wwii axis reenactment forum

About 1 week ago i bought a couple of post war German mess kits. These are the 50's/60's West German police kits who are to my opinion the closest to the originals. Right now the kits have still there original colour, grey blue. I want to give them the correct most used colour. If i take a look to original kits, you can see them in all kind of colours. I had green, black, tan, factory camouflaged (?) and grey ones? Also some without paint? I think green is the most common colour for the kits? The plan is to make a couple of these green and maybe 2 in tan (Afrika korps).

Im also looking for the best adres for a couple of Mess kit straps!

Zeltbahn01 wrote:About 1 week ago i bought a couple of post war German mess kits. These are the 50's/60's West German police kits who are to my opinion the closest to the originals. Right now the kits have still there original colour, grey blue. I want to give them the correct most used colour. If i take a look to original kits, you can see them in all kind of colours. I had green, black, tan, factory camouflaged (?) and grey ones? Also some without paint? I think green is the most common colour for the kits? The plan is to make a couple of these green and maybe 2 in tan (Afrika korps).

Im also looking for the best adres for a couple of Mess kit straps!

Stay away from painting your mess kit black. As far as I know it was only done on the earlier tall mess kits used by political organizations and the S.S. I think. And it depends on what time period. If you are doing late war really any color will suffice but if you are doing early war or mid war naturally your options will be less than what you will have doing a late war impression. For mid war (1941- 1943ish) I did a green/ tan color seen on many mess kits. For early war you may want to do some sort of field grey.

As for mess kit straps, At the front makes some kick ass tropical stuff and their leather stuff is good too. I don't know about their new straps, but two years ago their stuff looked pretty dang good with some wear and tear.

Best,
Sam

The closest you get to the original mess kits, you have to get a hold of an east German one, throw the top away and replace it with the top from your west German one .

As for the colour, I would use your normal field grey like this one:
http://www.germanmilitaria.com/Heer/photos/H041164.html

Mattias Sieger wrote:The closest you get to the original mess kits, you have to get a hold of an east German one, throw the top away and replace it with the top from your west German one .

Do they fit?

I believe that post war Austrian messkits are the closest you can get:

https://www.libertytreecollectors.com/p ... oduct=1603

The bottom ones looks great... The 2 on top to the left looks like BW and are not great..

Yes, the attachment point for the handle to the sides is wrong (for WW2) on the ones Mattias picks out. The others are ok.

You get the same result by combining a east German bottom half and a BGS top half.

The East German bottom does not have 2 rivets in attachment point for the handle, so Austrian one is better. Of course you are right, that not all messkits from the picture I posted are OK. To be honest, I didn`t know that there were Austrian ones with handle attachment same as in Bundeswehr messkit - all Austrian messkits sold recently in Poland were the type almost perfectly matching German WWII model.

an kochgeschirr without any farbe will do also

Or an original one, as Mooyman implied , there's plenty about , and they're not expensive

Forgetting about colour for a moment, be aware that there are messtins manufactured by the Polish and red armies that look identical.
Check the stampings.

At this year's Beltring I selected an appropriate mismatch body and lid ( as mentioned above! ) from a pile of assorted mess tins and other crap... net result one correct Kochggeschirr, total cost £1

to Kochgeshir´s 31 coulour: http://www.dererstezug.com/kochgeschirr.htm
* Feldgrau (RAL 6006) 1935 to 1941.
* end of April 1941, order HM 41, No.435 - color changed to Graugrün (RAL 7008)

Actually RAL 7008 is not the correct color for the olivegreen messkits, it's 6008. I recently found that out.
I've seen a few sources claim that it is 7008, so i thought that they had changed the shade of it since the war, but this color is still the same. It's more of a khaki green. I got some mixed according to the 40's recipe, and some mixed according to the current recipe, and they are identical.
However i do think the current 6008 is different from the wartime one. But i haven't seen any samples of it in person yet. There has been some changes in the RAL system over the years, so that could be the case.

The field grey spray paint (not the slate grey) which SOF
sells seems identical to the Wartime field/grey-green colour,
i matched it with an aluminuium waterbottle cup i have which
still has the original paintwork, think it may be Ral-6008 but
not sure of the code anyway it is the only field-grey paint that
SOF sell so you would get the right colour/shade if ordered
Good luck Pipes