wait stop right there before you start posting comments we need to clarify a
few things first I do indeed know what good optics are
I've had the opportunity to look through some of the best glass that money can
buy second I do realize that there is a big difference between the expensive
stuff and the cheap stuff third I think that the expensive stuff is well worth
the price there's a mitten bender pm-2 that I got to look through once that I'm
pretty sure I could see into the spirit world when I was trying to find a mirage
it was amazing and the fourth thing we have to keep in mind though is that this
entire experiment has a cap of five hundred dollars and for those of you that have
been following the series you know that what we're doing is returning a budget
deer rifle into a thousand-yard competition rifle and the total budget
is capped at five hundred dollars now be sure that you subscribe if you want to
see new videos as they come out in this series pretty soon I'm gonna be actually
hitting the range to compete with this thing if you like us on Facebook you can
connect with us and get some extra goodies and then this playlist down here
has everything in it if you want to go back and see any of the steps like the
trigger job that we did on this or some of the stock work that we've done
including pillar bedding epoxy bedding and all that now I mentioned that the
total budget on this was five hundred dollars so one rifle one stock a basin
rings later and we pretty much just have a hundred dollars for the glass and if
you've been on Amazon recently and tried to see what's available for a hundred
dollars you know that really it's grim it's a steaming pile of garbage out
there there's a whole lot of trash but when I was setting up the original
budget for this whole rifle I knew that I could probably get away with it
because of this one scope right here this is the Simmons 44 mag six to 24 by
44 millimeter mill dot scope I selected this scope in part because of its older
reputation this used to be made in Japan and it came into the US as actually a
rather reliable and kind of a hidden gem in the market it was still very
inexpensive but it was mechanically good and a glass was pretty decent from
I've heard I've gotten to look through the Filipino model that followed and the
glass on that actually was pretty good and it seemed like things were pretty
well built on it and then they moved production to China which is what we're
dealing with here these modern ones are coming straight out of China and the
question is is this a worthy successor even to its Filipino cousin that started
to get a little bit of a lower reputation and in a word I think the
answer is no there are some weird things about this scope I have run a battery of
tests on this scope and so far it displays every kind of aberration and
distortion in some mild way at least that you can pretty much have in any
list so it's going to have some barrel distortion it's going to have chromatic
distortion all kinds of things and when you're looking through this scope at 24
power the total effect is kind of like you're looking through a dusty window it
is not very clear in those higher magnifications these higher
magnification models come with target turrets and the clicks are very
indistinct it's very easy to skip one when you're turning there's not much
sound and it just kind of has this rounded feeling it's not a positive
click and when you've adjusted this to not even it's more extreme ends but as
you start to you know really adjust for your longer ranges you totally lose
focus and parallax and you have to readjust here I suppose I've seen this a
little bit on some other scopes before but it was very minor this one is
extreme as you start to get like say maybe I don't know 20 MOA
the total image is gone and parallax is way way off so it has to be readjusted
and this scope does something that I have never seen before this has 1/8 MOA
turrets which actually quite like I have another scope with 1/8 MOA turrets and I
love that precision that's just fine but this is something truly bizarre never
seen this before take a look at this I'm used to on 1/8 MOA turrets it's going to
count okay from zero it's going to go to eight
because that's going to be one M away so if you want to adjust one MOA
you turn to that eight spot but what they did is they counted every ten all
the way up around 260 and this is truly bizarre I don't know if they were trying
to fool people into thinking that these were mill turrets or what but this makes
absolutely no sense if I'm going to adjust my my turrets based on some kind
of you know ballistic chart or if it's going to be you know a friend making a
wind call or something I don't want to be adjusting by tens I want to be going
by eights which is going to be that one mo way position so that is really really
weird while we're here abusing the turrets I have to point out something
else that's just truly bizarre typically you can remove these turret caps so that
you can reset your zero for the zero that your rifle has so say if I had
ended up here on ten that's what where my actual zero is I could back these set
screws out there are three of them all the way around and on some scopes
there'll be one on top but a lot of these less expensive ones you're gonna
have three here so you back out the set screws you lift this cap off plop it
down at the zero position like this tighten it back down and now you have
your zero set on this scope but here's the deal you can back out these set
screws but this cap is going nowhere I don't know if somebody at the factory
was just getting crazy with the glue or if somebody was practicing with a welder
or something but this cap is going nowhere not on the elevation nor on the
windage these things cannot move so my workaround is going to have to be to
create my own set of markings going around this thing I'm just gonna have to
do some kind of paper or tape or something and make my own markings and
make this work because this cap will not come off
I tried prying it and all I did was just put some slight damage on the lip of
this cap if I kept going I probably just would have torn things
up those are not coming off despite the criticisms that I just
leveled against this scope I think that it is still worth the hundred dollars
that I paid and I think that it's actually going to perform okay in
competition as long as it can hold its zero under recoil and we're going to
find that out in testing the turrets track perfectly and that's both the
elevation and the windage I tested this on my garbage bin Oh truth so all the
way through its entire range it was very accurate and actually this scope is
advertised as having 45 MOA of travel in any direction and what I got when I was
testing at least the elevation was 60 and it seemed to be tracking true now I
did have those parallax problems like I mentioned but it was always hitting the
correct mark every time so I think I can rely on those turrets the image may be
somewhat washed out but it does resolve small details quite well the second
focal plane mil-dot reticle combined with high magnification means that I'll
be able to make very minut adjustments as I make wind calls during the match
and these very precise turrets are going to help me get right on target for those
first shots testing is going to reveal the true nature of this scope so stay
tuned
you