Its a good lesson in 'as ssued' though..... Makes ya wonder if the worker got it right, would this be a 'as issed' gun in the eyes of the collector? I would think yes, and also wonder how many 'as issued' guns are out there that were indeed reworked to some level and everyone thinks its a 'as issued".
I think it's a better lesson in showing just how much we as a collecting community don't know about these firearms. Like I've said before, w/o knowing the pedigree of a gun from initial fabrication, to acceptance, to issuance, to refurbishment, to storage, to re-issuance, and finally some type of final storage and sale to surplus, we really are pretty limited as to what we can and cannot attribute to any particular firearm. 'Unfired', 'unissued', and 'non-refurb' are automatically out the window.
If all S/Ns on this gun had the proper prefix (regardless of font style), based on the limited knowledge we do have, I would be forced to call it an 'as-issued' gun. We just don't have any basis for not calling it that because much of everything else is subjective (such as the light stamps on the magazine M08 showed above) and to one collector these might be no big deal while to another they might be enough to be a deal breaker. I've seen tons of guns with very light crossbolt stamps, light right-side stock acceptance stamps, shellac filled valleys of S/N stamps, or extra Cyrillic letters stamped where they really don't belong. It's a tough thing to set a red line as the criteria because some of the subjective things I just mentioned may or may not be a big deal to certain collectors.
None of the wrong prefix parts show scrubbing and renumbering. The refurbishment process could certainly have utilized un-numbered spare parts, and the incorrect prefix applied - after the scrubbing and application of the correct prefix on the mag and trigger.
I do think that there are plenty of as-issued gun out there. But this is a great example of one which might have passed as original, if not for the prefix mistake.
An example like this should give us all good reason to do some detailed inspection before declaring a gun as original manufacture. There are probably a good number of them with refurb evidence.
I think this is the most likely scenario Matt: Pristine hardware put in during the initial build that was stamped incorrectly and made it through final inspection. The odds of matching any two numbers from two 9999 numeral sets is (1/9999)*(1/9999) or 0.000001%, so I'd have to say that's just not as feasible at all. There is no way the Russians had 40 or 50 guns apart at a single time during refurb, what a nightmare that would be even with S/N to help match things up.
It could easily be a mix-up during refurb, but the incorrect EP'd S/Ns sure seem to suggest that there was some kind of issue right off the line...unless no hardware (from gas tubes, to pistons, to RSLs, to buttplates) was EP'd right off the line to start with and we are delusional to think that a gun exists that hasn't ever gone through a refurb facility....