This is an interesting piece that just surfaced through eBay – THE venue for fakes and mis-represented items. (I don’t see that in their marketing material but there is an increasing recognition that eBay is also THE fencing venue for stolen property but that’s another story).

Back to the item – We were asked by several collectors this past week regarding what was listed as a vintage 227 Wetassa patch. Specifically it was represented as an R1. We have handled two of these, out of a known population of about 6, plus have seen the R0.5 – same design but on very dark blue felt.

What had us looking was this was close but just didn’t seem right. The original design is crude but not this crude. Destry, who’s from Illinois, got to checking what else this person was selling and there were other felt patches but in the militaria area. Our conclusion is that these were/are hand-painted reproductions. Which makes it interesting but not the real deal (and it sold for $160 +/-, not the $10,000 that the real one brings.)

Below is the picture of the patch that was just sold:

This is the image of the real piece, from John Pannell’s OAimages.com site, of the patch in Dave Pede’s collection.

Addition: 3/31/09:

Over the past couple of weeks another one of these surfaced, also coming from Yorkshire, England but under another seller id:

This one is much closer but still wrong. Note the problems with the ‘A’s in Wetassa compared to the original. Also, the fakers are having problems with the red ‘WWW’ and the fuzziness of the raccoon within the arrowhead.

What has just popped up is a Lone Wolf A out of Oslo, Norway:

Paul Myers, an expert on Indiana OA amongst many other things, brought this to our attention. As Destry mentioned:

the guy is getting good. Another fake high end OA felt from overseas. Check his other stuff, there are fakes military bullions and even another hand painted leather sqaudron patch. This is the same guy that sold the 227 felts, just operating under another name. I did another Patch-L posting about it, just letting the boys know.

Here’s a picture of an original:

Actually, I’m thinking they are making their fake based upon our picture because of the distortion they have in their attempt to reproduce the number. We have had this up for sale at set price and they could have seen the high value thus making it a target. What they are missing is that this was done on composition material, not felt.