our $500 1,000 yard experimental rifle is coming along really well the pillar
bedding job is done action bedding is done we have finished
the trigger job which includes creep over travel pull weight reduction and
everything on this is humming along really well
mechanically or at least it should be and right now you can see that I have
stripped down the Boyd stock and I've started to remove all of that kind of
epoxy paint that was on the outside so they can get down to the wood and do
some of the reshaping that I need it's already feeling a lot better and the
lines are already a lot cleaner this is going to look very good by the time I'm
done but I really need to hurry for those of you that are not familiar with
the experiment what I'm doing here is for a total budget of $500 I'm taking a budget
deer rifle and I'm turning it into something that I can compete with at a
thousand yards if you haven't subscribed already I'd recommend you do so appear
if you like us on Facebook you can chat with us or just see some extra goodies
sometimes I have some behind-the-scenes footage then it's up there this playlist
down here is going to have everything in it so if you miss something you can see
the entire experiment eagle-eyed viewers have noticed that there's something
missing from this rifle and of course that's the scope and those of you that
are budget conscious after you've taken a look at the cost two hundred twenty
one dollars for the rifle one fifty four for the stock and then of course we're
going to need a base and some rings you know that there's not going to be much
room left for the glass and the common wisdom is that on a rifle you're
supposed to have at least as much in your glass as you do on the the rifle
itself and I think that wisdom has actually changed over the past few years
about five years ago I'd say that the common wisdom was twice as much glass as
your rifle and now I think as of last year it seems to be more appropriate to
just get a mortgage on a really really expensive scope throw out the rifle you
don't need it all you need is just a really good scope if I intend to print
small groups at a thousand yards I definitely need both now let me explain
why I set up the budget the way that I did I don't really trust that plastic
stock on any of these budget rifles the axis plastic may be better than in
previous years but I'm still not going to trust it in a competition I want
something that's going to be nice and firm and it's not going to have that
forearm flex like you see on a lot of these budget rifles I've had half MOA
guns go up to six MOA easily just because of some flop up here in the
forearm this with its pillar bedding and action bedding is going to keep my
groups nice and tight if I had a limitless budget I would want the best
glass money could buy I would want a large diameter tube so I could get lots
of elevation and windage adjustment and I would want very repeatable very fine
turrets and as far as a feature set goes I would want everything to be about
precision and that's about making minute changes during these scenarios so I would
want something like 1/8 MOA turrets I would want some fiddly little reticle so
that I could make all kinds of last-minute wind calls and then it would
want high magnification so that I could see small changes even in this ideal
hypothetical situation where I have all the money I want I think I would still
prefer a second focal plane reticle over a first focal plane reticle I'm after
precision here and first focal plane reticles even though they make things a
lot easier and more consistent across all zoom ranges the second focal plane
reticle can achieve more precision as you increase magnification I'll do a
video on this a little bit later but there is still definitely a place for
second focal plane if I could nudge the budget up on this experiment just a couple
hundred bucks I would take the SWF a 20 power in a heartbeat it has a mil quad
reticle a fixed 20 power magnification very nice turrets and a 30 millimeter
tube that thing would work smashingly for this kind of competition well we
don't have $300 we have $100 and that may make it sound like the optic is an
afterthought but that's not the case at all from the very beginning I've been
juggling all kinds of parts the rifles the stocks the scopes to see what we
could actually do to get a $500 rifle okay so we have the the price of the the
rifle we have the price of the stock we have base and rings and we have the
Simmons 44 mag and this tops out at 24 power it has a mil dot reticle in the
second focal plane and it has 1/8 MOA turrets so that's kind of the feature
set that I was after it even has side focus which is nice and on the face of
it that's what we're after but the big question is can a 100 dollar scope with
that kind of feature set actually compete in this kind of competition will
it actually work in the next video we're going to take a close look at some of
the ups and downs of this scope and we're going to see where we anticipate
that things might get a little weird and in the final result you know really it's
all going to come down to the competition does this thing actually
perform in an F class match
you