Reminds me of the "Khyber pass copies" of ancient British firearms that still float around Afghanistan/Pakistan: http://www.martinihenry.com/khyberpage.html

> The makers even tried to copy the stampings and markings from their original source Martini. Backwards letters and misspellings of the markings are common. The majority of Khyber Pass Martinis I've seen have typos that are very similar. One of the most common is to have the "N" in "Enfield" backwards...likely because one "Master Copy" of an original Martini was made, then passed around for others to makes copies from. The erroneous marking was then faithfully copied from one weapon to the next.

Wow. I had heard that many Chinese factories will use retired molds for casting processes and the like to create copies of things like golf clubs, but this brings the whole process to an entirely new level.

The retired mold bit happens quite a lot with carbon fiber bicycle frames. A couple companies have gotten quite upset with Chinese manufacturers in the past.