Kiwi Medals

The Air Crew Europe Star is one of the rarest of the Commonwealth WW2 Service Stars. As a consequence it is valuable and heavily faked.

I have two here, one original and one reproduction. In this case the only way to really tell one from the other is that the cypher of King George in the center is slightly rotated in the fake so that the bottom of the V is lined up with the center of the W in crew instead of with the left hand leg of the W. If you look at the right hand foot of the W on the repro, you can see that it doesn’t align with the spine of the lower star point as it should.

And finally, repros usually age to a mid brown colour. The originals retain some colour and age to a red-brown patina, rather like a penny.

Original at left, Repro at right

Reproduction

Original

This entry was posted on August 1, 2013 at 5:39 PM and is filed under 1939-1945 Service Medals, Rare Medals with tags Bomber Offensive, United Kingdom, WW2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.