Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics How many of you have had Talley LW’s fail

IMO, aluminum is for pack frames. Scope rings properly made will be of steel. Screw the weight difference.






But---who puts a 28-ounce rifle scope on a Forbes Ultra Light??

No problem but I always lap and torque. Have learned those screws need a lot less tightening than I used in the past.

I have noticed that the hole in the lower half is usually not round. Was told they were intentionally made that way and it was a “design feature”. Really dumb idea if true.

I buy the bases and split rings, put a dab of silicone between rings and scope.

Nope.

Two 7 Rem Mags, three 7mm-08s, two .30-06, one .300 Wby Mag, four .223 Rems.

It's not just the bottoms...the tops have the same 'pinch point' at the parting lines.

Talley LW's are extruded aluminum. And being an extrusion, the flex that happens at this pinch point gets transferred throughout the ring/base, which can lead to cracks. Combine that with over tightening and you can have failures (in some instances) as well as pinched scope tubes. Once a few minutes are taken to address this, they're a darn good setup.

It's an easy matter to lap the 'pinch' out of the Talley LW's. It's done on every set that gets worked on here.

Here's a 1" lapping bar set into virgin Talley LW's...you can clearly see where the 'pinch' is and that the lapping bar doesn't contact the bottom of the rings. You can see that the bases have previously been bedded to the receiver for maximum contact:



Doesn't take much equipment to straighten 'em out:



Relieve the parting line on the tops with a small file to eliminate the pinch point:



100% contact, no breakage, no tweaked scope tubes, no tracking issues because of scope damage.

It always works. -Al

Al:

I don't disagree with the efficacy of your methods; however, to me, it seems like a lot to go through to still have something that might fail from the normal stresses of doing its job. The material they use is brittle - examples of this are all over this thread and many like it - and it seems to have trouble holding up to the myriad directional stresses intrinsic to securing a scope to a rifle. Further, these sort of chronic stress problems seem to manifest themselves when the item is being used in a way that changes the normal stress dynamic on the materials, such as being bounced/carried around during a week of hunting vs sitting in gun safe.

Certainly some of the problems are due to over torquing; but it still doesn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy about the fact that a few extra inch lbs might bring about catastrophic failures at inopportune times.

The ring strap I had trouble with didn't exhibit different pinch points; both rings clamped evenly around the scope right from the package. I always check alignment with a straight edge across the bases and a lapping bar through the rings.

Ultimately, I'm sure the Talley LW can be made more serviceable with some well informed attention to detail; but, this treatment doesn't fundamentally change their nature. In my experiences, there's plenty of options out there that don't require much or any de stressing to be as solid as they can be, and are more robustly built from outset.

Yep...lots of choice out there for good, solid scope mounting.

All of them can benefit from some attention to detail to ensure a solid, stress free set up.

Good shootin'. -Al

It makes her feel alive

LOL! Tell me about it. You can visit 50 hunting forums and not be able to dredge up a single negative word about a particular product. But come here and 50% of the people will claim to have had a 100% failure rate with the same item. I swear if you started a thread here entitled "Oxygen, What Do You Think of It" The first responce would be, "F@#k the S@#t, I quite breathing it 5 years after it let me down on a elk hunt." LOL!

And I'm with you. I never thought of myself as lucky. I've never had a Rem Model 700 trigger problem; broke a model 700 bolt handle; had a Leupold scope fail; or had a Talley scope mount break. But after reading about the claimed failure rate of these items here at the Fire, Hell, maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket. LOL! But then again I shoot animals with my rifles. I don't hold them by the barrel and beat critters to death with the other end of it. Maybe that's the difference.

Dont forget about the extractors that fail all the time!

Yes, extractors and bushing the firing pin!!! Haha

I remember hearing how remingtons weren’t a very good choice for dangerous game, if you fell or got knocked down, you couldn’t feed a round into the chamber. So one day when everyone was gone outta the house, I loaded 4-5 remingtons up. I floundered around on the living room floor acting like a Cape buffalo had a horn up my ass!!! 😂😂😂 I know I know funny shiit, but guess what, every fuucking rifle chambered rounds without a hiccup... people sure are funny, they hear something and oh boy it’s the gospel

Boy it is time to buy a lottery ticket!!

Have been using Talley Lightweights, and the mounts they were based on, the rings designed by Melvin Forbes for his Ultra Light Arms rifles, for 32 years now. The original ULA rings were made by a Midwest company that as I recollect used the same aluminum alloy.

Have never had a failure, and one of the examples I've mentioned before was the rings on the first ULA rifle my wife and I owned, a .270 Winchester with a #1 contour Douglas barrel that would groups three shots of 130-grain Partitions into 2" or less--at 300 yards. Eileen used it as her Main Hunting Rifle for around a decade, and among other things it bounced around the Arctic Ocean in an open boat, and went on horseback and backpack hunts. It never changed POI until the scope itself went to schidt.

When the company that made the original ULA rings went out of business, Melvin and Talley made a deal where they'd make rings for his rifles as long as they could make them for other rifles. Have used the Talleys on both NULAs and various other actions since then with NO problems. Dunno how many rifles I've had them on, but it has to be 2-3 dozen. Have yet to have the base or rings crack, but then again I don't crank hard on the screws, using the inch-pound recommendations of Talley.

Have only lapped one set, which as far as I could tell made zero difference. That was on a Weatherby Vanguard Sub-MOA in .300 Weatherby.

But can see how the bases could crack if they didn't match the contour of the action very well. Have had problems with that using other bases and rings over the decades, as far as I have been able to determine 75-80% of the problems are due to the actions, not the rings. Have usedTalleys with several heavyweight "dialing" scopes, again no problems after thousands of rounds. Though I do use Loc-Tite when attaching them to to the rifle.

But that's just one person's experience..

Talley Lightweight’s are not pieces of junk but, they are only $40. What do you really expect for cheap? They are nice but not infallible.

The fact that Talley LW's fail is not disputable. Plenty of pics to prove it and I've seen three with my own eyes. Why they fail may be due to lapping, over tightening, out of spec actions, etc.etc. But regardless, they fail. I've never seen any other ring fail (break), all subject to the same conditions.

Then you haven't had much experience with various scope mounts.

How would you know that about me?

According to Melvin Forbes, the "pinch point" is by design. It's also a sticking point for me, pun intended.

No failures here, have them on various rifles since Talley started offering them. I even have a few mounted with 8-40 screws. I do chamfer and lap them.

Never had a failure on at least 5 rifles & some 338’s in there. Some mentioned China in the thread. Mine have always said Made in USA on the packet. I bought a set for my 35Whelen kimber just recently & they also say Made in USA on them.
Of late, I have been using Warne steel bases & their steel rings exclusively but this wasn’t due to Talley quality. Talley’s are just harder to source here...
I have had a set of alloy Gamereapers(single screw variety) not hold my Swarovski Z6 1.7-10x42 in my 9.3x62 Tikka, so I switched to steel Warnes. Problem solved.