If you had to choose, would you go with an expensive scope paired with an inexpensive rifle, or a cheap scope paired with an expensive rifle?
If you had to choose, would you go with an expensive scope paired with an inexpensive rifle, or a cheap scope paired with an expensive rifle?
the difference between cheap and expensive has narrowed for both. Arken and Vortex scopes are super affordable and are of decent quality. a Savage Axis is only 300 dollars and is a perfectly good base rifle that you can expand upon later.
cheap scope
cheap rifle
800 dollar bipod
This. A $450 Savage with a $300 SWFA scope and a $250 Atlas tripod was THE best rifle I ever owned. Probably the best firearm I've ever owned, period. It was $1K setup and I routinely shot 0.3 - .05" groups with it. This was with my handloads, mind you. The real secret to precision shooting that normies don't know is that it's all in the hand loading. Almost any modern rifle can shoot little bughole groups if it was manufactured correctly and you work up proper handloads for it using premium components.
meant to say 0.5" groups, obvs.
Sure, but no one finds that stuff exciting if they aren't already into it.
>look at this sick custom action and chassis I built
vs
>look at these ladder tests I did last weekend
That was my point. No one has the ability or desire to get into reloading, so they miss the point of precision shooting altogether -- that it's not about building some shit-hot rifle. That is part of it if you have the dough, but as far as precision shooting goes, a solid rifle is like 1/3rd of the equation. Handloading, doping your load, gathering velocity data, adequate practice in real-world conditions at varying ranges and in varying shooting positions, etc, all play just as crucial a role, if not more.
The former, by far. The vast majority of new rifles today are all very good, regardless of price. On the other hand, you can easily tell the difference between a cheap scope and a good scope.
There's no point buying a $4000 rifle if you can't shoot accurately with it because your scope won't hold zero.
of all the faults of cheap scopes, seems like most of them hold zero quite well in the 300-500 dollar range
I got drunk and won a tracking point rifle in an auction at RIA.
I'm still trying to sell that piece of shit. RIA sold it knowing the scope doesn't even fucking work.
>expensive scope paired with an inexpensive rifle
That, easily.
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Good optics are harder and more expensive to manufacture than mill aluminum and steel. Guns themselves are expensive, optics can make them look cheap, NVG's and thermals make optics look cheap.
expensive scope for sure.
it's so much more practical to unfuck a rifle.
Cheap rifle doesn't necessarily mean bad rifle, and cheap scope in 90% means bad scope.
Simple as
A cheap rifle will probably still be sufficiently accurate for hunting. A cheap scope is almost always an unreliable paperweight.
Expensive scope with a cheap rifle, for sure.
A Tikka t3x is pretty basic but you're paying durr rifle prices for something that would've been considered a specialized sniper rifle in the 80s. Throw a Nightforce on top and a skilled user could place reasonably well at a PRS meet (though not ELR, that's more p2w).
I think the third option should be mid tier scope on a cheap rifle with an expensive ballistic solver, like an AB Kestrel.
Based, though these days more and more feel like I'd have trouble justifying new because feels like we're on the verge of having that sort of thing built into scopes.
It's hard to get the features you find on something like a 5700 Elite to fit on a scope. You can cram a ballistic calculator with a little in-scope display onto one, like on the XM157, but a full wet/dry bulb sensor and wind meter would be annoying as hell to have sticking out of an optic.
>It's hard to get the features you find on something like a 5700 Elite to fit on a scope. You can cram a ballistic calculator with a little in-scope display onto one, like on the XM157, but a full wet/dry bulb sensor and wind meter would be annoying as hell to have sticking out of an optic.
100% true, but I'm sort of envisioning something where I'd be wearing that and it'd link to my rifle/scope, which could also have pulse IR range finder etc as well. Or have it talk to the weather station at my own range or on my property, or other options like that. There's lot of interesting potential there to explore.
Admittedly it's somewhat silly, it'll be years before that really starts to get refined probably. And those things have decent resale value and probably still will, because lots of people won't even WANT electronic scopes or whatever else which is totally valid. Maybe even me, not like I have anything more than irons on certain guns, sometimes you just want to pick the level of tech you're applying. So no real reason to wait if you want it right now. But compared to 10 or 20 years ago dunno, just feels like we're entering a period of more rapid change before stuff settles back down again.
third is the unfair reasonable option so doesn't apply but yeah the question basically begs which is more important
Probably cheapish rifle (low mid to mid range price) with a mid range scope. Then after that upgrade as it makes sense. Trigger, ammo, maybe the barrel if you find you're reaching the limits of how accurate it can shoot. I guess if I had to answer in a way that answered exactly to the question - cheap gun expensive scope and rings.
In my experience, a $300 10/22 shoots good with a $300 Leupold. A $500 AR-15 shot way better than with its old junky scope - yet again - after buying a $300 Leupold. If I upgrade my scope maybe I could shoot better, who knows. Doesn't matter if the rifle can shoot one hole groups at 300 if the scope is sloppy inside. And it doesn't matter if you have a $10,000 scope that could get you one hole groups at 1000 if the rings can't hold the scope to save their life. Doesn't matter if your whole gun costs $25,000 if you don't have everything tightened down, either, so you might as well buy a $60 FAT wrench and torque your scope rings correctly. And make sure you level your scope: put your rifle in a gun rest/vise and level the gun using the rail and a bubble level, then put your scope in the rings and level that using its turret cap (not perfect but close enough). Check that everything is still lined up after securing the ring tops. Doesn't matter how fancy your gun is or how level your scope is if you're shooting with your gun canted either. Thought Midway or Brownells had a video on this but guess not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc1OY8Rxxhk
>his scope doesn’t have an integral rail
ISHYGDDT
Damn, I didn't even know they still made integral bottom rail "clamp on" scopes! Who made that? It looks expensive. Exposed adjustments, a turret cover for a battery (?), controls on the eyepiece...looks out of my price range.
Zeiss, Swaro, and other high end euro companies still make them. Looks slick as hell but it it's very expensive.
It’s a Swarovski Z8i (2.3-18x56). Got some guy at a small German shop to sell it to me. For whatever reason, Swarovski won’t technically sell the integral-rail iterations to US customers. I wish more scope manufacturers would start doing integral rails - no rings to worry about and if you get a QD mount, you have a perfect repeatable zero should you want to remove the scope for transport, storage, etc.
I paid $3,600 about 6 years ago. The QD Innomount was ~$250. The ballistic turret and scope caps were another ~$300 lol. Not cheap but at the same time I don’t really need any other scope for multiple bolt guns. The rear buttons are for illumination on/off and intensity (red dot on crosshairs).
Funny thing is Bushnell did it years ago in the 80s or so - maybe even 70s. They made a gloss black scope with integral clamp (adjustable front/back) and a .22 version (clamp, dovetail). I assumed it just died out and no one ever did it again. I liked that a lot about my Bushnell .22 scope. Now, if you ever lose that clamp (or fuck it up) you're screwed. But the idea was neat. The .22 had a rail along the whole base of the scope as well, so you could slide the clamp forward and back on the scope and the clamp forward and back on the rail and get a surprising amount of adjustment for different rifles and eye relief.
Interesting. Sounds a little different than the Swaro but that’s expected. The Swaro’s integral rail is recessed and mounts to your preferred mount (which then attaches to the rifle via a picatinny rail or direct threaded into the action) w/ rings or ringless w/ or w/o QD capability. Pretty much impossible to fuck up to the point of ruining it/making it inoperable. Pretty neat, but yeah unfortunately only really an option on very expensive scopes as of now.
>BCA rifle
>with a CVLife scope
You can always go cheap and cheap.
Some cheap rifles have accurate barrels
So A cheap rifle as long as the barrel is good and then good glas
Middling scope on a middling rifle.
Every rifle today shoots straight.
Optics have large margins of quality.
Go figure.
Cheap scope + cheap rifle = <3
I bought an expensive rifle. The guy said I should spend double the rifle cost on the scope. I said I’d save and bought a cheap scope a local gun club specked and had made, shot long range with that just fine. A few years down the line buy expensive scope. Don’t shoot any better in fact in some regards worse. The main thing is repeatability when winding the turrets back and forth.
LWRC REPR with quality iron sights would get everything done I need to do.
What are we counting as a cheap scope? $300-$500 scopes today are amazingly good and are considered cheap by some people. If that's the case I would take the good rifle/cheap scope. A good rifle will shoot .1-.2" groups even with a "cheap" scope.
we have reached a weird time where a 2000 dollar set-up
>WITH HANDLOADED AMMO
can shoot hilariously good. if you spend 1k on gun and scope and develop a load for that gun you can expect .5MOA or better.
A cheap rifles going to be slightly below 1 moa on a good day. Cheap scopes can be surprisingly decent these days.
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expensive rifle cheap scope, mainly because I wanted a mildot scope and the only options were either cheap swfa or expensive mil/le only leopold homosexual ass scopes.