Planning on putting a scope on an old mauser utilising a base that fits in the rear sight dovetail. What exactly is the difference between a "Scout" scope such as sold by Burris (and others) and using a LER pistol scope in this application?

Is this what you have in mind ?

I used a Leupold EER 2x in a modified (sunken) Burris mount. The action is a WWII K98 rebarreled with a 9,3x62 Belgian Delcour bbl. It works quite well for running shots on driven wild boars but still no faster than a rifle conventionally scoped with a 1,25-4x24 "battue" scope from Swarovski or Zeiss. Having extensively experienced both systems, I have my doubts about the "scout" concept...

As to the difference between pistol and true "scout" scopes, I think it may be a matter of parallax zeroing, the latter being treated as longer range rifle scopes.

Some scout scopes have a very narrow eye relief range. The pistol scopes may have a 10-20" eye relief so the mount point is not that critical.

I have a bushnell 2.5-6 on a Swed mauser. Works great. I did this one many years ago.

Swed Scout

I have three rifles set up scout style and I used pistol scopes for all of them with no problem.
And, I agree with Andre, I am not a big fan of the scout concept either. Col Cooper got a lot of mileage out of the Scout style rifle concept, but I am not a devotee of that idea.
I think it's an overly complicated solution to a simple sighting problem. Symplicity being, mount the scope where it belongs, on the receiver. Me thinks the good departed Col Cooper was related to Rube Goldberg..

Don

I have 3 Scout Rifles. All wear standard low powered variables. A short, quick handling, lightweight rifle of sufficient caliber is an excellent idea. Forward mounted scopes are not.

The reason that forward mounted scopes came about was to enable loading with stripper clips, which is completely irrelevant to a hunter. A forward mounted scope is optically inferior to a std scope due to it's limited field of view, vunerablity to occular reflections etc., besides the fact that the models currently being produced don't use the companies best optics anyway.

Buy a short handy scout rifle, don't waste your money on a Scout scope.......................DJ

Not a fan of forward mounted optics myself but this is an old mauser that I don't want to irreversibly alter. My aging eyes though necessitate the use of a scope if I am to continue playing with it meaningfully rather than just expending ammunition. Will just be using it on the range so optical issues like field of view etc are not that important. So LER pistol scope it is.

I had one "scout scope" set-up on a .416 Rem, I think it was the same Leupold 2x EER Andre referred to above...

It was nice not to have to worry about being whacked by the eye-piece. I did not appreciate the vey low FOV this set-up gave me, though. The scout scope idea is sold on the idea of shooting with both eyes open, "infinite" FOV and the scope "inserted" into the whole affair, as if by "magic". In reality, I found it very hard to "abstract" away the scope, and found FOV very low and disturbing. Maybe it was because I chose a 2x power, I don't know?

Since then, I have used no scout scopes on any of my rifles.

- mike

The Scout scope is an intermediate critical eye relief scope, approximately 9-inches.

I put a Leupold 2x handgun scope on my Brno-made Vz24 using an S&K mount and rings. While it does improve the Mauser's ability to make hits on smaller targets with iron sights, I can't see that it's much better/faster than a low-powered variable scope mounted on the receiver of a conventional bolt rifle.

BUT, since I didn't like the original barleycorn open sights, so it did allow me to put a scope on a rifle that I didn't want to drill into and cut up, just by replacing the rear sight with a scope mount.

I do believe that the Wehrmacht fiddled with this concept in WWII with the ZF-41 tiny-scope on a similar mount. The concept was alright, but from what I read the marksmen didn't like the dim picture and crappy field of view.