@MarinePMI, thank you very much for making this thread a sticky, it's probably one of the most important threads on this forum! Also, thank you everyone who also commented on this and wanted the this thread to be tacked to the top of this section. I appreciate the kind words as well, it's been a pleasure working with all of you guys on various Mk13 builds and other rifles!
When I first got all the Mk13 Mod 0 stocks around 7 years ago, I didn't have a clue that it would turn out to be this popular and kick off an entirely new rifle series of military rifles for people to collect! It's been a lot of hard work, but these original items have been successfully documented and preserved for future generations, and cloners have been building some amazing rifles with these original parts!
In total, I had about 155 Mod 0 stocks and about 65 Mod 5 chassis. I probably kept a dozen stocks/chassis, so in the end I was able to provide over
200 Mod 0/Mod 5 kits to collectors! It's been a pretty wild ride, and it's all because of this forum thread and dedicated collectors like yourselves!
I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here before, but here's a cool piece of information for the guys with the original certificates of authenticity that came with the Mod 0 stocks. Take your COA and hold it up to a light, then look very carefully at the 2 crossed Mk13 Mod 0's that are the certificate's watermark. The rifle on the left has a bolt handle and cheekpiece screw visible, whereas the rifle on the right doesn't. I designed and drew this crossed rifle watermark by hand and submitted it to the company that made the certificates for me.
I spent a week arguing with them about how detailed they could make the watermark. I wanted it to be as accurate as possible and have it show up as 2 crossed rifles with the proper details on each side of the rifles. The company would send me examples of the watermark with each change that I requested. They were finally able to get the watermark the way I wanted it and the guy at the certificate company was even surprised that they were able to incorporate a few of these details (he didn't think it was possible to do so).
I just wanted everything to be perfect and the certificates turned out exactly like I imagined them! I wanted to make sure that they could never be replicated or faked, like the COA's that came with the McMillan return USMC M40A1 stocks. An guy in CA with a pretty poor reputation in the M40 collecting community actually made fake M40A1 return stock COA's, I actually have one in my collection. Stuff like that always bothered me, so the solution was to make an legit COA from a company that specializes in them and add security features.
In addition to the watermark, Kelly McMillan hand signed every single COA and added the date he signed them. Kelly was a great guy and I wish he was still with us. He told me that signing all those COA's really hurt his hand and that he had carpel tunnel surgery scheduled for the following week (surgery was already on the schedule, it wasn't caused by signing these certificates). He still powered through the pain because he knew how important it was to document these pieces of history.
He was planning on signing these certificates for free and he never asked me for anything in return. However, I wanted to thank him for his time and I sent him an amazing Mk13 stock for his collection! It was painted up, had a matching MIRS rail and bolt, etc. It was an awesome kit! He put it in one of the display cases where he kept the other pieces of McMillan history, like the demilled M40A1 the Marine Corps presented to his father. I wonder what happened to that Mod 0 kit after he passed and the company was sold. If anyone here knows where it ended up, please let us know and post some photos (I don't think I have any photos of his stock).
So, Kelly McMillan signed and dated every single certificate that I sold with these Mod 0 stocks. I was the person who wrote the serial number on each one of the certificates. I had Kelly leave that portion blank, because I didn't have a serial number list for all of the stocks. Whenever I pulled out a stock to sell, I also grabbed a certificate that was signed/dated by Kelly and I wrote in the stock's serial number (the last 4 digits of the rifle's receiver, which was written in the barrel channel of each stock). I even used the exact same blue pen that Kelly used to sign/date all of the certificates! No joke, I literally had him send me the pen he used so that all of the ink on the certificates was the exact same! I thought you guys would find this stuff interesting, so hopefully you all enjoyed reading this post.
Heres 2 photos that I don't think I've ever posted. This is from when I purchased all of the Mod 0 stocks from the guy who bought them all from the government. He owns a business and had all of these stocks arranged on some shelves in his warehouse. The labels on the shelves were from the items that were previously housed on those shelves, before he had his employees put the Mk13 stocks there.
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I've been looking through my old emails and camera memory cards, I just realized that I have a ton of old photos from when I was originally selling these stock kits! Would you guys be interested in me doing a photo dump of all those old photos? It would be dozens of pics of the Mk13 Mod 0 stocks, you guys will definitely be able to see the ones you currently own in those photos!
Let me know if you guys are interested in seeing these Mk13 photos. If you guys want to see them, I'll post as many as I can!
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