Jim, I would bet the front sight IS original. While anything is possible, the longitudinal grooves, or swapping the barrel within the breech block, are certainly beyond the average home hobby gunsmith! As for the hole between the grooves, that's a new one on me! It's really a fascinating transitional gun, I think, with the ball-bearing detent probably confirming the date I guessed earlier.
FWIW, after looking at a lot of 27's and 35's on German auction sites, etc., I've seen just about every combo of detail features you can imagine, including quite a few with finger-groove stocks and late scope-rail, stamped-trigger actions. Some may not be original of course--easy enough to swap stocks--but a lot of weird things happen when you change a given model's details while using up stocks of old parts, etc.
My buddy Lance recently got an 50's-vintage model 35 which has the breech block longitudinally grooved for the classic "two-position" target sight, but ALSO with a stamped rear sight mounted in a transverse dovetail! I hope to post some photos of this one soon....
This message has been edited by MDriskill on Apr 14, 2008 11:26 PM
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