Weavers Wore Many Hats
After transitioning from making license plates to making riflescopes in the early 1930’s, the W.R. Weaver Company really was pretty single-minded, dominating the riflescope market in America for decades. For much of that time, the competition wasn’t even close. Many of those years Weaver produced more scopes than all of the competition combined. They truly built an iconic American sporting brand and because of the robust quality of their all steel designs, it’s a brand that will live on in infamy with the vintage gun crowd. In that market we expect that they will once again outpace all other brands.
All of this ingenuity however did create a lot of hats, or rather caps, in the company. In 1949 the company began covering their adjustment knobs with caps, rather than the previous 1933-1948 designs, which included exposed adjustment caps.
A Weaver KV scope, for instance includes two different caps on the same scope, one of which are found on any other scope. The V-8’s external adjustment knobs are capped with another cap, which is unique to that scope. In ‘49 their first cap included external threads, a few years later they transitioned to internal thread caps and then it really got crazy with multiple cap designs even crossing over on the same scope, likely done just to burn up prior model cap inventory.
So, for the vintage enthusiast requiring period correctness on his/her collection, this presented a problem. And for the Weaver scope lover that still simply uses vintage Weaver scopes because of their stubborn accuracy and reliability, those caps are easy to lose, and thus, need to be replaced.
Thus, here at Vintage Gun Scopes, we decided to create a new resource for vintage fans in order to easily select the proper cap for your vintage Weaver. Our cap genealogy can be found here: https://www.vintagegunscopes.com/cap-geneology
Further, for those of you who may have “flipped your lid” into the snow, off the cliff, out of the tree, into the lake, etc., we are offering most caps for sale in our store under the new “Caps” tab. Here you will find both new/refurbished and used caps for most Weaver scopes from 1949-1984.
