Quote Originally Posted by Peter Laidlericon View Post
Initially reading about your brush trimming escapade got me going all of a dither there to start with.........

Seeing that odd yellow one among some perfect ones leads me to think that someones had the labels reproduced to add some 'authenticity' to them. I say that because when I look through the poly bag here, at least three don't have labels on them. However, one of the label-less bottles does have a tie-on AFG-8061 label (that's the Ordnance Stores VAOS label). The norm, label/script wise was as shown in your previous photos and the dot-matrix printing (photo 7 above)

The trouble with these bottles is like the IWS brackets (and to a lesser extent, No42/53 telescopes). At some point it becomes viable to have them made. As soon as they are available and pretty-well perfected, the real ones sort of loose their value. Like No42/53 scopes. A bit of a shortage, albeit just spare parts to me, but I have a feeling in my bones that a lot will soon swamp the market. If I was a betting man I wouldn't be paying daylight robbery prices for them now......
Quote Originally Posted by Peter Laidler View Post
The trouble with these bottles is like the IWS brackets (and to a lesser extent, No42/53 telescopes). At some point it becomes viable to have them made. As soon as they are available and pretty-well perfected, the real ones sort of loose their value. Like No42/53 scopes. A bit of a shortage, albeit just spare parts to me, but I have a feeling in my bones that a lot will soon swamp the market. If I was a betting man I wouldn't be paying daylight robbery prices for them now......
Mmmmmm. Not sure about that Peter. I'm in the plastics game and it would still be an expensive gamble to produce the tooling in order to reproduce a good example of the bottle in question. I think the main prohibitive factor is the total quantity. There's only around 1200 L42's in total, then how many of those already have bottles?? the cost of set up is already rising against the likely return. I think a repro bottle would be more expensive than an original.

The repro IWS bracket has not had any impact on the price of an original. Top quality repro from Canadaicon (as currently on that auction site) is around £300 with import duty. An original will fetch £500-£750.

As with anything, not just items related to our game original items will always rule the day!!