Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Cheap Rifles and expensive scopes

traveling so spend time thinking driving down America's Highways and ByWays....

Why is it that the campfire's darling rifle seems to be the Ruger American.....

( which I look at as the rifle version of a Tasco Scope)

Yet low cost optics that work just fine... ( such as a Tasco Scope ) are flamed, and good quality optics start out with Leupold scopes and go up from there....

Just think the two extreme is kind of Ironic.

I have two Ruger Americans... yeah they may be accurate, but are real cheaply made, and feel ever more cheaper than they look...and the accuracy is kind of useless unless you don't mind single shooting them, since their magazines come with a JamAmatic feature at no extra cost.....

Give me a Model 70 with a Tasco World Class on top over a Ruger American with a Leupold Rifleman or VX2 on top....

and others opinions are?........

( and lets try to answer the question vs respond with the usual campfire slams, question someone's intelligence etc... )

Same!

I dunno. I've got a savage with a nightforce NXS 8-32x56 on top of it. I did manage to kill a prairie dog at 880 yds with it, pretty is as pretty does.

Just my experience, but I don't think I have ever paid more for the scope than I did for the rifle it sits on.

And I seem to have a rule of thumb that I won't usually spend less than half as much on the scope as I did for the rifle.

A reliable watch once cost as much as a good men's suit.

More recently, a 17" B&W T.V. cost as much as a serviceable used car.

Later, minimally Serviceable scopes have become much cheaper relative to the rifles on which they are mounted.

Give me the M70 and the Leupold as the lowest end optic and even then I feel like I'm taking a chance with the variables, which I used to hold in high regard but have broken enough through shooting that I am something of a carping skeptic anymore.

Like Ross Seyfried once said I regard Leopold variables about like a three toed coyote circles a piece of "free" meat on the side of the road.



Neither the Ruger nor the Tasco rise to any level of conscious stream of thought.....despite their virtues. I would not take either if you paid me. Life is too short.

Bob, did you ever consider that perhaps you shoot too much?


But to the OP's point, yes I think it rather ironic at the least to put money atop something like a Ruger American. While the rifle has some very nice points, certainly the magazines and the stocks are not among them. While more and more rifles and ammo gets shot under conditions that hardly challenge them much at all, and rifle that gets put to use in any serious pursuit ought to have the bases covered better IMO. Give me a proven M77 or M70, or even a well-proven M700 if I'm headed out where the rifle is not one of those things I want to worry about.

Klick it has popped into my head now and then. I know i am very opinionated about a lot of shooting things, But I feel like I earned it...

I am somewhat more relaxed about it these days.

I'm in the middle. If I have $1k to spend it will be around $600.00 - $700.00 for the rifle and $300.00-$400.00 on the scope. Neither extreme appeals to me. A year ago I sold a gentleman a Weatherby Mark V and he purchased a Bushnell Legend to go with it. I absolutely did not mock him, until he left the store. Didn't want to lose my job.

Tasco may have once put out a good scope. But not anymore. I see many more people going cheap on a scope with a good rifle than going with a good scope and cheap on the rifle.

I don't care for economy rifles for a variety of reasons. I care even less for economy scopes. Everyone has their own preferences, I cannot stand the tiny ejection ports on economy rifles, even more so than the cheap feel. But there is a place for economy rifles. If that is all you can afford, then that is all you can afford. If a 783, RAR or Axis were all I could afford, I would be hunting with one, not staying at home feeling sorry for myself, because Economy rifles are NOT cheap in the accuracy department.

I don't consider Tikkas and Vanguards to be economy rifles either, as some do.

Frankly I never got the whole ultra expensive scope thing. People wax on about clarity , light gathering, image quality of this brand over the other. I can see it in a binocular more than a rifle scope as I look thru my binocular for a period of time and often for a higher level of fine detail. My use of a scope is quite different as in oh look there's a deer peek, squeeze , bang. I doubt I look through my scope more than a few seconds and I'm not really interested in seeing the veins in the leaf on the tree behind him. The qualities I find important in a scope are holding zero, magnification , size / weight suitability for my rifle and then to a lesser degree image quality, clarity, light gathering etc. these last three are last and a much less importance to me as we live in a time where one can pretty much take it for granted that even cheaper scopes provide adequate levels in these categories for hunting purposes. Heck even blister pack Tascos are adequate in these categories. For example I have two vari x ii scopes on my main hunting rifles that I bought used years ago.They zoom and hold their zero faithfully. I have never had a issue seeing deer during legal shooting hours and beyond, and they are fairly lightweight and proportioned to fit the rifles they are mounted on. What more do you need.

That's where I am. In all these years I've only 'worn' out 1 scope. It was a 1.5-4X BUT I put it on several different rifles including every hard kicking rifle I owned for a few years TILL it broke.

It really took a lot of recoil before it broke.


Jerry

If the rifle is accurate and reliable, and you are going to use it and depend on it to work, It should have a scope on it that you have confidence in.

I generally like rifles that start at about $700 and I like scopes that start at about $400.That seems to me to be the sweet spot for quality and price. I buy more expensive rifles and scopes but after that price point you pay a lot more for small gains.

I recently mounted a Schmidt & Bender PMII on a Ruger American .300 Blackout.

Yeah, I know, the scope was about 10x the cost of the rifle.

I have interest in testing bullets thru the sonic transition but need a sorta-fast twist. The Ruger twist is 1:7. I prefer working in mils while on the range.

Other options were in one piece mounts and the Ruger "Picatinny" rail slots don't match up. This scope is mounted in individual rings so moving one was easy.

It is not that I think the scope was "appropriate" for the rifle, just that I needed the proper tools.

That's all they really are, tools.

Most of us fall into that category, but what we need changes with age, and circumstances.

Having said that I have seen lousy optics and light management, lack of contrast, etc fail to show me deer I knew were there,that were somewhat obscured by cover,through older tech leupolds and yet the same deer became visible through a scope with "better" optics.

Year before last a Connecticut buck spotted with bins became hard to find through 2.5-8X Leopold down in a clearcut..eventually I found him and killed him but the whole situation gave me pause.

Even if scopes don't show much difference past a price point, the same does NOT apply to your eyes as they change....trust me on that one.

Some people hunt where light gets very dim and bucks and other game show very late. There is and can be a big difference comparing the optics on some scopes.

cdb,

Tasco has never "put out" a scope. Instead they've had them made by various factories. Some have been good, but some haven't.

Less expensive rifles nearly always shoot well enough to get the job done. On the rigors of a tough hunt, cheap scopes do not necessarily always do that.

I have always stayed in the mid range on scopes and rifles and I have never had either one quit me on tough hunts. I will not spend thousands on a rifle, nor a scope. I have become a real fan of the SWFA scopes.

The only scopes that have actually failed me (aside from factory defects out of the box) have been the cheap Simmons scopes and Chinese Tascos. I just don't trust the reliability of a cheap scope.

And yes, I do own a Ruger American that has had over 900 rounds through it. It shoots 1/2 moa with its SS 6x aboard.

One way to look at this is like an engineer and not an economist.

Engineer says: "It works or not".
Economist says: "Well, it works in practice but it's no good because it doesn't work in theory."

Does the item do the job it's intended to do regardless of cost? If so, it's good.

You mention your RAR jams, well, feeding is a primary function of a rifle so I'd say that rifle doesn't work no matter what the cost. FWIW, I have what was a jamamatic .22-250 RAR but simply getting a new magazine changed it to a reliable feeder.

Same with scopes, as bangeye notes you don't always need top of the line optical quality, just a reliable aiming tool. Now some situations require both - if your target is little varmints that blend into their background and you twist turrets to shoot at varying long ranges then you probably want to see as clearly as possible and also have dead reliable adjustments.

If a Savage or RAR shoots well enough but you need to absolutely see clearly, get a less expensive rifle and a more expensive scope. If you need top notch reliability in your rifle but don't need to see fleas at 600 yards, get a suitable rifle and a relatively inexpensive Leupold 2.5 scope.

My Ruger American is a range toy, I just use it to bang steel. As such it wears a Weaver fixed 6X scope which does the job I ask of it as well as the most expensive scope on the market.


Bottom line is - set your goal or your priorities - reliability, accuracy, optical quality, whatever - set the level of each you need, determine what equipment will meet that goal and buy accordingly no matter if the price is high or low.

Seafire,

I've owned several centerfire Ruger Americans since they appeared, and right now have three. Haven't had any problems with the magazines but may have been lucky. I do know that Ruger will replace any magazines if customers simply ask.

The early stocks were less than perfect because they weren't stiff enough, so often weren't really free-floated. But at least a couple of years ago Ruger started making them much stiffer, and all three of my present RAR's (a .223, .243 and 6.5 Creedmoor) have the stiffer stocks that were floated/bedded fine from the factory and have remained that way.

Contrary to common Campfire belief, shooters have apparently been bitching about "cheap" rifles as long as rifles have been mass-produced, and some of the formerly cheap rifles are now regarded as classics. I've owned plenty of classic cheap rifles and modern cheap rifles, with generally good results.

Have also owned and tested a bunch of far more expensive rifles that didn't work right for one reason or another, often because the maker had some ideas about "improving" on other, successful rifles. These have included some so-called custom rifles.

Have also had 17 brands of scopes (not individual scopes) fail from sheer shooting on rifles over the decades. Some of these were cheap, but others were really expensive. One of the scopes that's never failed retails for $200. Another brand where several have failed costs at least $800.

As a result of these experiences with both rifles and scopes, I'm doubtful about using price as a criteria for quality.

If you don't like Ruger Americans, why buy them?

Some very refreshing (and perhaps, amazing) posts so far. It is gratifying to see such sensible opinions expressed in such a civil manner. (Just hope that this doesn't somehow get transferred to the optics forum with the indecipherable rant that it will provoke.)