Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Weaver external adjustment mount

I recently got a old rifle with a Weaver scope with no internal adjustments and an External adjustment mount. Mount says Weaver adjustable mount. The scope is a V8 with fine cross hairs.

Best I can find out the rifle came from Wyoming and is a custom 300 H&H Mag on a commercial Mauser action. It appears to be a custom job circa 1950's.

I or none of my friends have ever heard of a external adjustable Weaver.

Can anyone provide some information on this scope and mount?

Thanks,
Centex Bill

They were Weaver's answer to the B&L Bal-Var series of externally adjusted scopes. They aren't great scopes and the mounts are worse. I have one that I cut the rear adjustable ring off and used it in B&L Bal-Var bases.

I think the Weaver V-8 was introduced in the early 1960s and had a short life. In 2017 they are more of a novelty than a practical hunting scope.

I have one of those with a very fancy reticle for the day. Like 3 lines across and 3 verticle. It sits in the corner of my living room on a shelf full of shooting novelties. I tried it on a very light shooting rifle once, I think my 722 257 bob. That's why it's on the shelf now. Sure is pretty.

Been there, done that, sent it down the road.

The reason for the 3 parallel crosshairs in some of those Weavers was the reticle was in the first focal plane (these days often called front focal plane), so got bigger or smaller along with the target. This meant one thin crosshair would almost disappear at low magnification, so they added two more so the three would appear sorta like one crosshair when the scope was turned down. But you could also use them like hashmarks on many of today's reticles for aiming at different distances when the scope was to higher magnifications.

Bausch & Lomb solved the reticle problem during that era with a tapered crosshair in their FFP variables, etched on glass. The outer edges of each crosshair were thicker, but very thin where they met in the middle. I've got one of those B&L's in my collection still, a 2.5-8x, but it's a later, internally adjustable variable.

Have one of those B&L 8As John that has the mount adjustments. Have it on a 721 06. Just looks right and has wonderful glass yet. The Weaver was given by a good friend therefore kept as decoration.

Yeah, I had a B&L Balfor with the mount adjustments for a while. Great glass, among the best for its era, but I donated the scope and mounts to a fundraising event for a shooting organization. They fetched a pretty good price!

I was "into" the B&L Bal-Var series of scopes and adjustable mounts back in the early 1990s. I probably have over 40 B&L Balfour (4x), Balsix (6x), Baleight (8x), Balvar (2.5x and 4x), Balvar-five (2.5-5x), and Balvar-eight (2.5-8x) scopes. Before the Rodney King riots burned out B&L's scope repair center in LA, you could send in any Bal-series scope and they would refurbish it for just the cost of shipping. IIRC, they lost the majority of their repair parts in the fire and when they moved the operation to Kansas City, they started giving credit toward a current production scope as fulfillment of the life-time warranty.

For me, the best thing about the B&L scopes and mounts was meeting and getting to know the late Fred Warren. Fred was a walking encyclopedia of B&L information and, unfortunately, he took his knowledge with him to the grave. If you find a B&L base or rings marked "Pem's", you have a item that Fred had made up when the originals from B&L and Kuharsky Brothers were no longer available.