I still use two older 2.5-8’s. They do ok; one in particular. They’ve got aftermarket elevation turrets and are on “fun” guns, like my .223AI. They clearly and obviously outperformed the several newer 2.5-8’s I owned which have moved on to other shooters.
I don’t really understand WHY Leup has had a tough time getting with the program. I hypothesize that it’s somewhat akin to the US automakers in the 70’s; there’s just an arrogance there that they don’t need to compete at a high level because of who they are. That attitude set the US car industry back 20+ years and created an opening you could, well, drive a car through for the Japanese. I remember my first Japanese car, a ‘79 Accord. I traded my ‘79 Chevy Scottsdale pickup for it. That truck had it all: the 305 V8 was an absolute dog, but STILL got terrible mileage, when you put it up on a lift (I worked at a gas station all through high school and we were always messing with our trucks) you’d see the giant oversize holes in the frame/body mounts so that they could get things to more or less line up... the engine had a lifter tick at under 40k miles, which I cured by drizzling ATF into the carb with the motor running... the interior plastics were soft and the NM sun ate them up... various knobs and switches would work, not work, whatever.... then I got that Honda and..... you just changed the oil in it and it went and went and went and everything worked. “Huh”!
It’s frustrating because I work in the field of mechanical manufacturing and to a lesser degree (mostly my own fixturing and tooling), design... everything that is “wrong” with Leup could’ve been addressed decades ago with some reverse engineering, R&D effort, and stepping up their QC. This ain’t rocket science; it’s just EFFORT and being willing to admit you have a problem. The same things the US automakers did to compete... you want to beat Toyota, you first gotta BE Toyota.
I happily take my money elsewhere. If you believe in the power of free markets, which I do, the possibility of failure must exist and further, must manifest as consumer behavior, to change the behavior of the manufactures. I’m doing my part by rewarding excellence when I find it, and punishing complacency and arrogance. In a very real sense, it’s patriotic. Short of just closing our borders to imports, or imposing more punitive and ineffective tariffs, it’s compete-or-die on a global level. I want to believe America and Americans can compete. But blindly “buying American” won’t do that; in fact it can do just the opposite; it can function as enabling.
That's a hell of a lot of typing without including any pertinent information, except maybe about cars and your work history. "Newer" and "older" tell us nothing. Newer than what, or older than what? Ideally you would include the model of the scopes,Vari-X, VX-III. VX-3 etc.
