Video: Insyder Insyght: Airgun Scope Questions from Coinhound

Tyler is always combing through the comment section for questions and YouTube user Coinhound had several good questions about scopes. Keep those questions coming. You never know when we will make a video answer!

Video Transcript Below:

Welcome to the Pyramyd Insyder, I’m Tyler Patner. Today's video is gonna be on a viewer comment. Today's comment comes from Coin Hound 4, let's check it out. Coin Hound says, “I would like to see an in-depth video on zeroing scopes. What is the best distance to 0? What happens out past that distance and before the set 0 distance? Can you use a rifle scope on a PCP? How long will the scope last on the springer? Should the scope you mount it as close to the gun as possible? How about scopes with bells and whistles, when are they needed and when are they a waste of money? A lot of questions in there. Let's get into it. 

Short answer here, yes, you can use a rifle scope on a PCP. We're probably talking about centerfire rifle scopes here so the thing to consider is that a centerfire scope doesn't have a parallax adjustment in some cases, and if it does oftentimes they only go down to 25 or 50 yards, so you have to be concerned about what the minimum distance requirement you need to get a clearer image of your target is, so make sure that you get a scope that has a parallax adjustment that accommodates that. It's going to depend on so many factors that it's going to make it impossible to answer a hundred percent of the time. That said, there are some things to consider when you are buying a scope for a spring piston or gas piston gun. So, the first thing to consider here is the warranty. You want to make sure that the manufacturer warranties the scope if it does break or have a problem when used on a spring piston or gas piston rifle too. You want to make sure that it's a scope that is obviously rated for use on a spring piston or gas piston rifle. Most scopes are. They say airgun rated or spring rated or something like that on the manufacturers website. Just to give you guys an idea, Leapers, Athlon, Hawk, and Mantas scopes that Pyramyd Air sells are all going to be spring piston and gas piston rated. 

The last thing to consider is the amount of money you're spending. Okay, you get what you pay for, you spend a little bit more money, you're gonna get a better quality scope built on a better chassis that's hopefully going to last longer. Is that a guarantee? Of course not. Any spring piston or gas piston gun has the capability to break just about any scope you put on it, but spending a little bit more money means better quality which means you're going to have a better life expectancy. 

So, this is another very opinionated question here. So, for a bell and whistle, what I consider a bell or a whistle might not be what you consider one. That's okay. For me, I'm gonna take this a little bit different direction. Let's talk about the things that I think are absolutely necessary on an air rifle scope. So, number one is going to be a parallax adjustment of some sort. Now we have an adjustable objective here on this Leapers UTG. You also have side parallax adjustment where it's on that little side turret which is a bit more convenient in my opinion, but you're gonna spend a little bit more money to get it. Either way, I want a scope that has an adjustable parallax down to 10 yards so I can resolve an image, make it nice and clear from 10 yards and out. Another thing that I consider an essential feature is a mil dot or some other type of holdover reticle. So, I really prefer it, some people may not, but for me a mil dot or something with hash marks, something is going to be really essential for a lot of what I do with air guns, because I want to be able to shoot at various distances without having to actually click adjust my point of impact. If I had to think about some bell and whistle type features that really aren't essential to me something like a turret locking mechanism like we have on this Leapers UTG scope right here, that actually stops your turrets from adjusting so they don't get bumped or something like that. It's a nice feature. Is it an essential? Not for me, might be for you though. The other one is an illuminated reticle feature. A lot of people like them, but it's also very underutilized so really depends on what you're doing with your gun and scope combo, you know, whether you're using it in low light or some situation where you might need that, but again something that could be considered a bell and whistle, but it's also found commonly on a lot of scopes, but is it essential, I don't know, that's up to you. 

So, I'm gonna split this into two parts here in terms of what the best distance to zero at. It's a hundred percent dependent on what you're doing with your gun in your scope so if you know that you got a bird feeder in the backyard that you got some pests they keep attacking or something like that at 20 yards zero your gun at 20 yards. Guys, it's really simple in that kind of scenario, but if you know that you're shooting at multiple distances, what I often recommend is that people zero the gun for the apex of their trajectory. Now that's also a factor of not just your pellet and your velocity and things like that, but your scope height as well so before we head out to the range and show you what your trajectory looks like passed and before your zero point, we also want to show you guys what the impact of having your scope mounted either closer or further away from the centerline of the boar means which is Coin Hound’s last question. So, to do that before we head out to the range, I'm going to introduce you to my Walther LG 300. Now this is a 10-meter gun. It's only shooting about 580 feet per second with an 8.4 gram pellet so very, very slow, but we're gonna go ahead, I just mounted this Hawk Air Max 34 216 scope on it, we're gonna go out and get it zeroed on camera for you guys, show you that process, and then we'll go ahead and shoot it closer and further than our zero point, and show you what kind of impact that this two-inch scope height has on the trajectory. 

First thing we're gonna do without touching our scope adjustments, let's go ahead take a shot here. Now you want to hold dead center on the bolt, okay, so you can see we won't weigh the heck off to the right and just a touch high, so we're gonna go ahead and dial in our up adjustment here, and that looks about right, and now we're gonna go ahead and crank it all the way over now. We'll see if we have enough adjustment to compensate in laymen's terms. Sighting in your scope is just matching your point of aim to your point of impact. Almost there. Alright, so you'll notice how we are now dead on our last shot which is exactly what you want to do and we don't even have to use our target. We can actually use that point if we want to because theoretically we should be able to put it through the same hole. What do you know? Perfect. Alright, so now that we've made our adjustment here, over to our original point of impact, we're gonna go ahead and recenter everything and take another shot, and we should be very, very close, if not dead center, pretty much dead on, maybe a tad left. We can always adjust out for that. We'll take another one just to verify and right through the same hole, pretty satisfied with that zero. 

Alright, so now we're gonna see what our pellet does at our closest distance of 10 yards. Let's take a look. Alright, so about two mil dots low there and again just off to the left right about that second mil dot so we know that if we want to hit dead center on the target, we need to be two mil dots below the sign. Alright, so now we've got our target out at forty yards here, so just to give you an idea of what the trajectory looks like all the way out at 40, take a shot and see. So, you can see that's about three mil dots down, just off to the left. I'm not very concerned with the right left, but you can see that's a much more pronounced trajectory out at distance than we had at that 10 yard target. Let's take another one just to see what happens here and again just a little bit lower there, but still right around that third mil dot, so again you can see how much more pronounced the trajectory is here out of distance as opposed to 10 yards. 40 yards is quite a blaze further for a gun that's only shooting about 600 feet per second. 

So, with our Hawk Air Max 30 mounted, it's got a 15 millimeter bail, so we have to use high rings to make sure it clears the barrel. That puts us at about a two-inch scope height so that's what we're gonna use here. The red line at zero represents the centerline of your scope so because of that two-inch scope height, we do create an apparent rise as we shoot so with our 25-yard zero and our two inch bore height, we're hitting about a half inch low at ten yards and you'll notice as we start to get further out in our trajectory, we're right around fifteen yards. We hit what we call our flat spot or the apex of our trajectory. That's that top end of the pellets path and it produces a very flat area so if we were gonna translate this to a target, we're basically going to be zeroed from about 15 all the way out to the back end of our flat spot at around 25 yards before we start to experience any drop. Now you guys can see that once we get to that 25-yard point in the back end of our zero distance the pellet drops pretty dramatically. After this at 40 yards, we're experiencing about two and three-quarter inches of drop which is pretty significant. That's a lot of compensation you're gonna have to do and as you guys saw about three mil dots in our scope. 

So, to illustrate what increasing the scope height would do to our setup here, you can see with a 4-inch scope height we would actually hit our apex around the same 20-25 yard point, but it's a much shorter distance that we're zeroed at now, so we're with a two inch scope height we had a nice flat spot from about 15 to 25 yards now we only had that flat spot from about 21 out to 25-26 yards so it's a much shorter area that our guns going to be zeroed at. You can see how much more compensation we have to do on the short end leading up to the apex of our trajectory. The benefit of that higher mounted scope though is that we have a much less pronounced drop-off past our zero distance, so if you're doing a lot more long-range shooting, a higher mounted scope may actually benefit you where you're going to have to compensate a lot less where it counts at further distances. 

Alright, guys that about wraps it up for this look at scopes today. Hopefully, it answered some questions you guys might have had. Coin Hound, thank you for submitting the question. We had a lot of fun doing this video here and putting everything together. For the Insyder, I’m Tyler Patner, we'll see you guys at the next one. Thanks for tuning in to today's video. Hit us with the like and subscribe down below, feel free to leave a comment if you so desire, and tune in for the next one. We'll see you guys then.