Thank you

[SF Jeff]

About metal, throughout the 19th century and up into the mid-20th century the standard metal for sporran hardware, waistbelt and crossbelt hardware, brooches, cap badges and collar badges, dirks, sginean, and bagpipe fittings was solid "German Silver" AKA "nickel silver" AKA cupro-nickel. (It's an alloy of nickel, copper, and zinc and contains no silver.)

When polished up it looks quite like Sterling Silver and is routinely misidentified as such by Ebay sellers etc.

So the standard sporran hardware would have been solid German Silver, either plain or silver-plated, or Sterling Silver, which AFAIK was scrupulously hallmarked.

Good information, thanks. I'll start a new thread in the Care & Maintenance forum to address this and how it relates to my sporran, which I am refurbishing. I don't want this thread to get too far off topic.

It's not until after WWII, I believe, that you begin to see sporran hardware cast in brass and nickel-plated. Did this start during WWII due to copper being needed for the war effort?

My house, which my parents bought new in 1968, is almost all aluminum wiring. My mom always told me that it was because all the copper was being used for munitions for the Vietnam war and builders had to use whatever wire was available (there was a huge housing boom here in the 60's and 70's). That may be why I have mostly aluminum, some copper and even some copper clad wire. Whatever they could get their hands on, they used. A friend's house, about a mile from mine and built in 1971, is the same way.

Then later, 1970s?? you start seeing nasty chrome plated stuff. A lot of the sporran hardware today is made out of I don't know what. Pot metal? Aluminium? It looks cheap anyway.

My tassel cones look like pewter, although not as dark. They won't polish up like the cantle did.

[OC Richard]

Yes Ebay sellers generally mis-identify the German Silver stuff they're selling either as Silver or as Pewter.

I don't know that any of older makers used Pewter, though a lot of Ren Faire stuff including Ren Faire type pouches and sporrans have Pewter hardware.

Anyhow here are three buckles of the same pattern, a pattern that's been in production since Victorian times and is now mass-produced in Pakistan.

Bottom left is a horrid modern chrome example, the other two are c1900-1939 German Silver examples. As you see the same pattern was made both landscape and portrait in the old days.

They've not been polished up but you get the idea.



Here's the matching pattern crossbelt hardware, again an ugly modern chrome-plated set and a vintage solid German Silver set.