product review. new barrel, new scope, junky ranger finder

[.270]

guess i drunk too much diet mountain dews today. still awake. anyway, put a new schnieder barrel and a leupold vari x 3 6.5x20x40 with a custom reticle and turret on FARKILLER, my .300 win mag model 70. barrel was installed by kokiak precision. i can highly recommend this guy. good work. took some time to get the velocity of the bullets to match the reticle, but a few trips to the range with the chronograph and a lot of different loads finally worked out. my youngest son went with me today to do the final zero. my new shoulder doesn't hold up too well to lostsa shootin' and i'm just getting a little shaky anyway. new setup with a good rifleman holdin' the gun shoots 3 shots all touching at 100 yds. well under 1 inch at 200. knocked the gong of the chain at 422. hit a baseball sized hole in a rock at 690 yards. twice. hit a deer sized rock at 850 dead center. (these last 3 shots were all with me doin' the shootin') only dissapointment in the whole deal was my new leupold range finder. can't recomend it at all. took it back to cabelas and traded it in on a leica 1200. (they gave me full price on the refund, so i can recommend cabelas too, think they'll give me a clothing line?) the leupold was supposed to range 1500 on reflective surfaces. 900 on a tree and 800 on animals. sometimes it would range in the high 600's on reflective stuff. sometimes. wouldn't range an alluminum barn at 500 when we were in colorado goat huntin'. wouldn't range pronghorns at 100. i know they're hard to read because of the hollow hair, but deer and elk were the same. had to hit a rock or tree in the neighborhood to make it work. first click with the leica read 1302 of the side o' the cardinal staduim. my kid has one and his is fine. anyway, if anyone is interested, i can highly recoment the schieder and kodiak's work. spendy, but the results are amazing. the varix 3 with the custom reticle is too cool to even try to explain. also kinda 'spensive, but not compared to swarovskis or some of the zeiss'. real disapointed in the range finder tho. top of the line leupold and it wasn't worth much. heck, i can guess out to 600 close enough for most stuff. most of the time it had a hard time on anything over about 350. well, there is my product review, and we all know i'm the smartest guy there is, so heed it maroons. Lark.

 

[cactusjack]

What model Range finder was the one you took back. I was considering buying one of the Leupold 1000 with the angle system. I have the Leica 1200 now but I am a sucker for new gadgets.

[ultra300mag]

I own a pair of Leica Geovids and my son in law was looking for a range finder. He does not have a lot of money and asked me what I would get. Of course I told him that if he has the money that he could not go wrong with any of the Leica's. He bought a leupold RX IV that does the angle and range. He was very dissapointed with the ranges it would read. We went and compaired it to my Leica's and there was no comparison. I had told him earlier that I had tested the Leupold and Bushnell and that he could count on reading about half what they adveritise. That was pretty close to what his did. He just sold his on ebay and bought the Leica 1200. Very compact and very good at reading the ranges advertised. I know it costs more but if you are planning on shooting longer ranges I would look at one of the higher end rangefinders for sure. Good luck.

[pwrguy]

I just got the Leica 1200. I love it. You can't alway's get it to range that far, but most of the time you can if you find a rest and try hitting a few other surfaces in the same area. My previous one was a bushnell 800 and it got the job done most of the time. I find it usefull being able to range beyond my shooting ability, it will help you in determining where to shoot from many times. Having a rangefinder you can afford is much better than nothing, I'm just not sure what cheaper one to suggest.

[.270]

it was the most expensive one leupold made at the time. angle finder and all that crap. never did figure out how to use all the that stuff. i wanted it to tell me how far away stuff was. and it never did that very well. seemed to be real temperature sensitive. hardly worked when it was cold. and you had to push the button 3 times to get a read. that was part of the system. this leica, you point it, push the button and it tells you how far away it is. i didn't leupold would eve make anything as crummy as that thing was. Lark.