Optics



I figure this is probably one of the most ignored aspects of shooting. Folks will sit around and talk for hours about reloading... debating over which powder produces the perfect burn rate for what grain of bullet in what caliber... People will talk about glass beading barrels.. or floating barrels.. or bull barrels... People will talka bout B.O.S.S. systems that tune that barrel...

And then... after all this minutia.... after wringing every ounce of accuracy out of their rifle... they go and throw a cheap scope on it. It bugs me to no end to see a $1000 rifle with a $70 scope.

Oh... I understand.. you just spent every dime you had on your new ultra bad rifle. You ain't got a lot left, and you aren't interested in saving up for another several months... so you buy a cheap one... just to make do until you do save up... but then you never actually get around to replacing it...

And that thousand dollar rifle is suddenly no more accurate than a 40 dollar scope. That sucks boys.

Now... maybe the old addage of spending just as much on your scope as you did on your rifle is a little out-dated.... because the price of scopes has come down.... and the quality of scope that you get for 500 bucks is on a totally different scale than the quality of rifle you get for that money.

But you should at least be spending half.

$500 bucks will get you a helluva rifle from Savage. It will be a 1 MOA firearm. A $250 scope... be it Leopold or Nikon or even Tasco will complete your rig like you won't believe.

Believe me... once you've used a good scope you know the difference. I used to have this old Redfield scope on my Savage model 99. It was a range finding scope... easily a 500 dollar deal. The scope was worth way more than I paid for the rifle that it came with.

Before that I never put much thought into scopes... scopes were scopes...

I know better now.

I reckon that's enough for now... maybe we'll hit some more specifics in the comments. I'm sure Res, Gregg, Bill, and JAC all have opinions on the matter.