My assumption is that considering the rather meticulous standards at SAL & REL and the very fact that they serial numbered the cases at all, and the fact that as the scopes and cases were made in the same factory over the same time period, they would have been originally assembled in matched pairs as they were finished. The only other scenario would be that all 500 of both were made and then randomly mated to each other before shipment. Logically they would have been sent to the Canadianicon Army stores system with the scopes inserted into their cases in order to protect them in shipment and the logical thing would have been to pack them as they were finished and so sequential assembly with matching numbers would have been hard to avoid I suggest.