You've opened them?? Good for you, I'm not that brave – 5731 is very rare this [European] side of the pond. I'm cursed with a MISB one, which I got in order to complete my Caparison Chart, but won't play this knight until I get a used one from somewhere.
Tell me: is there a parts sheet in 5731? If not, then the identification of the left saddle as ETN 30092840 in playmodb might be wrong. The two colours shown are standard shades in the playmoverse: I have many "minimal pairs" of items in the two colours around, so think we can exclude batch variation of a single variant. The ETN of the saddle in 5731 would then be unknown.
Yes, I have an army of green dragon soldiers, but concerning this 5731 knight, I only could get 7 after years looking for them. It is certainly one of the most difficult caparison knights to find these days (the only markets I spotted them with any regularity were US, Mexico and Australia).
Because of that, I started a project of building 5731 knights from scratch (piece by piece separately), noting that, in the end, I would have to resolve the 'caparison and shield dilemma' - as far as I knew, they were the only two pieces in this set that were 100% exclusive to 5731. Please find attached the current result of 2 'frankenstein knights' next to a legit one.
Thats how I noticed that in my 'frankenstein knights' I was using an incorrect saddle and belt loop, so then I tried to find the original ones.
As GrahamB correctly said, there is no instruction sheet in 5731, so we cannot be sure about its number.
I thought, therefore, that there might be other sets (even if few) that had the mysterious saddle and belt loop, so I could try to either a) identify the code or b) get the mysterious parts from these alternate sets.
As for the belt loop, I made progress, as it was possible to confirm that the it is being produced in new sets (such as the samurai from series 17).
However, as for the saddle, I was not successful, which leads me to believe that it may be another exclusive piece from set 5731...
By the way, my suspicion is that they used this stronger red on these pieces to match the edge of the shield which has this particular color.
Geobra are manufacturing parts for toys, not components of medical machinery, so the consistency between batches is not all that critical. Part numbers are often retained even when a different mold is used to create the parts. Likewise, the exact colour of parts can vary from batch to batch. Even if a given colour is specified, a slight variation may be allowed to pass quality inspection.
There are also numerous examples of sets where a part with a different number (but otherwise apparently identical, usually) may be included, perhaps in later releases when the stock of original parts ran out.
Attempts to get Geobra to disclose part numbers not shown in instruction sheets have not been met with success. Even if they keep records of what goes in each set, with variations, it is unlikely they will ever share this. (Apparently Lego are just the same with their products, I learnt recently).
So your dull red saddle may indeed be 30092840, or it might have a different number, but someone at Geobra decided it was a good enough match to the box picture (and in the early days, Geobra didn't always attempt to match the colours on the box, marking the packages 'Farben unverbindlich' - colours may vary).
Good point!! It really seems that the box picture shows a 30092840, which also led me to believe that this would be the right color. When opening the MISB knights, however, it was possible to verify that we are facing a different piece (similar, but not the same).
