Mother of all Bren Accessories

[sinder357]

id like to see about makeing some reproductions for thoes of us who cant afford real ones

[Peter Laidler]

Reproductions of what? Or have I missed something?

[sinder357]

100 round bren mags

[peregrinvs]

I've seen 'lookalike' repros made from a resin casting of the drum coupled to the lower half of a standard magazine with which to attach it to a gun. (No mounting bracket required) I'll leave the more technically able to consider the practicalities of making an exact functional copy, although I assume the costs would be pretty daunting.

[Peter Laidler]

Thousands of pounds for press tooling alone (I'm not a production engineer just a mechanical engineer who's just looked at a drum so it's just a good estimate based on experience....) for a look-a-like non runner. As for reproducing the real McCoy, well...................

[Woodsy]

I make replica guns and could do Bren 100rd drum replicas (external details only) and the mounting brackets but they would be about US$250-350 each because of the relatively low numbers involved. Any takers? These would be the Mk II version with the attached winding handle. I have both types in my collection for accurate measurement.

[Surpmil]

Had one of these chests a few years ago, sans internals sadly. Who bought them all at £75. a box Peter??

Regarding your comments on their use, here is an eyewitness report from Crete, 1941:

The next day the Stuka came back and this time one of our lads had got a Bren gun mounted on a tripod. We were sitting under an olive tree enjoying the shade when we heard the Stuka a long time before he got to us. I stayed put under the tree with the others but one of our blokes dashed out to where the bren was mounted and was shouting "come on you b----d have a taste of this" and pulling back on the cocking handle he swivelled round to get a bead on the now approaching Stuka. Because he was not under cover, the Stuka pilot spotted the movement changed course and began his dive at the same time. He opened up with machine guns. We got round the other side of the tree while screaming to the bloke to leave it and take cover. But he was so obsessed with the Stuka and he ripped off the used magazine. While he was putting the new magazine on, it looked like a huge blast of wind and big hail slammed him to the ground and he stayed there still, and the Stuka climbed up and away. I didn’t know his name, I wished I did but I think that bloke should have got the highest award. Some one did get his dog tags and I heard him say,” you will always be remembered mate, no question, and ah’ll see to it yu git a medal”.

Of course the moral of the story could be: don't shoot unless the pilot can't see you.

On the other hand, there was a case apparently satisfactorily documented of a crackshot digger downing an ME109 on a strafing run in the desert with one well placed round in the engine. Stranger things have happened.

[John Sukey (Deceased)]

since we are talking about rare accessories, I have the magazine loading tool that fits on the magazine metal carrying case and loads Bren mags from 5 round chargers/ stripper clips

[Peter Laidler]

Those magazine loading tools fell by the wayside because they soon learned that you could load a magazine quicker by hand than using the loading tools.

There were two types of loader. One type for charger loaded ammo and another with a hopper for loose boxed ammo. If you had the loose boxed hopper type issued, then you could bet with near certainty that your ammo would come in charger clips. And if you had the charger clip type loaders............, yep, got it in one! An absolute waste of space but now quite rare

[csmarcher]

The nice thing about the 100 round drums is that they worked well with the L10z Blanks.

Gary