Originally posted by oldken@Dec 20 2005, 01:26 PM
Gabe you are the master of these found parts, one of the deffinate gurus on this board, i know you said you felt it was smooth, im just wondering what this coulda came from to where it would be smooth and not some sort of pattern or knurling to it?
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You are way too kind, Ken... please don't stop.
Well, I have a theory about this bracket design, since it's never been positively identified.
Three things stirke me as odd about it:
- The edges of the scope cradle flanges on the side facing the Mauser are ground off, as if the design had a flaw that was corrected to eliminate interference with the elevation sight
- The screw holes in the scope ring flanges are not centered but off to the side. This is a sloppy way to fabricate a precision machined part
- The rear post of the vertical bracket is considerably narrower than the front post
This tells me that the assembly may have been cobbled together from existing scope rings and the rest was designed on the fly or off a sketch by a gunsmith or Bapty for the purpose of filming
Sitting Target. If we look at similar ( in the sense that they're about lone gunmen with customized weapons) films of the time, such as
The Day of the Jackal and
Naked Runner, then for this scope bracket to be a "one-off" design is by no means far-fetched. We also know that between the 70s and 90s
Blade Runner,
Robocop,
Aliens,
Timecop,
Blade,
Battlefield Earth, and later
Equillibrium, featured working handguns that were used as a baseline for prominent film-specific props, but our "prop awareness," inside studio knowledge, and availability of reference materials and prop maker testimonies only really only began following
Star Wars with respect to converted firearms, so we're at a definite disadvantage here when it comes to pre-
Star Wars films.
So to expect certain elements of the design to conform to our notions of mass-produced military or hunting optics might be misguided. That means that the Thumbscrew knob may indeed lack knurling and the fabrication could be expected to be sloppy and asymmetrical. This isn't to say that we should stop looking for a twin somewhere out there, but in this case I suspect we could be on a wild goose chase.
Feel free to disagree - we're nowhere NEAR the end of this brainstorming session.
- Gabe