Who made your optics?

https://sageratsafaris.com/category/optics-oem/

very interesting

I'm sure Miao Optics are the cat's whiskers!

We can wonder and debate about origin, lens quality and assembly but the ugly truth is that almost all scopes made now are, mechanically, rubbish.

Even Nightforce, which claims great recoil resistance and reliability (because they use best materials including a brass erector tube) still has that heavy tube hinged at the back and held by spring resistance at the front. Given time and enough work that setup is about 10 times more likely to give trouble than, say, one of Nickel or Hensoldt's old erector cells held in a dovetail.

quote:

Originally posted by sambarman338:
but the ugly truth is that almost all scopes made now are, mechanically, rubbish.

I'm wondering now whether you are as committed to the most reliable technology in everything you own, or just in rifle scopes?
Does your car for example have a timing belt or chain rather than the mechanically superior gear drive?
Is it water cooled or does it employ the more reliable system of air cooling?
I could probably go on for days, but the simple truth is that for 90% of uses, an erector tube scope of reasonable quality will last most shooters several lifetimes. Most of us don't throw our rifles off cliffs every second weekend, nor do we exclusively shoot light rifles in heavy calibers.

In 45 years of shooting with scoped rifles, all of them with erector tubes, I have had only one fail, and seen only two others fail, and all three those were cheap brands. One so cheap that it didn't even have a brand name on it.
I have in fact had more mechanical failures with iron sights than with scopes.

No, Peter, I don't obsess about many products, because most do get better. In the front of my book, however, you may have noticed certain analogies I made with SUVs, push-feed rifles and VHS video tapes.

Yes, many modern scopes will last long enough because of limited use and light calibres. However, because most of the rifles I use are of reasonably large bore and sometimes get carried much over many decades, I think scopes are more important than most stuff. Over my 57 years of scope use I've only had three or four pack up but that is probably because I use mostly reticle-movement models on centre-fires.

That modern scopes do give up prematurely can be seen in the AR epistles of Ray Atkinson, use of Tucker conversions by smaller-bore target shooters and the number of scope sellers who claim their offering has only been used on a 22LR.

The deficiencies of modern scopes are usually related to mechanical design but are not all to do with things breaking. I'll list a few of all kinds.

1. The damage from recoil/bump inertia on the articulated erector tube, between five and 10 times heavier than the little erector cell in reticle-movement scopes. Erector tubes are hinged in a way causing them to swing down reciprocally to a rifle rising in recoil, while the old erector cells were designed to move in a plane perpendicular to the barrel. That swinging erector tube may be damaged by crashing back against turret screws but the most common complaint appears to be broken erector springs. It is my guess that this happens most when the scope has been mounted badly, causing the spring(s) to be stressed laterally.

2. The tunnel vision (and loss of field of view) common to modern scopes - caused by use of heavy field stops to mask reflection from the erector tube when crooked from bad mounting. Even so, Burris has warned that bad mounting can still cause reflection haze when you shoot anywhere near the sun.

3. The increased chance that changing magnifications in a variable will, as the scope wears, cause changes in bullet impact. This can be avoided by choosing a scope with the reticle in the first focal plane, of course, but most modern scopes use SFP, something I've never seen in reticle-movement variables.

4. The increased chance of parallax problems in modern scopes caused by taking the erector tube near its limit of travel. This was pointed out by Burris in promotion of their Signature scope rings and, though their graphic made no sense to me, I accept their claim that excessive winding of the turrets can change the distance between the objective and erector lenses. The extra weight of articulated erector tubes also means they may well move longitudinally over time, creating more parallax problems.

5. The possibility that image-movement also causes focusing problems in scopes with higher power multiples. A friend who invents scopes in California has shown me scientific evidence that the parallax problem explained in 4. also affects focus - but maybe not in lockstep with the adjustment needed to fix the parallax. He claims that a 0.1mm movement between a front erector lens and the FFP becomes an 8mm shift at the SFP. So, this may explain part of the need for constant adjustment of the parallax knob in modern scopes (something I hate more than the time needed to set up an old-timey scope correctly).

6. Maximal twisting of the turret screws has been reported to distort the lens picture, causing shot groups to string out. Another charge is that it dulls the picture, said to be one of the reasons the March Genesis has all the adjustments outside of the main tube. I wonder whether these issues could have something to do with Carlos Hathcock preferring the long Unertl target scopes for his extreme-range sniping, despite the problems of carrying them while stalking his marks.

I don't mean any disrespect or offense here, but I feel your mind-set and preferences are based not only entirely on a very narrow set of circumstances but a narrow set of circumstances that are also fairly uncommon.

Furthermore the mindset disregards the technological improvements in materials and construction techniques of the last several decades.

Are erector tubes more fragile than image-moving scopes of the same era? Almost certainly. Can a reticle-movement scope be made more robust than an erector tube scope? Also almost certainly.

However, unless I am missing something they would be a very poor choice for long-range competition shooting.
In this genre, scopes are usually mounted on slanted bases quite deliberately, such that at 100m the adjustment is intentionally very close to the bottom of the available adjustment range of the telescope.

I myself have a scope mounted this way. All the adjustments on this scope are used often (zoom, parallax and adjusting turrets), because my training regime includes a lot of dry-firing at home, and the furthest range at which I can do this is about 15m. Thus the parallax and zoom need to be changed every time I go to the range. I have owned and have been using this telescope for 25 years, thousands of rounds of shooting and many times that of dry firing. The caliber is not an especially heavy-recoiling one, but it has enough recoil that coupled with the weight of the scope it has destroyed a couple of sets of otherwise well-regarded scope mounts. It has also been bumped and dropped and been in a pretty bad car accident, but it was also high quality and state of the art when made.

I certainly haven't noticed the effects claimed in your post on parallax, bad image quality or increased lens flare, even when operating through the very edges of the scopes' fixed lenses. I don't doubt that such effects are possible, but lens design has come a very long way in the time since image moving became less popular.

One of my other hobbies is photography. In this area, lens performance is a much bigger deal than in shooting, and it's relatively easy to find test results for almost all the performance characteristics of lenses, and it's almost always reported across the lens or at the very least in the centre, in the corners and at a middle point. Comparing lenses made just 15 years ago with those made today, the differences are quite staggering.

The spherical bearing has also almost certainly improved a lot in it's precision and durability. I have personally used such bearings (although no doubt considerably larger ones) to replace the old trunnion joints on racing car suspensions. In this application it carries 1/4 the car's weight when the car is stationary, and probably up to double the car's weight dynamically, and in the worst direction for the joint. These joints are not only far more accurate than the trunnions they replace, they also last longer and don't need lubrication!

For most uses, if the choice is between an unbreakable image-moving scope with 40 year old lenses and a modern erector-tube scope with good modern lenses and mechanical construction, I know I will be choosing a different scope than you.

As for the March Genesis, have you looked at one? While the design does away with the erector tube and some of it's drawbacks, it puts the entire outside of the scope (which must be several times the weight of an erector tube) on a similar spherical bearing, and the adjustment mechanism similarly has to carry all that weight. Far from addressing your concerns, it multiplies them. And the sealing of the system relies on a set of rubber bellows!

As for the Unertl, I am pretty sure the only reason Carlos Hathcock chose it was because it was the only scope available to him at the time with the required magnification.

I do believe that a modern image-moving scope might possibly be about the best possible choice for a dangerous-game rifle or any other rifle which is used at relatively short ranges, never adjusted for distance shooting, subject to abuse and in which reliability is paramount, but for virtually everything else any decent modern erector-tube scope is quite sufficient.

As for that dangerous-game rifle, I am going to blaspheme now: for roughly the last two decades, those who really rely on their rifles to keep them alive against fast, fleeting targets under tough conditions have almost universally changed to red dot sights. I am speaking of course of special forces soldiers engaged in close-quarter combat.

Thanks Peter, I don't discount your extensive experience but will argue with this and that in your generous reply.

First, I see some confusion in the terminology used. Reticle-movement scopes are the old ones I prefer. In these, the erector set is firmly lodged in the outer tube and should never move; the only bit that moves is a little reticle cell, a fat brass ring sometimes with an octagonal outer to engage with the turret screws. It is held against the screws by a stout flat spring and, in the better makes, against longitudinal movement by abutments (or a dovetail in some single-turret models).

Some mid-20th-Century scopes even had the erector cell screwed in place as well, to stop any possibility of movement. This often required an Oldham coupling but may have been overkill since a strong spring was generally quite sufficient to hold such a small piece in its perpendicular plane of movement.

Image-movement is the general term for modern scopes with 'constantly centred reticles'. These are the ones with the articulated erector tubes. This tube will contain the erector set and power scroll in variables, and often the reticle and one-or-more field lenses as well. In a variable it should be made of brass to reduce galling in the power scroll.

This all adds weight and complexity, hence my calculation that these erector tubes generally weigh five-to-10 times that of even a heavier, brass reticle cell.

Image-movement scopes certainly seem more adaptable to extreme knob winding for long-range shots, though (as I mentioned in the book) having your crosswire deep in the field of a reticle-movement model would at least remind you to wind it back afterwards.

That you haven't noticed any problems with parallax and focusing may be because your scope has easy parallax adjustment and you use it assuming it is just a consequence of high magnification. In your 25-year-old scope that may indeed be true but my friend in California has 'proved with algebra' that the power scrolls of modern high-multiple variables enhance those problems just in mechanically moving from a low power to a high one.

Though some long-distance and extreme-light shooters may really need the absolute best and latest lenses, I see scopes first of all as instruments taking the place of our old iron sights. They are simply to line up a target, not to survey the landscape or take a fine photo. The first, most-important need is to be stable and reliable as possible. Some gun scribes deride busy reticles as taking up field of view, too, but I would rather use a 'Christmas tree' than be constantly twiddling the knobs.

By 'spherical bearing', I assume you mean the ball-joint used by several scope makers to hinge the erector tube. Though I would think them stronger than the hooks and gimbals used previously, sooner or later the weight of brass erector tubes will tell there, too.

And since you mention cars in this matter, it has come to me that scopes and their erector tubes have something in common with the body of a car under extreme braking. Even if a scope sat above some tactical rifle where the barrel did not rise in recoil, the front of the scope and anything moveable within it would still be under pressure to flex down at the front under recoil. This will obviously affect a hinged erector tube but also possibly bend the objective end of a long scope - and the punishment when a rifle has old-fashioned drop at heel will be even worse.

I would love to see new reticle-movement scopes made with the latest lenses and waterproofing. The March Genesis scope may not be pretty and the rubber bellows may perish over time but they are only to protect the adjustment mechanism - water getting in there won't fog-up the scope.*

As I recall Carlos Hathcock did have some choice in the scopes he used in Vietnam, since a 3-9x Redfield was also available to US snipers.

As you say, modern scopes meet the needs of most shooters - but they are not without problems beyond the ones I have mapped out. One is that American and Japanese makers never bothered to beef up the one-inch diameters when they went to aluminium tubes. (The European makers had generally added at least a millimetre or two and usually strengthened their tubes with mounting rails.)

This failure led to the problem of scopes bending if not mounted with extreme care. Though I see the whole sorry business of image-movement as one of bending light paths, many boffins shudder at the possibility of scopes bending and thus spend the same time making sure modern ones are straight and stress-free as is needed to set up an old reticle-movement model. Using my now-favorite Burris Signature rings solves both problems, of course, and getting the reticle centred to start with is actually easier with my old scopes.

Yes, I have noticed that some special forces and dangerous-game hunters have taken to red-dot sights. Though I'm sure they provide a bright aiming point that could give an edge in extreme circumstances, I wouldn't trust anything with a battery - and as the book's name suggests, I've have gone through this matter in 'Light at the Start of the Tunnel - Are rifle scopes off the rails?', too.

On the other hand, I understand the Australian army favors something more to my tastes - an Elcan Specter scope with external adjustments.

Cheers
- Paul

*PS: you may be right about the Genesis scope just being an enormous erector tube in itself. Even one of my favorites, the old Bausch & Lomb 'Custom' set-up, may have been vulnerable in a similar way. Though B&L advertisements showed somebody whacking one of their scopes with a hammer to show that the 'cartspring' beneath would return it to battery, by that time their scopes were aluminum and I have one with gouges above the front mount cones. My thoughts now are that the scope lifted under the second pulse of recoil and then got damaged as the flat spring pulled it back against the cones. So what is the best answer against recoil affecting scopes? I think it is to have as little as possible able to move under inertia and to make sure that part can take the punishment.