Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Leupold Says They are the Best, Made in USA

Johnny L,

For what its worth, just a few thoughts and experiences:

I don't disagree with your discernments on the implications of buying American. And I, too, was a dedicated Gold Ring guy for a long time, owning just under 30 of them at one point. I was a fan boy;
I routinely admonished non-Leupolds in hunting camps and at the range. I truly thought they were the best. And I loved that they were as American made as they could be at their price point.

But, in retrospect, I'll admit that I was both blindly brand loyal and giving them a free pass because of their American roots. Too many times I danced the "Leupold Shuffle" - trying to get rigs sighted in with inconsistent adjustments. Too many times I made and explored other excuses for rigs that didn't hold zero and/or had wondering zero and/or had very inconsistent grouping some days while inexplicably shooting very well on others. The final straw came when the CDS's became popular, and I started dialing for distance more frequently. On 3 of 4 Leupold scopes I owned with turrets designed to be regularly field dialed, I experienced problems with inconsistent tracking and, more frequently, not returning to zero after being dialed. The one that hasn't experienced problems has the older M1 capped turret, which has spent its life on a gas .223, whereas the others were on 300 or 338 mags of one sort or another, so recoil was likely an issue. I'll say that Leupold CS has been nothing short of great, but CS really can't definitively fix fundamental design flaws in their scopes; instead, they bank on the fact that most people don't shoot enough to notice any fundamental shortfalls, or, more commonly nowadays, that people get problem scopes repaired and then send them onto the next person via internet sales.

I embarked on a research journey that led me to find out that many others had routinely experienced the same issues that I had with my beloved Gold Rings. I was hurt. I felt cheated. For a time I didn't know which direction to turn, but I knew I needed more reliable scopes if I was going to continue dialing for shots while hunting. It seemed that with all of the scopes returned to Leupold, they know full well of the issues they have and, by extension, ought to be able to engineer and produce a scope that could stand up to holding and returning to zero. Further, according to my own experiences and those of others, their reliability issues aren't constrained to their lower or mid tier scopes; the issues are also present in their high end offerings.

Eventually, I found my way to a couple of Nightforce scopes and I haven't looked back. Sure, they are pricey and heavier than comparable Leupolds. But they flat out work, even after a beating. And, after they are mounted, you barely notice any weight difference; certainly not enough to throw off a rig's overall utility, and certainly not enough to mean the difference between climbing an extra hill or not. Additionally, they are a company with a substantial manufacturing footprint in the U.S.

I still have low powered Leupolds on a bunch of levers and woods rifles as they are trim and svelt, and they seem to do OK for a time for closer range, set it and forget it type use.

I would love nothing more than for Leupold to make top quality optics I could rely on. Competition mainly benefits the consumer.