By god you're right! Mine is just much more faded. Thanks for taking the time to do that.

Thanks. I don't want anybody to have to take my word for things. I'm all about presenting my methods and evidence and the importance of letting people judge the weight of evidence for themselves, as well as making all my raw data freely available on request. So I'm at the public good science end of the spectrum.

This is in contrast to Drumaholic who created those comparison photos and started all the work on timelines and trademarks on cymbals. Drumaholic won't release methods and evidence because he's worried about people copying his work and not giving him credit. In his own words from 2010:

We're still waiting for a web site from Drumaholic. Drumaholic and I respectfully agree to disagree about the best strategy to improve the quality of information available to those interested in cymbals. My response to web sites like Winne's one (which is still ranked high in Google searches and used to misidentify cymbals) is to put out what I hope is a better one. You can see my work via the links in my signature.

I took the OP's image and flipped it, and then put it alongside a real early K con first stamp. The result looks like this:

I read your work zen because you give credit to where it belongs. Bill isn`t here as often as you so I can rely on good data from you. If it weren`t for Bill, those stamps wouldn`t have names, if it weren`t for you, our waiting period for info would be long.

Sometimes I wont post here helping someone ID a stamp, but I`ll come and look.

Wow, I'm surprised that anyone would think there's money to be made charging people for such arcane information. I think I'm with you, I share knowledge freely as a pastime on anything I know about, and I would never be jealous about it.

Interesting. Thanks Scott. I've blown your image up a bit

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2016/logo-annotated.png[/img]

and added a second image of what's reputed to be a similar aged stamp, although I wouldn't know myself.

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2016/zero2.png[/img]

It looks to me like there are some portions missing in yours which appear in the other impression, and vice versa. That makes things tricky.

I think I'm still seeing stylistic differences which mean there isn't a close match between the early K Con and the presumed ersatz k. The external bow in the presumed ersatz k is longer than in either of the early K Con examples. Any similar structure in the K Con is not only shorter but not external (meaning not on the outer edge of the composition).

There is also a whole structure present in your early K Con example (and replicated in the other early K Con example) which is entirely missing from the ersatz k.

But now that I've seen these earlier K Con examples the situation isn't as clear as it was. I can't rule out that what we're seeing isn't just two different very early K Con dies, and we happen to have two examples of the same one. This is a good example of why I'm in favor of making examples public so we can replicate the results so far on larger samples.

Yeah, I think it looks more like the actual K-con stamp, to my eyes it doesn't look much like the ersatz stamp you posted.

However, to complicate things further, I just noticed this one in one of the comments on Rob Scott's site, which is definitely Italian (the writer says the cymbal says made in Italy):

Yes, and Feltium (or whatever it says) is on the list of UFIP stencil brands

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2012/ufipStencilBrands.jpg[/img]

We can be forgiven for having trouble with these given that they are meant to deceive buyers into thinking they have a connection with Turkey. They even write Constantinople on them.

I still think the OP's cymbal might be an old K con. Not 100% convinced yet either way.

I love this stuff. I find myself wondering whose job it was in Italy to come up with shapes that looked like Arabic lettering.

What if it was someone's job in a non-Roman-alphabet-using state to come up with fake figures that look like European letters? Or cyrillic? I think that would be hilarious.

It's also kind of a racist idea to just artistically riff off Arabic script for profit.