Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Scopes with thick reticles

Always amusing to come across someone in the NE hardwoods (where you won't get an unobstructed shot beyond 75 yards or so) with a rifle top version of the Hubble telescope on top and a Harris bipod below

My eyes are getting older, along with my body. It's getting very hard to pick up thin cross hairs in the woods early in the morning and late in the evening. I don't know about your sporting goods stores, but the ones around here don't have any scopes worth looking through. All they have is the latest bdc and all that sort of junk. I don't understand why people want to buy those scopes for not shooting over 200 yards. But that is what is being pushed on us.

I sold a friend of mine a Leupold VX-III 1.75-6x32 heavy duplex to put on a Rem Mod 7 308 for deer hunting on our lease. In this particular scope the thin parts of the reticle are a full MOA thick. He loves how easy it is to put it right on even when the light is low.

A lot of the reticles I see mentioned in these type conversations (several versions of #4 come to mind) have thick outer bars, but the center parts aren't very thick. Nor do the heavy outer parts come in very close to the center. IMO that misses the mark, the center is the business part of the reticle.

Even in my oldest Leupold shotgun scope, an "E" suffix Vari-X IIc 2-7x33 from 1997, the HD reticle gives enough contrast and a passes enough light to be full functional well before or after legal shooting light everywhere that I've hunted in North America. The current VX-2 lens coatings are better than the 20 year old Vari-X IIc and pass more light, but I can't be certain all that improvement in technology would make a quantifiable difference in the woods.

I do have a couple of Redfield scopes that I sent to Ironsight, Inc., to be rebuilt and had the reticles changed to their "#1" European style and that reticle is so heavy/coarse that they are too heavy for any fine work.