DFOOSKING - Great find brother! The Balvar is not a turd. It is a relic from days gone by and a very fine optic. I have two of them. One is mounted on one of my fine Winchester 52's. I often compete in 22 BR matches using a 52 wearing either a 20x Unertl or the 6-24x Balvar. When I first got my Balvar, I mounted it on the rifle and bore sighted it off sandbags on my back porch. I had placed a empty soup can at 50y to aim at and was stunned when I found that I could read the fine print on the label from 50y.
The Balvar is one of the clearest scopes ever. A little bit of Trivia: In the 50's and 60's, Bausch & Lomb was hired to make the large camera lenses for the super powered aerial spy cameras used first on the U2 and then the SR71 spy planes. They had access to a rare deposit of nearly pure quartz sand that was used to make glass of exceptional optical clarity. From time to time one of those bigass lenses had a flaw in it and rather than scrap them, they cut them up to make rifle scopes, namely the Balvar product line. It is like using a scope that was built using recovered alien technology. It was also one of the most expensive scopes in the world at that time. At $240 ea in 1956, for the price of one Balvar you could buy nearly three of the top of the line premier Winchester Model 52's which were selling for $88.50 in 1956. Yes, it is impractical and clunky for use in the field but for target work at one distance like 50y, it is as good as they get.
In the 60's B&L also made a slightly more modern 2.5-8x Bavar variable hunting scope. You could buy three pre-64 Model 70's for the price of one. I mounted one of those onto my 1963 vintage FN Browning Mauser style 308 and took it on Safari in Africa last year and it performed flawlessly. Made five one-shot kills with it on that trip. By the end of the hunt, my African PH and his lead tracker were both in love with it. The clarity of that scope is every bit on par with a Swarovski. Bought it for $60 on Ebay, lol.
Pics below: 1.) FN Browning 308 with Balvar 2.5-8x. 2.) Winchester 52B Named "Pretty Gurl" wearing Balvar 6-24x
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