1/128 Royal Navy Twin 40mm OQF MKXI Bofors on MKV Mount

1/128 Scale Royal Navy Twin 40mm OQF MKXI Bofors on MKV Mount as used by the Royal and Commonwealth Navies. This is a highly detailed part modelled using the Norman Ough plans and many reference photographs taken from surviving examples.

• 1x Highly detailed Mount
  
• Highly detailed and accurate part, modelled from plans and photographic reference from many surviving examples
  
• Details include: Training and Elevation Gear, Sighting Apparatus, Accurate Bofors guns, Handrails, Rivets, Hex nuts, electrical wiring, water cooling pipes and more
• Guns can be elevated as desired.
  

HISTORICAL DATA

Probably the best automatic cannon anti-aircraft weapon of World War II, Bofors guns of this type remained in service long after the war ended. This weapon was used on almost every major USA and UK warship of World War II and was a very potent AA gun.

These guns are recoil operated and use a monobloc barrel with a detachable breech ring, breech casing and automatic loader. The barrel was attached to the breech ring via an interrupted screw design. The breech block was a vertical sliding type which was developed from the Finspong (Swedish arms manufacturer of the 1800s) 57mm Ssk M/89B. Although often listed as being 60 calibers long, all guns from all nations except Japan were actually 56.25 calibers in length.

The British Army first showed interest in these guns in 1933 and placed an order for 100 of them in 1937. First Royal Navy shipboard use of air-cooled guns was in late 1941 aboard the battleships Prince of Wales and Nelson and on the cruisers Manchester and Erebus, although some ships had earlier been temporarily armed with Army air-cooled guns that had been “rescued” during the evacuation of the Norway invasion forces in 1940. The British water-cooled version was developed by copying the Dutch Hazemeyer mounting which had arrived in Britain in 1940 aboard the Dutch minelayer Willem van der Zaan. The first issue of locally produced water-cooled Bofors guns was to the Black Swan class sloop HMS Whimbrel in November 1942.

The total number of air-cooled guns built by Australia, Britain and Canada is not accurately known but was somewhere between 2,100 and 2,800 plus about 200 to 400 guns supplied from the United States. Water-cooled guns are better documented with 442 Mark IV and 342 Mark XI in service at the end of the war plus 786 water-cooled guns supplied by the USA. These USA weapons had been sent to Britain as a part of Lend-Lease or else were installed on ships refitted in USA shipyards.

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