Fake Erie?

SShort

Member
Saw this on a local ad. Looks like a Gate Mark but Erie’s did not have gated skillets. Any thoughts?
 

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Sshort,

According to another recent post on this site, Griswold did not have gate marks on skillets or DOs. Here is a picture of the "ERIE" I found just before Christmas.

https://imgur.com/jNLPTVf

It was categorized as a 1st Series (http://www.castironcollector.com/erie.php). Note the scoped handle similar to the one in your picture. The gate mark is certainly suspicious. Also, it looks like the letters in the ERIE are not spread as much. However, I'm by no means an expert, so I'll leave it to those who have seen a lot more skillets to weigh in.
 
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It's not a gate mark. Maybe a sand shift. Looks like a 1st series Erie to me. I don't think it's fake or a repro, but can't tell you that with absolute certainty.
 
I have a 2nd Series #9....not sure about this one tho. Looks very straight to be a sand shift, but stranger things have happened. I have a Wapak #9 Z Logo that has what I thought was a gate mark, only to find out thru this site that its indeed a sand shift.
 
Looks like a casting flaw due to the mold itself. Maybe the box the mold was in had two boards with a gap between them. Sand that should have been compressed by the pattern got pushed through the gap instead, leaving a void where that line is. If the mold was in a rectangular box, the pattern's handle would have pointed toward a corner in order to get away with using the smallest box possible, leading to the funny angle of that line on the skillet.

Not saying with any certainty that that's what happened, but it fits.
 
I have seen several fake Erie pieces though never a #9. Usually the 7s which were bigger money back in the day. That is a fairly large gate mark. Is the interior surface smooth and level? On some of the bad recasts the interior suffers. My initial impression is recast.
 
If a gate mark, we would expect to see evidence of the gate having been broken/ground off. I'm not seeing that here.
 
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