Indians For Guns

I think it's time to finally set my doubts in order

there are air rifle scopes, and the are centrefire scopes. i believe that due to differing recoil characteristics, they are not interchangable. for a while i thought rimfires could survive with either....till i discovered rimfire scopes as a seperate entity!

i understand that a rimfire would not need the same level of magnification as a centrefire shooting post 100 m would. but honestly, is there a difference? would i be able to interchange a centrefire/airgun scope on a rimfire rifle?

come to think of it, what scopes do the learned members have on their rimfires? and what made you choose them?

anand

I hate computers! Almost finished typing a reply and then the bloody thing switched off.

would i be able to interchange a centrefire/airgun scope on a rimfire rifle?

Most definitely. A rimfires lack of recoil will ensure that the scope isn't damaged. However, the converse, a RF rated scope on a CF or AG may prove to be an expensive mistake.

Magnification is determined by the primary purpose the rifle is to be used for. A CF rifle meant for Afrian dangerous game hunting may have a scope with a variable mag of 1.5 to 5. Whilst a CF rifle used for bench rest shooting at 600 to 1000 yards may have a scope with a minimm mag of 24x.

Similarly a rimfire used in the U.K. for long distance vermin control may have quite a bit of mag. I know of many who use a scope with a variable mag of 6.5-20x. A rimfire bench rest shooter may also use the same if the rules permit even though their max range is 100 yards. .17HMR is not permitted on U.K. ranges. However, someone who stalks with a RF may have something like a 2-7x or 3-9x or even a 4-12x variable mag scope.

I use a Bushnell Elie 3200 2-7x32 on my rimmie. A friend of mine bought a Weaver 2-7x32 (or was it 28?) rimfire scope for his and not only is it cheaper than mine but brighter as well and just as well made. Not that the 3200 is any slouch. It's a very good scope infact. My reason for the 2-7x was based on price and availability at the time and I did not want a big scope on a tiny rimmie. It's sufficient for the 50 metres paper-punching and plinking I do at the range.

Mack The Knife

Mack The Knife,

so, would the converse be true? will i be able to use an AG/CF scope on a rimfire and get away with it?

anand

so, would the converse be true? will i be able to use an AG/CF scope on a rimfire and get away with it?

???

I have already answered this....

Or have I misunderstood?

Mack The Knife

On a very easy leve of understanding, without going into things like twilight factor and light index, illumination factor, and reciever / pupil ratio etc. etc,

For a rimfire, say .22 LR a fair scope would be 4 x 32 or 4 x 40.

Varioscopes of 3-9 x 32, 40, 42 or 50 would also be fine.

Such a scope would be available for Dhs. 250 or Rs. 3,000. They work perfectly well with .22 like BRNO model 1, 2, Marlin, BSA or Krico.

A model best suited to quote would be Tasco Proghorn, Bushnell Banner, Bushnell Sporstsman or similar offering from reputed makers like.

Simmons
Vivitar
Nikon
Redfield
Baush & Loumb

Or even the very reputed makes like Carl Zeiss and Sarvoski if someone cares to spend Rs. 35,000 on a scope with illuminated reticles.

To tell the truth, even the 4 x 20 scope made by Diana which is retailed at US $ 10 or about Rs. 550 works fine with .22 LR upto 70 - 75 yards.

Then from personsal experience, I have gifted at least 7 Norconia scopes, 3-9x x 40 costing Rs. 3,000 each to friends in India. Lets see what .22 LRs

Brno Model 2
IOF .22 x 2 people
BSA - x 2 people
Anchungz
Marlin

All of them are working perfectly.

These Norconia Telescopes are sold at Al Seyad Hunting Equipment , Dubai for Dhs. 250 to 275 by the dozen everyday.

You never gifted me ??? This time u are going to bring one for me.

Danish

"so, would the converse be true? will i be able to use an AG/CF scope on a rimfire and get away with it?"

sorry Mack The Knife , guess it's the old foot in the mouth disease again.

btw , how have you secured the scope to your IOF rimfire? does it come with scope rails?

anand

hamiclar01 wrote:btw , how have you secured the scope to your IOF rimfire? does it come with scope rails?

Hi Anand,

The IOF rimmie does come with dovetail grooves which will take an ordinary air-rifle scopemount.

In my case it is a two piece, high mount for 1" dia. scope tube called Pro Mounts. These are made in England by Sportsmatch.

Herewith a couple of pics to illustrate the point.






I chose high mounts as I do use the irons as well, so the objective bell needed to clear the rear sight. In the past I used to have a scope with a larger objective bell - Tasco Varmint 2.5-10x40 mil-dot.

If anyone reading this wants to put high mounts then you will also have to raise the cheek piece appropriately, unless you have a long neck.

The following pic shows a home made cheek piece raiser.



Since the scope is removed every now and then and ammo is at a premium, I invested in a torque wrench to nip up the scopemount hex bolts to the same torque (6 N-m) everytime. This puts me within 1/4" to 1/2" of the original zero everytime.

I also use the torque wrench to tighten the action bolts (have changed these to hex bolts) to the same setting (5.5 N-m).

Mack The Knife

thanks for the pics and info Mack The Knife. feeds my barely concealed desire for world domination ...sorry, errrr......interest into 0.22 rimfires.

btw, do you have any problems with the bolt movement....does the scope get in your way?

so the torque screw means you don't have to rezero the scope every time you put it on? and have you ever had a problem shooting high, with the high mounts you use?

anand

btw, do you have any problems with the bolt movement....does the scope get in your way?

No, not in the least.

so the torque screw means you don't have to rezero the scope every time you put it on?

Yes, that's the general idea. However, I do use two shots to get spot on.

and have you ever had a problem shooting high, with the high mounts you use?

No. Haven't tried it under well under 25 yards, if that is what you are getting at. It is usually zeroed at 50 metres and is more or less hitting centre at 25 yards/metres.

Mack The Knife

Gentlemen,

I recently worked with Johan to find a suitable scope for a friend in Pakistan who has an incredibly beautiful and mint Brno Model2 Luxe, which, though it must have been amde in the late 1970s, looks like it came off the gunmaker's bench yesterday.

On my wife's little Marlin 60 (which I mostly shoot) I mounted a Bushnell 3-9x32 scope, first on Bushnell's own rings and then on Millets when I realised how crappy the Bushnell rings were.

Since my friend wanted to use a really good scope, I took Johan's advice and did the rounds of some of the gun shops around here and he finally decided on a Leupold 2-7x28 VX-1 riflescope. This scope alone cost more than my wife's rifle and scope did together, but one look thrugh it and the quality was obvious. It was at least as good as the Japanese stuff available if not better and vastly cheaper though, of course, not as good as the premium European brands like Schmidt und Bender, Swarovski or the recently defunct (and possibly among the best) Pecar.

Redfield today is just a division of another company - they no longer make super premium scopes. Other US brands like Burris, Simmons etc all offer low priced alternatives but they do not approach Leupold's quality. The Chinese stuff is crap. I remember when my father's business imported Chinese rough blanks in the early 1980s when the import of raw materials for the optical industry was allowed. They cost about 30% less than stuff from the Eastern European factories from which we used to import blanks from at the time. The problem was that breakage of the Chinese blanks was almost 50% higher. Not quite the stuff you want if you;re using an air rifle where piston recoil is likely to be brutal on the scope, nor, for that matter, on a using rimfire. As far as their optical quality is concerned, just three years ago, before I moved to the USA, most leading opticians in Chennai would have signs over their showcases telling customers that they did not sell any Chinese products. This might not be related to riflescopes, but I have seen too many Chinese photochromatic lenses which either developed two different colours on the sme lens when exposed or changed to different levels of darkness when exposed in full. The Chinese have a policy of using the shoddiest quality control processes in manufacturing whatever they manufacture. If you;re not likely to buy a Chinese air rifle, then give Chinese made scopes - even if they are labelled under an American or Japanese brand - a wide berth. With ammunition costing what it does in India, it is not worth wasting money on crappy scopes that would make sighting difficult at the very least, and impossible at worst.

Cheers!

Mehul,

I beg to differ on two counts. The first being the Leup you mention. My friend has the same scope mounted on a Win 70 in .30-06 and to be honest the Bushnell 3200 Elite beats it on clarity and brightness, with the cheaper Weaver 2-7x28 Rimfire scope being better than both. Ofcourse, these are one off incidents and I have heard conflicting reports about similar scopes but thought I would mention it all the same.

The one thing I do like about Leupold are the positive reports from customers who have had to use Leupold's customer service.

The second point I wouldn't completely agree with is our opinion about Chinese optics. By most accounts they have improved a lot in the past year or two, though you still get the lower budget end rubbish as well.

A case in point would be the Nikko Stirling Platinum Nighteater 2-10x40 or something or the other I asked my friend to get me from Oz. The scope looked very well finished as I lifted it out of the box but my heart sank when I read Made In China on the box. However, I did use it very briefly (needed the cash, rather than there being anything wrong with the scope) on my rimfire and I honestly could not fault it. For a rimfire, such a scope would be fine.

If I am not mistaken, Grumpy uses quite a few Hawke branded scopes and it is quite possible these are now being manufactured or assembled in China rather than in the Philipines as was the norm for such scopes by Asia Light Opticals.

What's your taken on the Nikon range, particularly the lower end?

Mack The Knife

Mack The Knife,

Perhaps, your friend was unfortunate in getting a bad piece or a damaged one. Your friend's Leupold may have suffered frame damage and have had it's gas let out or it could have developed fungus on the lens bonding material. Buyers pay significantly more for Leupolds here than they do for virtually any other American brand only because they are convinced that the Leupolds are vastly superior. I did check out a few scopes at both Gander Mountain as well as at Bass Pro and there was no doubt in my mind that the Leupolds that I saw were vastly superior to Bushnell, Burris, Simmons and other American brands.

As far as lens material is concerned, all crown glass (Refractive Index 1.523) is made of aluminium borosilicate and The blending of the various materials is an art that the Chinese do not seem to have mastered. Also, almost all scopes (with the exception of those coming from Russia) are vacuum coated with Magnesium Fluoride. More compact scopes are made using lenses of a higher refractive index of 1.6, 1.7, 1.8 or 1.9 and the Russians have a proprietary material called Fianit which has the highest refractive index of any synthetic material today 2.2. Now, in order to minimise reflections from a lens surface you need to have a coating that is of an RI that is the square root of the lens material in order to eliminate reflection completely and allow more light through. More light through the lens = better clarity. So, the compromise of using multiple coatings of Magnesium Fluoride on different kinds of glass. The Russians, since they have lens materials of very high RI bond two lenses of different RIs together to achieve this effect. They also have a proprietary process of using a liquid dipped coating process over crown lenses which the rest of the world has still not managed to figure out.

To cut a long story short, if recent Chinese scopes have begun to offer better quality, it is very likely that the Chinese have been buying the lenses from other countries, already coated and then mounting them into tubes made in China. I hecked with my cousin in Chennai and the fact is that Chinese lens material has not improved much over the last decade or so.

The Japanese make good scopes, no doubt at all, reasonably priced and with good optical quality. That said, I would compare them with the mid range East and Central European scopes like Meopta and not with the top of the line German or Russian ones which are definitely superior. I don't think it is a coincidence that the finest scopes available in the USA from companies like US Optics, ATN and others all use Russian lenses - if you check their websites, they invariably mention that they get their lenses from Eastern Europe without mentioning the country concerned. There is an element of silly nationalism that keeps the Americans from admitting that their snipers use scopes with lenses from what was formerly described by them as the Evil Empire. It would take the Americans very little time to use Japanese lenses if they wanted to use them. The fact that the US army uses Russian lenses almost exclusively in it's high tech stuff, especially 3rd and 4th generation night vision scopes, shows what the best sources for lenses are.

Sadly, two of the finest scope manufacturers are now effectively dead. Docter Optik were bought by Zeiss after the German reunification and their top of the line Aspheric scope with an etched glass reticle was discontinued forever by Zeiss for reasons that only they know. Aspheric lenses, because of their profile, almost eliminate peripheral aberrations though the same aspheric profile makes mounting them difficult because giving the edge a profile that fits into a groove introduces a prism effect and negates the advantage of the aspheric profile somewhat. Docter had found the perfect way to make these scopes though they offered them mostly in an 8x56 format with a 30mm tube and made a very few - I have heard though am not sure of this - as variable power scopes. These days Simmons in the US make a cheap Aspheric scope called the Aetec series though I have no idea how good or bad they are. The other top company that closed down very recently were Pecar in Berlin when the owners of the building where they were located decided to evict them from the premises. The British realised how good Pecar scopes were when they used them on their L42A1 Enfield sniper rifles even during the cold war. I am really surprised that no one - not even wealthy Indian companies - have thought of buying Pecar, hiring their highly experienced worers and continuing the name. It would be as prestigious as takeover as the steel plants that the Tatas and Mittals have bought, for anyone who has the money.

BTW my father's business were agents for Metro Optical's lenses for India for a long time - they make scopes under the Meopta brand. We later started buying rough blanks from the BC Rubin Russian plant at Lytkarino, the same plant that supplies coated lenses to the top rung US military and tactical scope manufacturers. They later switched to buying cheaper lenses (of poorer quality IMO) from Poland after a Polish plant was bought by Corning France and Corning started marketing the lenses actively in India. I have visited most of the East and West European glass manufacturers, hence my experience with scopes even though I personally prefer shooting without them.

Cheers!

Perhaps, your friend was unfortunate in getting a bad piece or a damaged one. Your friend's Leupold may have suffered frame damage and have had it's gas let out or it could have developed fungus on the lens bonding material

.

A bad 'un? Perhaps. However, it isn't damaged. Never heard of it misting up and when I last saw it in Feb 2006, I don't recall seeing fungus on the glass.

I have only looked through three Leupolds to date. The one mentioned above, another that belongs to the chap who runs Indian Angler and the third being Sat's.

The first two did not impress me in the least and whilst Sat's was good, it definitely wasn't superlative. What I did find to be an absolute cracker was an old Lyman Alaskan (I think) that he has on his M70.

Whilst I may be wrong, I personally view the Americans penchant for Leupold scopes as a case of patriotism mixed with a fair amount of follow the herd mentality.

This post just reminded me of a question I have been meaning to ask for sometime. Why do some scopes have a light yellowish golden tinge to the sight picture? I have noticed this on an old Swarovski and a brand new Kahles. The latter was more of a light yellowish brown.

Mack The Knife