a good friend of mine who works for a sporting goods wholesaler just returned from 2-3 days of training at Leupold. I talked with her for an hour or so, largely because of all the posts I see from time to time on the "fire" regarding supposed un-reliability of Leupold variables. Unlike most of you, I don't have lots of scopes. I do 100% of my hunting with 2 old Leupold variables: a 2-7 vari-x II I bought new and a 2.5-8 vari-x III I bought used. I'm more of a hunter than a shooter, so I don't shoot a lot. Mostly .270 Win. and the last few years a .300 Win. Mag. All this talk of Leupold failures has me wondering if its only a matter of time. I'm going on another wilderness hunt in Sept. and plan on using the 2.5-8 again and don't want a problem.

Some of things she learned on her training and shared with me, you'd probably not believe if I stated them here. One example is the percent of scopes that come back to Leupold for supposed failure that they can find no problems with. They keep close stats on this and know the percent in detail. All I will say is that it is far more than 90%. And that is after shooting extensively with THAT scope.

Another interesting stat is that they ship more new scopes in ONE DAY than the combined scope manufacturers in all of Europe do for a LONG TIME. So there's a fair number out in the market-place.

Another issue she mentioned was the re-coil pounding test they put on their scopes. In an experiment some time back, they upped the amount of pounding the machine exerted on the test scope by a huge margin and just let it run for much longer than you'd believe. After quite a spell, the machine actually broke.


I could go on and on. In a somewhat un-related but interesting experience this same gal had was with an old Leupold on a .375 that was accidentally dropped out of a bush-plane but found. No apparent damages. She used it a couple years ago on a moose.

Go ahead and question this info if you want. The credibility of this person along with her experience made her proud to sell the Leupold product-made in America.

At her suggestion, I'm going to send in my old vari-x III just to have them go over it. Its never given me problems, but they can determine if there is anything out of order that I'm not noticing.