7 Scope Myths Most Shooters Believe

today we're talking about mistakes and myths with Optics but there are also a ton of myths that can make you spend way too much money on a scope that won't even fit your needs so today I partnered up with some absolute experts in different areas of long-range shooting accuracy and Optics to talk about some of the myths that they hear from hunters and Shooters like us I'm sitting here with Ward Bryan basically when military snipers from Seals the National Guard to even Hunters are looking for training this is where they go you don't like the Christmas tree style reticles a lot of people see that as oh you know if you're a really Advanced shooter that's what you're going to want so basically what it says is if I you know shoot and I need to hold a little bit high and maybe to the side for wind now I have lots of little data down there in that in that Christmas tree that I can hold over three and up to and whatever not but you seem to have two problems with those Christmas tree reticles what's what's the number one reason that somebody shouldn't use one of those it will cause you to miss high when you're shooting flat and when you go to shoot on angle because of the angle of incident of sunlight as it as it hits the uh aggressive angle of the lens the lightly it's bent downwards and away from the light source it it causes you to meet to miss severely High and when you come outside of one third of the optical center of the viewing portion of the lens you would you you number one defeat the purpose of the design of the rifle scope and the Assembly of the lens system and you also come into the curvature of the lens which causes you to look at a distorted and displaced image yeah you can see that even on an iPhone if you shoot the really Ultra wide and you look at the edges somebody's face is on the edge it's all distorted right but then on a and they try to correct that as much as possible on a scope to make it rectilinear but it's never going to be perfect no lens is and so what you'd rather see people do is dial for elevation and just hold the windage so we don't need to get crazy down there right because your windows will be off plus your vertical will be off and you're defeating the purpose of the build of the scope so the the most accurate method of utilizing a scope is the method is that it was designed to function in and that's to utilize your turrets your elevation your windage turrets well if people are looking for training they can check out the Mountain Shooting Center and get in touch with you who I'm sitting here with Kevin from element Optics I'm sure as an Optics manufacturer you guys hear all kinds of myths yeah we've heard a lot so when people are looking at Scopes you know in the display case and there are so many options one thing that I hear pretty often is you want to get the bigger tube size not the bigger objective Bell you know the bigger the front end of the scope the business end of the scope that one okay but a lot of people are talking about the tube size and they want it as thick as possible to allow more light to get through is that true no why not it seems right yeah it sounds logically you know the the crazy part is is that the number of people that believe that and then like the jobs that they have I'm talking about a lot of SF dudes that I that I'm friends with I mean it's a general probably one of the biggest misconceptions with Optics is tube Size Matters as far as visual Clarity amount of light that you're getting through so why are some bigger than another smaller it's very simple it's for travel it's it's going to give you more elevation more travel but it's also going to give you more glass and more glass is going to be where you're going to get more weight heavier yes so uh if you want more light you get a bigger objective lens that's the only way that's oh that's literally until somebody comes out with some new spooky something that's it that's the only way you're getting more light into that scope is a larger objective lens to gather that light and there are all kinds of Coatings that can assist maintaining that but bringing it in yep absolutely and then so there's one inch tube size 30 millimeter and 34 millimeter pretty much you might see a 35 or something weird but it's pretty much those who should buy a one inch who should buy a 30 and who should buy 34. uh so one inch is going to be typically your your older Scopes there's not many that are made so much in one super light hunting yeah they're going to be super light duplex type reticles and the reason they're one inch they're not dialing on them all right so yeah they're going to cap the turrets after they get everything optically zeroed and then what they're going to do is they're just going to basically have their target within a known distance when people go and buy a rifle and then it doubly hurts when they got to buy a scope they go and look at the Rings at the store and you see some rings for 20 bucks and some for 150 bucks and they look the same why in the world would somebody spend a lot of money on expensive Rings is it worth it I say it is the repeatability is definitely one of the key things with this so when you take the rifle apart for cleaning or whatever when you put the rifle back on or rifle to back together and the scope icon torque it up it's normally on the same spot so same zero and you know bouncing around in a truck for a week you want to make sure that that thing isn't going to get knocked off at all going from a hot to a cold environment different Metals you want to make sure that it's going to stay tight as much as possible Plus we all know you can take a very fine expensive scope and turn it into a piece of trash cheap scope yes if it's not mounted right now you can destroy the internals with uh you especially see that on the on the Parallax and when you when you go Zoom you can kind of get sticky points Ah that's a big red flag yes having a torque wrench you must own a torque wrench if you own a rifle so that you can get the right connection on those rings so the real issue with the Rings is first of all how concentric they're going to be those things so that they have even pressure everywhere on them plus just a lot of design things I've bought some cheap scope rings before take it out on the first hunt and the screws are rusting and stuff or I notice like uh you know the the scope is moving and different different things you just see fewer problems with them now I don't think you always have to go buy the most expensive rings every time but get quality rings that you know are made by a company that can do right yep yeah the big manufacturers they they have good reputations for a reason that it's just so weird everybody who's serious about long range shooting tends to go to Mill and yet the Moa is a finer adjustment it is a click of MOA is less than a click of a mill it is a finer adjustment you gotta understand people don't want to deviate from what they're comfortable with also and that's the biggest issue with MOA is people are comfortable with the numbers they understand it so they don't want to try Mills to begin with where if they tried and went to the metric system and tried the Mills they'd understand how easier it is to correlate long distance shooting I for a long time I held pretty tight to MOA I felt like I'm a Hunter everybody that I know shoots them away and then you get into more and more serious shootings uh areas and for whatever reason I don't know that it one is really Superior than the other there are benefits and drawbacks like we've talked about absolutely but for whatever reason when you gravitate into really serious longer range shooting everybody's shooting Mills they are and this is the other issue with it okay if you shoot if you spend all your time with Hunters who shoot him away you've got to be able to talk MOA to them yeah okay so when you get into long distance shooting world and you're dealing people with people that's shooting in Mills you've got to be able to understand and communicate in the same language basically so you're understanding the same issues next myth is you gotta spend big money on Scopes if you want that really good result I learned this with you guys so you have element Optics you have expensive options that are very very capable yes they are but we've done two long range shooting courses together and I was using a 700 3 to 18 by 50 Titan and I mean the tracking has been perfect dry at you know very extended distances to a mile that we've been shooting um and I think like dang that's 700 bucks like what what do you need to spend the more expensive on oh so your friends like you more I guess it's going to come down a lot a lot of times guys they associate costs with quality and it's not necessarily the case today element makes an extremely amazing optic and I'm going to throw the caveat out there for the money I don't think there's anything better and that's just based on how we build the optic we're not building it to hit a certain price point we're literally just focused on the end shooter and trying to get the best possible optic to them and we cut out a lot of the BS that you don't really need um so where you're going to spend a lot more money is going to be a different Optical companies that like you know the the Japanese glass and then your German and European glass and things like that guys there's some really great glass that comes out of the Philippines a lot of guy you know I hate to use the c word a lot of good glass comes out of China A lot has to do with not necessarily the region of the world that it's made in but the tolerances that it's made to and that's a very big thing and uh when you look at you know do you need to spend three thousand dollars you can spend three thousand dollars on a scope that just does not work for what you want it to do yeah and that's what I would say is it's I don't think either of us would say there's no purpose in spending two grand on a scope absolutely Scopes out there and they do very nice specific things but what I would say is don't spend two grand on a scope unless you know exactly why you need that one and why a 700 scope isn't going to hack it so because for for your Hunter for your even decently serious longer range shooter you can do a lot with a pretty inexpensive scope you can't and I like to just use a very simple Pepsi challenge if you will take the most expensive scope you think you would ever buy I mean I'm talking about like the two to five thousand dollar Optics and then take something like a seven hundred dollar element look through both of them and then be able to tell the person behind the counter exactly why you're spending three to five times the cost and if you know then there's nothing wrong with that if you know then you then then then you know okay and that's but if you don't know don't spend the money because you don't have to so many people I'm telling you right now if you want to spend extra money spend money on training uh because that's going to make be able to make you make the most out of that scope and I would tell anybody any day before you go below three thousand dollars on the scope go spend seven hundred dollars on that optic from element and then take the remainder of that budget and come out here see Ward and learn how to actually use it so basically two different types of Scopes there's the capped turrets that you know you have to spin the cap off and then you can zero it in with that and then an exposed turrets go hope where you're dialing the whole turret there and the purpose of it is if I want to adjust from you know that deer's at 300 yards rather than saying I'm going to hold on those back I'm going to dial up to whatever 2.4 MOA and and then my reticle is perfect on the spot right so people look at two scopes with exposed turrets and they say well they probably track exactly the same right each click is .25 MOA or a tenth of a mil they're all the same right that's what you're supposed to they're supposed to do that but normally see you see that on on lower end Scopes or the most affordable Scopes they don't track that well so the only way to expose this is actually to to put a rough stationary put up like a scale from one to seven MOA or one to ten mils at 100 meters and over 100 yards and store tracking right and so you want to make sure that your reticle lines up exactly where it should as you go up it can be a tough test to do perfectly we got to make sure we're exactly 100 yards that we are you know exactly vertical on that line everything but that would be a way to know it if you have a scope that doesn't track very well when you're out at distance you could be missing lower high and it's not your fault it's your scope isn't tracking that distance perfectly similarly when you're sighting in I've had a few Scopes that were just bafflingly frustrating because you dial it's like okay I'm three I'm about three tenths right I dial three tenths and I move like way too far to the left or something you can see sometimes a scope that isn't doing well one of the things you can do to actually counter that is to if you go say you do five mils of elevation so we go to 5.2 so we go over and then back down because normally it's uh it's a spring issue so you see it doesn't it doesn't follow like it should but if you go past it and back down same thing with elevation or with windage if you go like two minutes or two mils to the side go over and then back it could be something to try if you're having trouble yes sir so those are your Optics Miss Thanksgiving everybody for joining me on backfire and be sure to check out backfire plus where we have courses on shooting and hunting and reloading and much more

Channel: Backfire

Views: 188,166

Keywords: Backfire, Hunting, Outdoors

Id: ebKIbv8rv3Q

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023