Vickers tripods

[Foggster]

 When I bought a Vickers back in the 90's , I was lucky enough to get one with a stamped and dated tripod . Stamped V.S.M 1915 . Are dated tripods rare as i've never seen another ?

[303man]

All I have seen are dated, mine is one of the WW2 Australian ones.

[Pete_C]

16 hours ago, Foggster said:

 When I bought a Vickers back in the 90's , I was lucky enough to get one with a stamped and dated tripod . Stamped V.S.M 1915 . Are dated tripods rare as i've never seen another ?

All tripods are dated but Great War dated tripods are certainly rarer than WW2 examples.
To tick all of the boxes, ideally they should be matching throughout, I.e. GW dates on the crosshead, the legs, traversing dial and elevating wheel, and crosshead and legs should have matching serial numbers. I used to own an example with all of the above except for a 1924 dated traversing dial - and which in hindsight I shouldn’t have sold, sigh….

Pete

 

 

[Foggster]

Mine has matching GW date on legs and crosshead , 1931 on Trav. Dial and 1929 on the brass mount .

I know of 3 friends whose tripods have no dates on the legs or crosshead ! Strange .

[Chasemuseum]

With the "Australian" ones, we had a lot of Vickers material in War Reserve. In the early 70s (under the Labor Govt) we did a big cull. Several hundred guns were sent to Lithgow (reported as about 600 but not confirmed) for "Factory Thorough Refurbishment" (FTR) being fully refurbished and prepared as full kits - guns, tripods, spares boxes and all the other material required to place them immediately into combat. These were then returned to War Reserve and everything else was destroyed.  

 

The FTR guns were then taken out of war reserve in 1988. A small number were rendered deactivated and distributed within Australia and the remainder sold on the international market and went to the UK.

 

As part of the FTR program, the objective in the 70s was to produce functional weapons for the army. So they had no interest in dates. Hence WW2 tripods were happily matched to WW1 guns. That remained the way they were sold in 1988. The only attempt to match tripods to guns occurred in the UK in 1989/1990 when they were in private ownership. There is no data available on how many of the guns were WW1 or WW2 and the same with the tripods.

 

As further background, the Vickers had been on issue to school cadets through the 1950s and 1960s. They had received minimal maintenance for over two decades. So when they were withdrawn to war reserve, most of the guns were compromised by lots of worn out parts. So the FTR program of the mid 70s was a legitimate exercise as too many of the guns in war reserve were effectively worn out and unusable. It was all about cost. The FTR tried to recover and use as many unused parts as possible rather than putting parts back into production.  

[Foggster]

Very interesting . My weapon has MA and OA stamped parts on it , it is aussie green and there is a greasy Lithgow docket in the transit chest . I bought it in 1997 . £450 at the time . The mount and tripod came in a transit box too . Nice to know the history behind it . Thanks

[Mark Finneran]

For your viewing pleasure.

 

[Mark Finneran]

One of mine before I moved onto German MG.