Nice. I have pre-64 in a marksman stock (that was hacked up by someone to shoot palma) that I'd love to have turned into one of those. Biggest problem I've found is finding the correct stock for the build.
I bought the model 70 refinished the stock with tongue oil and GAP set up the bedding, barrel change and sight mounts,tuned the trigger and re-blued it. It's fun to pull out when you first shoot with someone. They kind of scratch their head at first expecting you to pull out the AI.
What I never understood about this era of sniper rifle is why would they went with what appears (to me) to be a much more fragile design of a scope than what they were using in WWII.
These Lymans and Unertls look as fragile as a museum piece, compared to the smaller, internal adjustment scopes of WWII.
Just looking at that, I'd imagine any rough bump on a rock or tree branch would set off the adjustments.
Simple...Accuracy is Repeatability. You're trained to never bump or break your weapon system...you might snap your back when you fall...but the weapon never got hurt...
Most times I see weapons from the sandbox from any branch, they are completely beat to shit.
Philosophy is nice, but practice is another thing. It seems quite dangerous to put a delicate piece of equipment on your rifle and trust the Marine to take extra special care of it while in the heat of battle and throughout their deployment.
In fact, I just came up with the perfect example- read all the proving requirements and tests for the USMC scopes nowadays- they try to destroy those things before ever making a final decision. Not the most efficient approach if the prevailing SOP were "take extra special care of it".
All I'm saying is, if I were to be in the thick of battle, I'd rather have this:
I used to own one of those externally-adjusted Unertl scopes.
While they might have been somewhat mechanically fragile - you didn't want to beat them up - they were <span style="font-style: italic">extremely</span> reliable, more so than any scope with internal adjustments I have owned since.