Parts 1 and 2 of The Rifle, BYP & Pistol are up at CTKA

[David Josephs]

http://www.ctka.net/2015/JosephsRiflePart1.pdf
http://www.ctka.net/2015/JosephsMOTimeline.pdf

The Rifle and of course the Money Order make for a variety of scenarios reported in the Evidence as to where and by whom the PMO was found.
The Timeline attempts to give you a sense of what was happening around the country and when.

http://www.ctka.net/2015/JosephsBYP.pdf
Somewhat complimentary to Jeff Carter's great BYP series.


"The Pistol" should be out in a few weeks. I find the story we know conflicts with the evidence related to who had this pistol and which pistol Drain takes with him that night.

From what we can tell sofar this pistol is COVERED with initials: HILL, McDONALD, BENTLEY, CARROLL,& BAKER all put their initials on that pistol.

In all of the evidence I have not found a single photo of these men's initials on that portion of the pistol.

Any help out there?

[Bob Prudhomme]

Good job, Dave!

[Bob Prudhomme]

I've got a few more interesting bits of info about the rifle and its scope you might find interesting.

When FBI SA Robert A. Frazier, the FBI's firearms expert, received C2766, he and two of his colleagues took it to a range to test fire it. No correction to the mounting of the scope was made prior to these tests. However, the Army was next to receive this rifle for testing. They found it was necessary to add shims to the scope mount before they could test fire it.

Looking at this photo below, can anyone tell me where shims would be added to the scope mount to correct an elevation problem (rifle shooting so high there was not enough adjustment room on the elevation knob)? Also, can anyone spot one extremely rare feature of the way this scope is mounted, and possibly tell me why the gunsmith chose to do this?



This is a closeup of the scope and mount on the rifle C2766. The barrel is to the left in this photo, and the butt of the stock is to the right.

[Albert Doyle]

I skimmed it. Looks like an extremely thorough job to be absorbed in a good comfortable reading.

[Peter Lemkin]

I get a report that all of those webpages are not available...don't understand why.

[Drew Phipps]

I'll play along, Bob.

I'm not a gun guy, but the only things I can see is that the scope is "side mounted" (to allow the use of the iron sights on the barrel, but I don't think that's rare) and the fact that only 2 of the three mounting holes have mounting screws in them. You could speculate that 2 screws, as opposed to three, would allow the possibility of adjusting the scope slightly by using the mounting bracket, if the holes in the mounting bracket were slightly larger than the mounting screws. If you had three screws you would not be able to adjust it much, if at all.

The only other thing I can think of is that the gunsmith is lazy or in a hurry.

Given that there were 2 possibilities for scoping the rifle, Klein's and Ryder's, can we distinguish the true gunsmith by the use of 2 not 3 mounting screws?

[David Josephs]

Thank you for the kind words... Especially you Bob... thanks for looking it over for accuracy.

The PMO stories are amazing no? Showing Holmes for who he was and what he did and then to learn about what the SS and the Records people did...

If anyone needs, go ahead and PM me an email address and I'll send the pdf's directly.

Back to work on the Pistol...
DJ

I get a report that all of those webpages are not available...don't understand why.

http://www.ctka.net/2015/JosephsRiflePart1.pdf

http://www.ctka.net/

Regardless of whether you link from here or from CTKA?

The document is a PDF - if that changes anything.

[Bob Prudhomme]

I'll play along, Bob.

I'm not a gun guy, but the only things I can see is that the scope is "side mounted" (to allow the use of the iron sights on the barrel, but I don't think that's rare) and the fact that only 2 of the three mounting holes have mounting screws in them. You could speculate that 2 screws, as opposed to three, would allow the possibility of adjusting the scope slightly by using the mounting bracket, if the holes in the mounting bracket were slightly larger than the mounting screws. If you had three screws you would not be able to adjust it much, if at all.

The only other thing I can think of is that the gunsmith is lazy or in a hurry.

Side mounting the scope on this rifle had nothing to do with allowing a shooter to be able to use the iron sights. It was side mounted for two simple reasons. 1. If mounted in the normal fashion, the scope would be directly over the magazine, and in the way of loading the six round en bloc clip into the magazine. 2. When retracting the bolt, the handle of the bolt would run into a scope mounted directly over the receiver.

Making the holes in a scope mount, such as the one on C2766, larger than the screws going through them, or making the holes vertically oblong, is a very bad idea, for the simple fact the slightest bump has the potential to move the scope mount on the rifle. Even a tiny movement of a few thousandths of an inch of the mount can throw the scope way off and make the rifle completely inaccurate. I really do not believe anyone would be foolish enough to make a scope mount with this in mind, although the middle hole on the base of the scope mount does look suspiciously oblong.



Suffice it to say that if the holes were larger than the screws or if the holes were oblong, there is a very good chance that even the firing of a few shots would be enough to move the scope mount, and I am quite sure that Oswald, if he practiced as much as some believe, would have quickly become aware that his scope was incapable of being sighted in. This once again begs the obvious question, why did he not remove the useless scope and mount before bringing the rifle to the TSBD?

Getting back on course, though, the answer to the question is there is no place to put shims that would correct for elevation. Placing a shim between the scope mount and one of the two mounting holes will only move that end of the scope sideways, not up and down. The sad reality of side mounting a scope, and attaching the mount with screws placed horizontally into the receiver, is that if the gunsmith accidentally drills one of the screw holes slightly off there is absolutely nothing that can be done to correct this situation, outside of drilling a new hole.

The very rare thing about the way this scope was mounted is the fact the scope had to be turned 90° in its rings to allow the en bloc clip to get past the scope. Normally, a scope is mounted as seen below:



The elevation knob (up and down adjustment) is on top and the windage knob (side to side adjustment) is on the right side. We are looking at the scope diagram above from the same side as the photo below.



As can be seen, the scope has been turned 90° to the left, as the windage knob would get in the way of loading the en bloc clip. This must have been very confusing for anyone attempting to adjust this scope while sighting it in. The windage knob would now be the elevation knob, and vice versa. How would a person know which way to turn these knobs to get the desired movement of the cross hairs in the scope? Did Klein's include notes with these rifles, explaining the odd scope mounting and how to deal with it?

Considering also how extremely difficult it is to sight in a side mounted scope, and Oswald's complete lack of experience in sighting in rifle scopes, I do not believe this scope ever was properly sighted in.

[Albert Doyle]

It was probably mounted on the fly by CIA connected people setting up Oswald.

[Bob Prudhomme]

It was probably mounted on the fly by CIA connected people setting up Oswald.

Well, I don't know about that, Albert. This was definitely the way Klein's was mounting scopes on Carcanos, and their gunsmith immediately recognized his work when he saw a photo of C2766.

Even if they were not regularly mounting scopes on the short rifles, and only mounting scopes on the carbines, the receivers on short rifles and carbines (in fact, on all models of Carcanos) are identical, and the mounting process would be the same.