Enfield made MkII Bren magazine well cover

[Peter Laidler]

That's a pretty philosphical question Peregrine! I always thought/assumed that The Mk2 Bren was totally outsourced and didn't use Enfields production capacity. Since both covers are fully interchangeable, I can't imaging the Enfield production supervisor agreeing to tool up for the simplified Mk2 type when the tooling for the original Mk1 was already up and running. But clearly, he must have!

But just one thought, are you sure that you have a Mk2 cover and not a slghtly shorter L4A 1 or 2 cover? These are actually slightly modified originals, converted during the gun conversion programme and marked with the DE logo. Both types were used during the conversion. We often used to find JI and DE marked L4A2 'shrouded' gas cylinder sleeves too. (You know, the thing that swings on the gas cylinder that the bipod hangs from.....). But these were just bog standard Mk1 production parts, machined away and converted to L4 spec, still carrying the old original marks PLUS the later DE mark too

On a 'same meat, different gravy' tangent, the magazine opening cover was one of the only pressed/fabricated parts of the Bren. Can anyone tell me the others? I think that there's only two or three across the whole Mk1 to L4A9 series.

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[peregrinvs]

But just one thought, are you sure that you have a Mk2 cover and not a slghtly shorter L4A 1 or 2 cover? These are actually slightly modified originals, converted during the gun conversion programme and marked with the DE logo. Both types were used during the conversion. We often used to find JI and DE marked L4A2 'shrouded' gas cylinder sleeves too. (You know, the thing that swings on the gas cylinder that the bipod hangs from.....). But these were just bog standard Mk1 production parts, machined away and converted to L4 spec, still carrying the old original marks PLUS the later DE mark too

I'm pretty sure - it's the same length and width as a MkI cover I compared it to.

I've had a closer look and it has both an ED logo and a broadarrow marking. I think it has been on a gun at some point, but only lightly used.

I'm still struggling to think of a reason why Enfield would have made this part.

Cheers,
Mark

[WallyG.]

Total conjecture on my part... but there was a war on... bombing and such...

What if Enfield's stamping dies were damaged... Daimler/Monotype might have had spares available that could have been put into production until new MkI dies could be created at Enfield... not too far fetched unless the stamping machines used entirely different (incompatable) stamping dies.

Could have been something as simple as a test run...

Unless Enfield or other archives have documentation... we'll probably never know.... Monotypes archives were destroyed post war.