Tag: Leupold 4X

Vanguard Safari First Shots

Last week I wrote a blog about my .300 Weatherby Magnum Vanguard Safari, and I recently spent a bit of time with it on the range.  In a word:  Wow!   This is a most impressive firearm, as is the .300 Weatherby Magnum cartridge.

Before the rifle arrived, I called both Leupold and Weatherby to ask which rings and mounts I should use to mount a 4X Leupold scope.  Both told me they didn’t know because there are so many possible combinations of rifles and scopes (which kind of surprised me; you’d think they would know).  The Leupold tech rep suggested I try their dual dovetail mounts and low rings and he gave me the part numbers.  (so it was off to Amazon for both).  The Leupold guy said he didn’t know if what he suggested would work and if it would clear the scope’s bells, but that’s what I ordered and it worked like a champ.  The Leupold scope has a lot of eye relief and it just looks right with the low mounts.  The matte finish on the rifle, the mounts, the rings, and the scope looks good.

Good buddy John asked about how I sight in a scope, and I thought I would explain that here.  I don’t use a boresighting device.  The idea of sticking something in the muzzle doesn’t appeal to me, as it is the most sensitive part of the rifle and any nicks or dings in this area will hurt accuracy significantly.  My approach is to:

      • Set the rifle up on the rest, pointing it at a bullseye downrange.
      • Remove the bolt.
      • Look through the barrel and center the bullseye at 50 yards in the bore.  I use the rear opening of the barrel and the front opening of the barrel (which visually form two concentric rings) like a peep sight, getting the circles formed by both centered on the bullseye.
      • Bring the scope’s crosshairs onto the bullseye without moving the rifle on the rest.
      • Fire the first shot.
      • Make scope adjustments accordingly for subsequent shots.

I can usually get the first shot within 10 inches of the bullseye using the above approach.  A couple of times I’ve got it within 2 inches of the bullseye on the first shot, and this was one of them.  I took some photos to make my explanation easier to understand.

First, set the rifle in the rest and have a target at either 25 yards or 50 yards:

Next, center the bullseye in the barrel:

Then (without moving the rifle), bring the scope’s crosshairs onto the target:

At this point, my approach is to fire one shot to see where it hits and then make adjustments.  My first shot was the one at the lower right in the target below.  I cranked in 15 clicks of elevation and 15 of windage, and my next shot was near the middle of the orange bullseye.

That was close enough to get me started.  I then moved a target out to 100 yards and fired a few groups.  This was the third group, and it measured 0.865 inch.

Not everything ran as smoothly as that target above suggests, though.  About a third of my .300 Weatherby Magnum ammunition (all ammunition I reloaded) had difficulty chambering or would not chamber at all, and the rest of the groups were all much larger than that .865 group shown above.  I was pretty sure the chambering difficulties were affecting accuracy, but that one good group showed the rifle had potential.

I recognized that the chambering difficulty was the same problem I had encountered with my .257 Weatherby Magnum Ruger No. 1 rifle.  A traditional resizing approach didn’t work on the .257 Weatherby Magnum cartridge, and when I called Sierra about it, they told me turn the resizing die into the press an additional quarter turn after the die contacts the shell holder.  I think there’s another issue as well due to case distortion due to the neck expander dragging during the resizing operation.  If the cases are not well lubed inside the case neck, the dual-radius Weatherby shoulder is more easily distorted upward when withdrawing the case from the resizing die (more easily distorted, that is, than would be a conventional non-dual-radius case shoulder).  The trick is to lube the inside of the case neck and to do the extra quarter turn of the die into the press.  This addresses the neck expansion longitudinal distortion, takes out all the clearances in the reloading press’s pivot points, and accounts for any springback in case exterior dimensions.

I went home, pulled the bullets on the .300 Weatherby Magnum cartridges that wouldn’t chamber, resized as described above, cleaned the cases thoroughly, and then reloaded them.

On the next range visit a few days later, every round chambered easily, and wow, the results were good.  My first group was the one at the top of the target shown below (it measured 1.452 inches).   I dialed in five clicks left the Leupold and fired the next two groups in the two lower targets.  The group on the left is 1.191 inches, and the one on the right is 0.871 inch.

Note that these 300 Weatherby Magnum groups were fired with a 4X scope at 100 yards.  It’s not easy to get great groups with a rifle that smacks you authoritatively each time you squeeze the trigger (the .300 Weatherby Magnum is one potent SOB).  My load was the 180-grain Remington jacketed soft point bullet and IMR 7828 SSC powder a grain or two below max, and I’m not done yet.  If my shoulder and my wallet hold out (and I can find components) I’ll bet I can get a ½-inch out of this rifle.

Take a peek at an earlier blog on three rifles chambered for the .300 Weatherby Magnum!

Three .300 Weatherby rifles. Click on the photo to read the story.

What’s it like meeting Roy Weatherby?  Hey, take a look!

Roy Weatherby in his office in the old South Gate facility. I met Roy in that office and had a nice conversation with him. Click on the photo to get the story.

How about a Ruger No. 1 in .300 Weatherby Magnum!

One of the world’s classiest rifles…a Ruger No. 1. This one is chambered in .300 Weatherby. You can get to that story by clicking on the photo.

Hey, how about an earlier standard Vanguard in .300 Weatherby Magnum!

Bought used but in as new condition, this Tupperware-stocked Vanguard is unusually accurate!

More gun stories?  You bet!  Just click here!

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A Tale of Two Leupolds

About 10 years ago, maybe more, I had a gig in Houston to teach an FMEA course to a consulting company.  This particular consulting outfit had a contract to teach Failure Modes and Effects Analysis to their customer, and they had taken the assignment without knowing anything about the topic.  It happens more often than you might imagine.  It was no big deal for me as I’d been teaching FMEA for years, I had a class ready to go, and I was in and out in a couple of days.  There was a nice paycheck at the end, and it was all easy peasy.

While I was in Houston, I found a local gunstore.   I stopped in to check out what they had. I do that pretty much every place I go and I’ve been doing it for nearly 50 years. You never know what you’re going to find.  The Houston gunstore was a disappointment (like most have been in the last 20 years) because all they offered (rifles, handguns, and shotguns) were these black plastic abominations.  Like the cannibals say, there’s no accounting for some people’s taste.

Anyway, the Houston gunshop had a junkbox/discount container holding all the gunshop detritus they were blowing out.  You’ve seen that sort of bargain bin before, I’m sure…things that are one step away from the dumpster. In that box was a beat-up old Leupold 4X scope that was so severely worn there was almost no anodizing left, the lenses at both ends were scratched  and chipped, and there were dents and dings along the scope’s length.

But, it was a Leupold.  In the scope world, that’s as good as it gets.  Leupold scopes are the best.  I bought that scope for $20, figuring maybe I’d use it if Bass Pro ever ran another scope sale where they give you $40 on any trade-in scope. They used to run sales like that, and I’ve used decrepit scopes as trading fodder, but my trade-ins were always cheapie scopes that had failed and didn’t cost much more than $40 when new.  That wasn’t the main reason I pulled the trigger, though.  That scope was a Leupold.  Even though it was trashed, it was still a Leupold.

The hoped-for future scope sale at Bass Pro never materialized (I guess they learned their lesson from guys like me on past sales).  The Leupold went under a shelf on my reloading bench and I kept it for when I had to mount scopes with twist-in rings, figuring the clapped-out old Leupold 4X was good for that kind of abuse. With all the damage on the lenses you couldn’t hardly see through the thing.  It became my scope mount installation assembly aid.  Now it was in my junkpile instead of the one at that gunstore in Houston.

About a month ago good buddy Greg and I were on the range and a different Leupold scope (a 3×9) that I had on a .22 250 Ruger No. 1 wouldn’t adjust (it’s the scope on the No. 1 in the large photo above).  That surprised me, as a Leupold scope had never failed on me before.  The elevation dial was stuck.  I wasn’t worried, though.  Leupold scopes have a lifetime warranty, as mentioned in the video below:

When I got home I took the 3×9 scope off the No. 1 and sent a note to Leupold’s customer service.   Then, just for grins, I told Leupold about the old 4X (the one I described above), and I asked if they could refurbish it.  I didn’t know if Leupold offered that kind of service for old scopes.   Within a day, I had an email from Leupold with a return material authorization for both scopes, and off they went.  I didn’t think they’d be able to do anything with the 4X scope, and they didn’t tell me what they would charge to refurbish it.  But I sent it in anyway.

The Leupold 3×9 came back a couple of weeks ago and it’s fixed, cleaned, and it looks great.  Leupold somehow managed to refinish the minor marks in the anodizing (you know, what you get from the scope rings), and the scope could almost pass for new.  I’m very satisfied with it.

And then, a week or two later, the 4X scope (the one I paid $20 for) arrived.  Except it wasn’t the scope I had sent to Leupold. It was instead a brand new Leupold FXII 4×33 (they don’t even sell these anymore), but there it was, brand new and in a new shrink wrapped Leupold box. As a point of reference, when this scope was last offered by Leupold (I’m not sure when that was), they went for $389.

My charge? $0.

Yep, Leupold replaced that beat-up old scope with a brand new one at no charge. I wish I had taken a photo of the original scope.  Trust me, it looked like a $20 bargain bin item with one leg in the trash and the other on a banana peel.  In its place, I now have a brand new Leupold.

You might wonder:  Why a straight 4X scope?  Even though many scope companies don’t offer fixed power scopes in 4X these days, I think that a simple 4-power magnification is the best there is for hunting.  The higher mags have too narrow a field of view, it takes too long to find the target, and the whole variable power thing, to me, is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.  Nope, I’m perfectly happy with a straight 4X scope.

Leupold doesn’t offer the straight 4-power scope any more, but they have a wide variety of variable scopes.  The most frequently seen variant is the 3×9 Leupold.  This is the Leupold you see on that beautiful Ruger No. 1 you see at the top of this blog.   I have the 3×9 Leupold on my Model 70, too…the same one I used on a successful wild pig hunt a couple of years ago.

Folks, trust me on this:  When people say Leupold has fantastic customer service, they speak the truth. I can’t imagine ever buying another scope from any other company.

More Tales of the Gun!