one over there either ...but perhaps hearing the same things from the NVRHA-site guys that you've been told here will be enough to settle the matter in your mind ...and maybe give you a higher opinion of the responses from the guys who answered your post here.
Regards,
Pete [PCGeorge]