i hear he made good machine guns. there are quiet a few MP40's in circulation that he made. his get close to an original within a grand a lot of the time. never heard any cross words about his work...

robert

 

forgive the interuption.. but why does it matter?
if you are buying an erb gun, it is likely a full auto sideplate gun. that means that you are spending a great deal of money on a piece of paper and that side plate. if there are any issues you can always take it off of that kit and put it on another. that said, the gun you are looking at could have been built by anyone if it was a sideplate that erb manufactured and registered before 86 and or even if it was one he made, you have no idea how hard it has been ridding in the last 24+ years.


erb guns hold a higher place in the resale arena than say catco and a few others because they were generally better. just like DLO.

in summary, the prices for these sideplates are as low as they were 5+ years ago and that is a great deal. go get it! if you need to rebuild it, you can buy a parts kit from a few guys here for around $500.

good luck.

rory

i made a few assumptions here so if any are incorrect, sorry. just wanted to address the bigger picture while still answering your question

 

ERB guns!

Charlie Erb made all of the sideplates himself and they were of good quality The metal was higher grade than what most people use now-- It was also the most expensive then but compared to todays metal prices it was cheap .

 

catco

I dont know what the deal is with the catco plates, my catco gun runs and runs and runs. As many here hasve built semis, I just dont see what the problem could be unless a few of the reciever boxes were out of square. I have talked to quiet a few other catco owners and no one I know of has had a problem. I would be happy to take problem catcos off peoples hands!!!!

 

Erb made lots of different FA guns. Most seem fairly good quality but some have problems. It seems at some point he was just pumping them out and quality went down. However I would not worry to much about that. I myself have an Erb MG08/15 sideplate.

 

Manufature and registration ended on May 19, 1986. Between then and now, virtually all MGs that were poorly built or with reman problems have been repaired. Have repaired quite a few of these guns belonging to my customers, and there have been a lot of them in the NFA community during those 24 plus years.
At this point, it is quite rare to run into any of the poorly fabricated remans.

Bob Naess

 

I dont know what the deal is with the catco plates,

The deal is, it all depends WHO made the gun, not really who made the plate. Most of the problem CATCOs were hammered together on a garage floor by a determined but lacking newbie 'smif. If it's running well, well, then it was assembled right.

Problem is... nobody can tell you WHO assembled the gun. Or they don't want to...

 

One of my friends at work has an Erb STEn. He bought it from Erb himself and visted the shop. This was in the early 80's (I think he said 82) and he said there were machine guns all over the shop. I think he said he paid around 400 or 500 for it.

 

If he has an Erb Sten AND bought it in the early '80s for $400/500, he got throughly screwed. All sorts of Stens were available as late as '91/'92 for $300 and people had to hold out for awhile to get that much. I bought new assembled (previously registered) Stens from DLO for $300 and $350 in the early '90s.