A little while ago, we received a sample mount for the Enfield Mk III and Ishapore .308 rifles.  The mount itself is made of aluminum, like a big CHUNK of solid aluminum. Very very solid in design.  Made of aluminum, though, it does not weigh all that much, about 3.7 ounces.  Length is about 5.5” and width is just under an inch.  It has nicely milled sharp and deep Weaver type cut rails along the top.  This is a mount that utilizes a long eye relief pistol or rifle scope and actually takes the PLACE of the rear sight on your Mk III rifle.

I found the mount to be extremely smooth, no sharp aluminum edges or even any sort of milling marks.  The color is an even and durable semi-gloss black.

That being said, I will be up front right here and now and say that this mount is not really made for the person that wants to flip back and forth between iron sights and a scope mount.  It is designed more for the person that wants to sporterize or semi-sporterize one of these rifles without having to drill and tap into their receivers. 

That being said, okay, what makes this mount different?  That’s simple one.  It has no screws.  Eh? You say.  Right.  It has NO screws.  Unlike other no gunsmith type, no tapping and drilling type mounts out there, this one actually slides ONTO the barrel and takes the place of the rear sight.  The key to its success is the heating properties of aluminum.

In a quick nutshell, you remove the front and rear sights of the rifle, heat up this mount and slide it on, aligning it with the pin that you popped out to remove the rear sight.  Done.  When the mount cools, or better said, as the mount cools, the metal contracts and “seals” itself to the barrel.  Pretty neat?

I decided to try out the mount on my “new” 1943 Mk III Lithgow that I had just gotten from Centerfire Systems.  The story on this rifle is that it came to me and it “seemed” to be clean, but after tearing it completely apart, I realized that I would not (could not) be so lucky, and had to brake cleaner blast it (thanks Mark!) to remove dried grease AND loosen up what was left of the black paint coating.  Some people would consider this sacrilege, but really, there was not much paint left on the rifle.  There was a lot of dried grease/dirt still left after the brake cleaner blasting that I ended up with the tooth brush and dental pick getting into the nooks and crannies of every screw and hole. 

The wood was pretty typical for a mil surp, a few dents, a few dings, a repair at the heel.  I decided to refinish the stock while I was waiting for the scope that I ordered.  The technique that I used is a modification of the oven cleaner spray method.  I plan on dealing with that subject in a later article.

Please, realize that I think that the manufacturers and designers are going through some testing stages still, so again, take what I write here as MY experiences working with the mount.  The basic instructions that came with the mount are, well, basic enough.  Again, I am sure that there will be more details in later models.

The first steps are to remove the front and rear sights of the rifle.  As always, make sure the rifle is unloaded.  Better yet, remove the bolt all together.  The front sight on the Mk III is pinned in.  You punch the pin out pretty easy enough.  Then, using a brass punch, tap the back side (facing the shooter) about MIDWAY up on the sight, knocking it toward the muzzle.  Why MIDWAY up on the sight?  Turns out the front sight is mounted on a raised guide which not only aligns the front sight, but it also has the hole for where the pin goes through and locks the front sight on.

The rear sight has a pin that goes through it.  Knock that out and set it aside, you will need to use it again to put the scope mount on.  The Mk III rear sight also has a screw in the top of it (lift the sight leaf) that goes through the flat spring, rear sight base and into the barrel.  I knocked out the pin that holds in the rear sight leaf, removed the small screw and then removed the spring as well.  You probably do not have to do more than remove the screw only, but I wanted to clean under the spring anyway.

Now comes the tricky part.  My rear sight was “welded” on by dry grease, dirt and a bit of what appears to have been rust.  I tried being civil with it, dousing it with WD40 and knocking on it with a mallet, to no avail.  I looked and looked, thinking that the rear sight was welded or soldered on.  Nope, on indications of that.  Finally, I had to resort to…….the torch.  Actually, only a propane torch.

Using the propane torch, I gradually heated up the rear sight.  I do mean gradually.  I do not mean CHERRY red hot.  My thought was to soften up the hard grease that seemed to be binding up the sight.  A couple of hard wacks with the mallet and SHAZAM, off it came.  Sure enough, under the sight it was not only greasy and dirty, but the milling on both the sight and the barrel was rough.   I cleaned up the this area really well, like even resorting to using an Exacto knife to CUT the dried grease off when scrubbing did not seem to be going to well.  Finally, with the cleaning done, I was able to move on to the main event.

In their instructions, they say to either use an oven or a torch to heat up the aluminum mount.  In MY house, it is VERBOTEN to put anything but food into the oven.  So the torch it was (YEEEESSSSS!!!, high FIVE!!!).  Now, aluminum accepts heating up very easily, so you do not need to heat to a red hot temperature.  I used my oven mitts and heated it, concentrating on the band area of the mount, the part that actually wraps around the barrel.  Once I figured it was heat enough, I quickly (downside of rapid heating is, duh, rapid cooling) placed the mount on the barrel, sliding it down and aligned it as best I could.  I slid the mount down as far as it would go and wacked it a bit with the mallet.  Hmmmm….it went down fairly easily, but not far enough to align the holes on the mount to the hole in the barrel.  I had to warm the mount again a bit with the torch (leaving it on the barrel this time) and wack it a few times before I got to the point where the holes lined up.  Ah…aligning is a bear, BUT, remember those marks I had made?  They made the alignment much easier, and told me when the mount was in the same location as the original that I took off.

With a bit of smacking here and there, I got the mount to align to the barrel holes and parallel to the barrel.  I went to pop in the pin and….well, the pin was too big to go into the scope mount!  Okay, so I heated it up again a bit (a bit, in the sense that you could still touch the barrel without frying your finger tips just an inch from the aluminum) and, using the mallet, gave it a smart wack or two.  It popped right off.  Turns out that I had to drill out the pin holes in the mount with a 3/32” drill bit.  You have to remember to clean out the holes in the mount really well, including any burrs on the inside of the mount.  Back to heating it and mounting it to the barrel as before.

Finally, I was able to align the holes through and through.  The pin started through the mount easy enough, a bit harder to go through the barrel, but I finally did manage to get it set.  I wonder now, in looking back, if putting the pin back into the mount was really necessary, may be not.  I do not know.  Aligning the pin/holes was the hardest part of the whole experience.  Maybe if the mount was just a tad larger it would make aligning the holes easier and placing the mount of the barrel easier, but that would negate the benefits of the tightest fit of the aluminum once it cooled.

Once the mount was on, it was time to put the rifle back together.  Mind you, between the time I had STRIPPED the rifle to basic screws and parts and putting it back together again, it had been at least 2 weeks…enough time to FORGET what went where…but…of course, going to the surplusrifle.com web site and using the section on the Mk III (SMLE) rifle, it was more like putting together a jig saw puzzle with NUMBERED parts! 

Everything went together nicely.  Of course, if you were to sporterize the stock or change out the stock to a new one, this would be the time to fit it.  However, I was going to re use my standard stock.  In doing this, there is one part you will not be able to use.  There is a short section of wood between the rear sight and the receiver end of the barrel held on by clips.  This short section of wood will not fit with the mount in place and needs to be left off.

All in all, the lines of the MkIII look pretty good with this mount on it.  I was happy so far with the project and went to mount my new LER (Long Eye Relief) scope.  I had ordered a 2-7x32 LER Target Sports scope from CDNN.  At just under $50, it did not break the bank and seemed to have good enough reviews for the cost.  I had also ordered a set of the cheap steel rings as well.  The ONLY reason I ordered this scope and rings was cost.  YES!  There are much better scopes and rings (this would come back to haunt me) out there, but I did not want to spend the money on a scope.  Turns out the scope works really well and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to get a decent enough optics on their mil surp and not spend 3x the cost of the rifle! 

This particular LER scope is not one of the short ones.  Being a zoom it has the looks for a more traditional scope for length.  This was not an issue for the mount as there are numerous Weaver notches in the rail and it was easy enough to move the rings/scope to where it was at the correct eye distance for me.  It all looked nice and accomplished until my wife comes along and, rather nonchalantly, asks me if the scope is supposed to be  crooked.  Eh?  Stepping back from the rifle, sure enough, the scope was aimed slightly to the right.  Being that I was working with it up close and personal, I basically missed that little fact!  Oh man….  There are no adjustments to be made on the mount itself, it just slides onto the barrel and is locked in place by the cross pin.  I guess anything could happen, so I decided to go to the range and see if I could get the scope to sight in regardless.

I loaded up some .303 British (180g Sierra over 40g IMR 4064) and headed to the range.  Turns out that we were in the midst of sight in days at the range, so I could not change out to nice clean targets, so you will have to bear the ugly shot up target pictures. 

We quickly bore sighted the rifle.  Already, it was pretty much a fact that there would not be enough windage adjustment in the scope to take care of the mis-alignment. And, once we started firing, it was really evident.  The grouping of the shots were excellent, the mount performed excellent as well.  There was NO loosening of the mount or the scope during any of the shooting.  It was rock steady and not going to move anywhere.  

To correct the problems of lack of windage adjustment, you could put shims on the rings, but I would think that a set of Burris Signature Rings and a Pos-Align Insert kit would take care of issues of offset receiver/barrel combos (which I think is the issue that is going on with my No1). See the article by Mark Trope: Staying Level and Centered.

After firing, I reversed the procedure and removed the mount and replaced the original front and rear sight.  Installing the original rear sight was not nearly as hard as taking it off, owing to the fact that the barrel was now rust/grease free.  Plus, there is the hole on TOP of the barrel to help line things up with as well as my registration marks.  The rifle is completely back to its original configuration now.

In any case, the initial testing of the mount passed for three of the four tests that I set out to do, that is, the mount was easy enough to install that most anyone can do it, secondly, the mount is stable and does not move and is solid.  The issue of the scope not lining up is an issue of this rifle, not of the mount, so I am not going to hold that one as a failure of the mount.  And, finally, I was able to return the rifle back to the original configuration.

At this time, the designers of the mount are working out the availability of the mount and are now selling it direct under an Ebay Outlet at:

http://stores.ebay.com/lynlou-scopemounts_W0QQsspagenameZl2QQtZkm

Their address is 7040 Canard Rd, Westlake, OR  97493, email is lynlou2002@harborside.com.  

I think that the mount is a solid more permanent solution for a no drill and tap, no gunsmith type mount for the SMLE and Ishapore rifle and shows much promise to fill this niche.