Rolleicord 1 (art deco)

[foofiebeast]

I just got one tonight (it's my second rolleicord), but I'm having bit of a hard time identifying when it was made.

I'm confused because the information on the rolleiclub site, regarding serial numbers, doesn't make much sense.

Serials: 1.460.000 - 1.760.000, engraved in taking lens (internal factory serial inside camera ranged from 05001 - 37508).

My internal serial number (pic posted below) is 6 digits (as are all the others I've seen) and numerically smaller than 05001 (001886) The rolleicord 1's that are non art-deco style have serials such as,

Serials: 1.460.000 - 1.760.000, engraved in taking lens (internal factory serial inside camera ranged from 00001 - 05000).

which would make more sense for mine... Is it possible the site has it backwards? But that would also mean they have the # made of each incorrect as well...
My taking lens serial is 1462302

thanks for any help!

 

[foofiebeast]

this is the response I got over at rolleiclub, just thought I'd share incase anyone was interested:

Your art-deco Rolleicord has a serial number lower than expected by literature, congratulations! (but: sorry, no big deal) And Jaap omitted one leading "0" when telling us "05001" (maybe copied from the Beverly Hills Roleli Club, who maybe copied it from Claus Prochnow's Rollei report, who copied it from ... factory records or another book)

The same applies for the taking lens: The serial number is rather low. Some experts may be able to tell you when that lens was manufactured.

"2728989" is the shutter's serial number, I don't keep any records on these. Some real experts may tell by this number when the shutter was made.

So ... maybe this is one of the very earls samples and maybe another example to show us all that (almost) all the entire serial number business is monkey business. None of the numbers really tells us when the camera was assembled (Franke & Heidecke just didn't give a ... for serial numbers, they were concerned about other makers copying or faking their cameras and were occupied with coming up with new cameras and selling them).