Query about LE repro scope mounts

[villiers]

After years of frustration with different "smithless" LE scope mounts (and increasingly age related eye sight deterioration), I was confronted with a dirt cheap "repro" LE scope mount on the German eGun site. I got the (expensive) Fulton brackets, and then a set of equally dirt cheap repro brackets. I measured them all carefully and could find no difference. I then ordered the Canadian mount (with a picatinny Stanag rail), as there were very few one inch tubed scopes on the market. Again, there was no measurable difference between the two mounts. The cheap repro rifle scope mount holds zero completely satisfactorily and there is absolutely no problem when re-fitting the scope each time I go to the range.

So, what was so special with the original version?

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[Peter Laidler]

Er........ what type mounts/brackets are you writing about Patrick?

[villiers]

I take it that this is the most commonly found repro:-

[Peter Laidler]

Ah, yes but the description was pretty ambiguous especially when you described the Canadian bracket with picatinny/STANAG rail. That got me wondering..........

I say many, many times........ It's no secret that most brackets fit most rifles. But not all of them do and not all the time. And there's part of the rub. It isn't the fact that they FIT, but they've got to fit AND collimate in that the mechanical axis of the bore of THAT bracket, both left-right/up-down HAS to collimate exactly with the mechanical axis of THAT rifle bore when it is screwed up tight. That is where the skill comes in.

There's much more to it than that of course but that should do for now as my wife has just put my tea on the table...........

[villiers]

Well thanks Peter ... so now I know how grateful I must be to the Bavarian gunsmith who mounted the tabs and collimated the scope. I´ve always respected the German system of a long apprenticeship and really good specialist academies. He told me on the `phone that he was astonished how accurate the scope was as soon as it was first installed. Or it could have been just .... luck!

[Peter Laidler]

As you're aware Patrick, we didn't number our brackets initially, relying on the fact that the telescope was in the bracket and the tele was numbered to the rifle and the whole lot cross matched/numbered within the telescope tin and occasionally in the rifle chest.

BUT.......... the problems arose when you had, say,4 rifles in the workshop being overhauled. 4 telescopes taken from their brackets* to go to the Instrument shop and immediately, the important cross matching is lost. And that's where the propblems start. It was this that propmted the instruction in the early 50's to the effect that '.....immediately a telescope is removed from a bracket, the bracket WILL be numberd to the rifle'

* because you can't mount the tele. on the optical bay stand with the bracket attached