USA Shooting medals

[Circus]

NRA qualification medals

pewter finish marksman, marksman first class

gold finish sharpshooter

Depending on the progrm/league one shoots in there are different levels that can be added to the medals

[Circus]

 here is a 1946 shooting medal

[thedeadpoint]

Wow! Do they still have these competitions?

[Circus]

Yes they do have a lot of completions. Camp Perry is the big one yearly  Camp Perry is a National Guard training facility located on the shore of Lake Erie in northern Ohio near Port Clinton. In addition to its regular mission as a military training base, Camp Perry also boasts the largest outdoor rifle range in the world after the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, NM.

I shoot in a weekly  NRA bulls eye League  which is a pistol league  at a local range. Working on the next level (expert) need eight scores above 250  out of a possible 300 need six more to qualify for it .The first two are mine. The third one my dad picked up at a garage sale, was in a can of pennies

[thedeadpoint]

Very cool! It'd be nice if the organization got out of politics and kept with old traditions like these!

[Circus]

The matches just passed and the winner shot 2675 out of a possible 2700

[schutzenfester]

A medal from 1940, Military Rifle Veteran Association of New York.

Marked Sterling - Plated. The assumption being gold plated sterling silver.

 

From Wikipedia regarding the medal maker:

Dieges & Clust were jewellers established in New York^[1][2] in 1898 by Col. Charles J. Dieges (b. Oct. 26, 1865-d. Sept. 14, 1953) and Prosper Clust.^[1]

They produced many medals, including the Spanish–American War Medal, the 1904 Olympic Medal, the Eagle Scout medal (from 1916–1920),^[3] the Medal of Honour, and the Titanic-Carpathia Medals (at the request of "The Unsinkable" Mrs. Molly Brown). They made baseball's first Most Valuable Player Awards and many Baseball Press Pins as well as Lou Gehrig's farewell plaque. They also cast the Heisman Trophy (in New York and later Providence, Rhode Island) from its inception in 1935 through late 1979 when the company was sold to Herff Jones (a division of Carnation) on January 1, 1980.^[4]

Perhaps the height of Dieges & Clust's production were the 1920s trophies known in sports collecting circles as "The Five Figural Spalding Baseball Trophies". The various trophies depict a baseball player pitching, catching, batting, playing first base, or playing in the outfield. The proportions of the figures and the detail (of the faces, fingers, stitching in the baseball gloves and shoelaces) are remarkable .^{[citation needed]} They fetch up to $5,000 at auction, relatively high for a silver-plated trophy on a wooden base.^{[citation needed]}

A 1936 New York Yankees World Series ring cast by Dieges & Clust and owned by Lou Gehrig held the record sale price for such a ring at $17,500.^[5]

In 1999, Sotheby's sold what was believed to be Lou Gehrig's 1927 ring for $96,000.

[Steve D'Ippolito]

If it is gold over silver, I wonder why it has blackened areas.  The pin bar (if that's what it's called), I would guess is actually brass.  The back of the medal itself, I am guessing, has had some of the plating rub off and the black there is silver tarnish. (I learned recently silver will tarnish even through a very thin layer of gold; thicker plating will block it.)

Brass or gold, it's a beautiful design and no doubt someone wore it proudly!

[Steve D'Ippolito]

On 9/20/2018 at 7:09 PM, thedeadpoint said:

Very cool! It'd be nice if the organization got out of politics and kept with old traditions like these!

It'd be nice if they didn't have to get into politics just to ensure that old traditions like these got to continue.

[schutzenfester]

53 minutes ago, Steve D'Ippolito said:

If it is gold over silver, I wonder why it has blackened areas.  The pin bar (if that's what it's called), I would guess is actually brass.  The back of the medal itself, I am guessing, has had some of the plating rub off and the black there is silver tarnish. (I learned recently silver will tarnish even through a very thin layer of gold; thicker plating will block it.)

Brass or gold, it's a beautiful design and no doubt someone wore it proudly!

Certainly could be brass over silver but most medalists would gold plate over silver considering the base medal being silver. 

In my experience in another field of collecting, brass over silver is (almost) unheard of. The patina that is seen/present is not entirely uncommon for gilt. Although considering that this is a 40's era US shooting medal and also a US medalist, I honestly have no idea from historical data what the plating would be. Certainly the fact that it is . 925 is the significant feature not the plating, even if gold, it would not enhance the value to any degree. The gilt plating enhances the look. 

 

[Steve D'Ippolito]

Oh, I guess I was a bit ambiguous...I'm thinking the pin bar might be solid brass.  After all, they could hang anything from it, a bronze medal, silver or...  On the other hand, they could have made it match whatever hung off of it, silver, bronze or gold.  The first option would be something someone might do for efficiency/economy's sake.  You'd certainly know.

The medal itself--I agree it would make no sense to brass plate silver.  That was my first thought, but as I was writing I thought better of it and tried to efface that from my post (I guess unsuccessfully).

I have three medals, gilt silver...and the gold has developed bright red and purple splotches.  Rather alarming!  It turns out the gold plating is very thin (thin enough that when someone did an X-ray fluorescence, it could "see" the silver under the gold), and the silver is toning under the gold.  Based on that experience, I'm thinking something similar could have happened to the back of the medal, some of the gold plating rubbing away (someone proudly wore it a lot), and the silver tarnishing through the now-thin layer.

Was there any indication of the purity of the gold plate?

[schutzenfester]

I agree that the pin bar may be indeed brass. The stamping on the back of the medal itself only states "plated", there does not appear to be any other indicators. 

 

[Steve D'Ippolito]

I suspect that it's 10kt or so plating.  Once upon a time, I got a piece of gold bling from my employer when I hit 25 years.  I figured it was 10kt gold plated, snorted derisively (if you're going to put a microscopically thin layer of gold costing all of a dime or two on a piece of pot metal, at least make it more than 50 percent pure!), and it really didn't look all that golden.  Then I finally realized it was solid 10kt gold (plenty heavy).  But the gold looked awfully...tan at that level of (im)purity.  I'd actually would rather have gotten a smaller item with a higher percentage of gold in it, so it would at least look like it was gold!