FP-45 Liberator Packaging Set Reproduction

Vintage Ordnance Co. LLC is reproducing the famous FP-45 Liberator Pistol including the ultra rare packaging. Adequate packaging was made for our reproduction pistols. Some over-run production is currently available and offered here and on our website. Our carefully researched reproduction faithfully copies the original and includes all the components except the ammunition. You will receive: ammunition box and spacer, two sided instruction sheet printed on bond paper, waxed pistol box, wooden ejector rod and wooden packing wedge. All components are delivered assembled or folded as appropriate. It was a surprise during our research to learn that the ammunition was not glued in any way. Like the pistol itself, the design was clever and efficient. Keep in mind that all these components were designed for a one way trip, handle them with care. Use a credit card to ease open and closed the flap of the ammunition box. It is a snug fit by design. X-ray examination of an unopened original shows the bullets packed in two rows of five, primer to primer. Like the originals, the exterior of the pistol box is wax dipped and will vary in appearance from box to box. It will also change over time as the box is subject to abrasion or heat. (The wax melts at 140 degrees so do not leave it on you fabric car seat in July while you go in the gun show! What doesn’t soak into the box will soak into whatever it touches.) If the box gets hot, the wax will soak all the way into the cardboard and give it the very dark, smooth look of some originals. This is not the way the originals looked when they began their journey from Frankfort Arsenal in Philadelphia to guerillas forces in axis occupied countries. However, if you want this look you can put the box briefly in a pre-heated oven. Watch it closely! It should take less than a minute to soak in. THE WAX IS FLAMMABLE. DO NOT LEAVE IT UNATTENDED. If you do, you will likely cause a fire resulting in injury, death and certainly the destruction of your pistol box. The original boxes were not meant to look pretty. These wax sealed packages were intended to provide some protection to their contents while in transit to guerilla fighters in occupied countries thousands of miles away over air and sea, through jungle and forest, rain, snow, etc. As a result of their journey, most of the few that do survive are in pretty sorry shape. (This is one of the reasons it was so difficult to reproduce the artwork.) Our reproduced box art shows the quality of detail of the original pen and ink drawing. The fine lines bleed together when the image is reduced to a halftone for printing in books. A copy from a book can never achieve the level of precision that working from an original permits. Even poorly printed originals have an immense amount of fine line detail. After locating collectors and museums with originals willing to allow us to examine them, we got good copies to work from. The art was laboriously cleaned up and redrawn where necessary to remove the damage of time, dirt, abuse and the steadily degrading printing processes used to make them in 1942. Some original boxes are printed better than others. We have reproduced one of the better ones. The instruction sheet was printed on a strong rag bond paper for durability. We have copied it using modern 25% rag content bond paper, trimmed to the exact size and professionally printed, not photocopied or laser printed. If you get it wet, it’s not going to bleed all over the paper. Our paper is also watermarked, but not with the original “WHITING PAPER CO” watermark. In the future, this will be an easy way to recognize our reproduction. It is delivered to you folded exactly as the original. It was placed inside the ammunition box, on top of the cardboard inner spacer, when the boxes were packed.