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I think we are going full circle here! The early experience with merely form fitted,like the Smithson, without a clamping arrangement to take up slack like Weavers, Talleys or Warnes left the Germans with a deep mistrust. Dovetail "Aufschubmontagen" = slide on mounts were only regarded as suitable for low-recoil rifles like .22lr to .222 Rem as maximum. On such rifles simple clamp-on mounts are sufficient, so the importance of a recoil shoulder like FI the Weaver cross bar was forgotten. As any country gunsmith was trained to fit a claw-mount and as up to about 1960 the mounting was not charged if you bought rifle and/or scope from your local gunsmith, all other mounting systems were forgotten. When I made my Jägerprüfung = hunters course and test in 1964 only two scope mounts were taught: the slide-on for smallbores and the claw mounts for real hunting rifles.Only when the cost of handwork was climbing up in the 1970s, other mounts were thought about. OK, companies like EAW also made satisfactory dovetail-base top- and side-mounts, these were mainly made for export, rspecially to Scandinavian countries and Britain. So you see EAW side mounts more often on rifles imported from there then on domestic guns. I still remember when side-swing mounts, first by Triebel (not to be confused with the pre-war Suhl Triebel claw mounts!), then by EAW and Steyr, were regarded as radical novelties. You often encounter Brno ZKK rifles in Germany with dovetailed square bridges and peepsight milled through to accomodate claw-mount bases, and I have yet to see a 1960s Mannlicher-Schoenauer with the swing mount Steyr offered, these are invariably mounted with three-legged claw mounts. Nowadays swing mounts are the German standard, I myself am regarded as somehow exotic using dovetail Warne rings even on my .416 Rigby.

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