Anyone Seen These Drawings Before?

[Bruce_in_Oz]

I had one of those Hensholdt scope assemblies, complete with the "FN special" dust covers back in the "good old days".

Quite a light scope, but handled a prodigious quantity of rounds fired under it and held zero fine.

The biggest weakness was the light-weight method of attaching the scope to the mount.

It is very reminiscent of a late WW2 German system for the K(G?)- 43 sniper variants, be they the odd, square-bodied ZF-4 or the more conventional ZFK-31/1 unit.

This latter item: here,

The thin, spring-steel retaining straps tend to crack and fail, just as they did on my old Hensholdt on that late and lamented L1A1. The "repair" is to make new straps from THIN spring steel sheet, not unlike a wide mainspring from a large clock.

It occurred to me at some stage that such a piece of kit was probably a bit extravagant for a "bush gun" used for hunting feral critters from the back of a motorbike, so I grabbed a spare NEW dust cover, "spread" it about a millimeter and then silver-soldered a pair of steel base-blocks to the top. This assembly was then set up on a barreled action and the PH style dovetails machined, more-or less to to bore alignment. The scope for this job was one of Leupold's lovely, very light, 2-7 variables.

This was one of my standard "bush" setups until I sold it to help raise the deposit for a house. A few years after that, our beloved leaders made owners of such rifles "offers that couldn't be refused". The Hensholdt scope and mount, complete with original "hard' canvas case, ended up with a collector of such things.