New to here, question on a fabric I purchased

[docdaddy]

Hello to all! I am an avid WWI air fanatic and was thrilled to find this site.

I'll start with a request for help. Years ago I purchased a piece of fabric, one of several that were on sale on eBay, supposedly from the collection of a reputable collector (there were other WWI air memorabilia pieces in addition to the fabrics.) I purchased one that was said to have come from a Spad (I believe a Spad 17?)

I would appreciate any feedback from here on how I could best authenticate this? Here is a picture:



Thanks, and I look forward to participating in the community here!

Jeff

[Kaiser Bill]

Docdaddy...welcome to the aerodrome. Good to have you here. We have many "experts" in residence, and I'm positive someone will be along soon to answer your questions.

Welcome from the southern shores of Lake Erie.

Kaiser Bill

[docdaddy]

Originally Posted by Kaiser Bill

Docdaddy...welcome to the aerodrome. Good to have you here. We have many "experts" in residence, and I'm positive someone will be along soon to answer your questions.

Welcome from the southern shores of Lake Erie.

Kaiser Bill

Thanks Kaiser! (I've lived all around the Great Lakes - Cleveland, Akron, and Midland/Saginaw/Bay City, MI) Looking forward to chatting with other aficionados!

[Jim]

You would need to have it personally studied by an expert to be 100% sure one way or the other, but from what I can see in the photo it appears to be non-authentic. There are some sellers of 'instant' WW I aircraft fabric who have a cottage industry of manufacturing these sorts of things in their basement and selling them on Ebay to unsuspecting and non-expert buyers along with undocumented stories that they were part of a well known collector's things. They concentrate on manufacturing these fakes with relatively whole markings such as yours, or an entire German cross, or and entire French or British roundel or an entire rudder with all markings, or an entire personal marking, or such. The colors on these are off - they are far too fresh looking for what a real one looks like today.

What kind of provenance did the seller provide you with this?

[Chock]

It might be genuine, though it looks a bit well preserved to me, but there are some well preserved relics, so that in itself is not conclusive. The lettering style looks a bit suspect too, but that again is not conclusive, since there could simply have been an aircraft rigger who painted letters that way. Apart from the lettering though, the bits that look slightly suspect incidentally, are the nine sitting above the baseline and the fact that the outlining of the numbers has been done on both the red and the blue overlap. It was rarely felt necessary to do it on both colours, which is a bummer when you look at old monotone photographs from the period, as the serials often blend into the national colours where it has not been outlined. The outlining itself is also a bit close to the lettering too, there was often a much bigger white outline to make such efforts visible from a good distance.

Those comments should not be regarded as definite proof it is not genuine, since you can see examples of quite narrow outlining of serials over both colours, and a wide variety of lettering styles as well, with not every rigger being aware that characters with round bases are supposed to drop below the baseline. Here's a picture of Richthofen's room back home which demonstrates the variety which could be seen on such serials:



There is also the possibility of it being a fake, but not a fake with the intention to deceive, for example, it might be a film prop from the set of a WW1 movie or TV series. That could put it in a WW1 aircraft enthusiast's collection legitimately, despite it not being a genuine period piece.

The best way to check (apart from detective work on the serial number itself and the provenance of the object - tracking down SPAD serial numbers and squadron allocations is a good place to start that, ultimately you would then be looking for photographs of that squadron with which to compare your piece) is to compare it to known genuine items. You'd be looking at material weight, weave, rib stitching if there is any, paint type, colour and penetration of the material, dope residue, and whether the distance between scuffs on it tally with the division of any ribs or stringers on the aircraft type it is supposedly from, as they should line up (you can in fact do that from an accurate schematic drawing scaled up to 1:1). All that kind of thing.

Radio carbon dating is probably not really a viable option, as you tend to need a fair bit to sample, which is of course destroyed in the sampling process as it gets burned to find the carbon radioactive decay rate. Radio carbon dating will cost between 75 and around 150 quid. You can find places online that will do it as a commercial business, but you can find university research departments that can do it for less, so if you really have a burning desire (no pun intended) to know, and of course the money to spend on it, and you can find somewhere that doesn't need 20 grams of material to conduct the test, then it is of course a possible option. It can certainly be done on material, as evidenced by the fact that it was done on the Turin Shroud some years ago, unfortunately, for the church, confirming it to be a medieval fake. Note that the closer the match in terms of year, the more you are likely to pay.

Sadly, it is relatively easy to fake such things, even quite convincingly, but where most fakes fall down is on the correct material type and paint (should of course be old fashioned paint with probably a high lead content and probably on Irish linen, although silk was used on occasion), although you can even fool radio carbon dating if you start with materials of the right age and type, such as one of your grandma's old bedsheets that she got handed down to her from her Edwardian mother and some paint form an old garage. Most famously, that kind of thing is done by using the blank frontispiece pages from books of Edwardian vintage to sign fake WW1 pilot autographs on, which gives you an autograph that will fool almost anyone if the penmanship is well replicated. Such devious methods would also probably fool a radio carbon dating process, in recent times having been employed to create the notoriously faked 'Hitler Diaries', which were written on paper of the correct vintage with ink from the 1940s.

I've knocked some up replica aircraft canvas pieces in the past (not as fakes, but for a film production, so they had totally bogus serials on them). It's amazing what you can do with a few things you can find around your house, cold tea being a favourite for staining such things to make them look old, and popping things under a grill on a very low setting being another trick people use to dry stuff out and make it brittle as though the doping has gone off, although in the case of the ones I made, they had to look fairly new. Kick a fake around your garden in the rain, and unfortunately, who is to say that the mud (providing it is the right colour and with the correct chalk content) is not from the Somme Valley? Do it in France and it could even be the case that it is the right soil.

Ultimately, if you like it, then that might be enough for you to be happy with it. Welcome to the forum by the way.

Al

[tcrean7828]

Mate,
Welcome to the flagship of the Aerodrome - where the greatest minds on the planet get together and talk about their favorite subject - WW1.

ttfn

tcrean7828

tom

P.S. Werner Voss fan here.

[Cliff]

Hi Jeff

The serial number on your fabric 'N591' or 'N591x' can tell you something about the aircraft.

"Royal Navy Aircraft Serials and Units" says that 'N591' was never used and the series 'N591x' was used on Sopwith Triplanes N5910, N5911 & N5912, the rest of the series was cancelled.

The 'Sopwith Triplane' Datafile has pics of N5911 & N5912. The serials are applied to white rectangles on the rear fuselage and don't appear to have any numbers on the tail stripes as on your fabric.

Also N5912 still exists at the RAF Museum at Hendon:
Sopwith Triplane

So probably not a British aircraft, maybe a French Nieuport??
Or fake

Cliff

[docdaddy]

Originally Posted by Cliff

Hi Jeff

So probably not a British aircraft, maybe French?? Or fake

Cliff

Yeah, the seller was representing it as being from a French Spad.

But I am getting a consensus here that the odds are greater that it is a fake that it is real. Bummer, but I was young and foolish perhaps when I bought it and didn't do enough homework - perhaps due to my enthusiasm for WWI air war.

So on a related track: where ARE there good places to purchase genuine WWI air war artifacts?

[Chock]

Not yet conclusive that it isn't genuine, and even if it isn't, if you liked it when you bought it, then enjoy it for that.

A number of auction houses have specialist auctions from time to time, and these can turn up stuff, but you will sometimes be bidding against some serious collectors with a wallet to match, so if a Le Rhone turns up, you'd be unlikely to beat the big guns, but sometimes you can get some good stuff so it's worth checking out that route if that's your thing. Normally you can bid over the phone or have a broker representative bid for you based on a limit for a small fee if you can't be there yourself. You can usually contact auction houses and ask for email notification of upcoming specialist auctions that cover your area of interest.

There are one or two online dealers who sell such stuff too, if you google 'aviation memorabilia', you'll turn up a few, and you can normally gauge the validity of such places by the stuff they have.

Some dealers go to airshows and set up stalls. You are unlikely to find any real rarities that way, but then again, it does mean a lot of that stuff is quite affordable. Expect to find a lot of cockpit dials and that kind of stuff. Having said that, I have bought quite a few genuine Spitfire bits and pieces from such sources including one or two rare and unique items, so it's not all common stuff.

Worth bearing in mind that even through reputable auction houses and dealers it is not unknown to get fakes and misidentified stuff. Their professionalism is not an absolute guarantee that you won't get something that has been faked, as there is money to be made in producing such stuff, so that's all the motivation unscrupulous people need. Be very careful with autographs.

Al

[Jim]

Most authentic and documented WW I material is quite rare and very pricey. You can find a few books that were printed in very large numbers for modest amounts($20 to $50 range) or postcards or widely produced photos from the era in the $10 to $50 range, or a picture frame made from a chunk of a propeller, or such, but something like an aircraft serial number or other desireable object will typically sell for thousands to tens of thousands.

Undocumented objects are easy to come by but you should expect that 99.9% of these are either fakes or later items from the 1920s or 1930s. Great war aviation souvenirs were avidly collected during the war and have been ever since. The supply is far smaller than the demand so fakes have been made since the start to meet the collector demand. Many of the old fakes have some real age to them so they are harder to sift out. Most of the dealers in old militaria can not tell what is real and what is not, though they would strongly disagree with my statement. That is what I have personally found though. If you buy from such a person, or if you buy at an auction you need to keep one demand non-negotiable - you need to insist on some rock hard provenance. And a statement from a collector that it came from their personal collection or a statement from a dealer that they guarantee authenticity is not very substantial provenance. You need something like a photo of that actual object from during the war, or you need to buy it directly from the relatives of the old pilot or such (though even that can be a bit dicey since family stories always grow with each telling). You also need to educate yourself by spending time in museums really studying the kinds of things you are interested in collecting so you will be able to judge intelligently whether to believe the story that comes with an object.