C tip sling on Ebay

[rondog]

Man, I bought an Enfield sling on eBay that even SMELLS 60 years old!

[Bill Ricca]

This does not apply to your Enfield sling because as far as I know there is only one maker of reproduction Enfield slings, and they are sold as such.

Smell has always been a good test, however since the late 1980's that has changed. As the government started to manufacture more items out of nylon and rubber coated webbing, it released many tracker trailer loads of old webbing. A Pennyslvania surplus dealer I knew (he is now deceased) got two loads out of Phila and two out of Norfolk.

By the early 1990's I was seeing fake carbine slings made from a lot of this webbing. The first ones I saw were the nonsensical Quartermaster marked. Today most fakes are imported, but that a lot of the older fakes still pop up. They smell old because the webbing is old.