Sunday, July 13, 2014

Adapt and Overcome With a 110 Year Old FE Reed Lathe

I suppose the lathe might even be 120 years old.

Anyway, I've got this Evil Black Rifle with a 50 Beowulf upper  and I've never found a scope that I liked on it.  I bought a red dot sight from a friend and he threw in an old Russian-made scope that was collecting dust in his gun room.

The scope is an ATN 5x33LU and has a ballistic compensator mechanism.  It came with five or six discs to match the trajectories of different cartridges.  None of them was for 50 Beowulf but that didn't really bother me.   The rifle is a swamp gun for hogs and such.  I'm not going to be sniping elk across a canyon with it.  

I had a 4x Pentax on the EBR and it just didn't look right.  The little Pentax would look a lot better on an optically-challenged Savage 99 that I have in the safe so I finally decided to put the big Russian scope on the AR and the Pentax on the Savage.   The only hitch was that the Russian one is a 30mm scope and I had no rings for it.

I looked on line and never found anything that I wanted to pay shipping on but noticed a set of Weaver rings at the local Goose Berg this morning.  I figured I'd just get them and make the swap on both rifles.  It almost worked right out of the package.

The plan went awry because these particular rings were Tacticool rings that use six screws on each cap instead of two or four.  The cap is an inch thick and there wasn't a whole inch between the scope's turret and the optical lens bell.

I had it in my mind that I was going to put that scope on the EBR today and I didn't want to shelve the project again.  Besides that, The Lovely Bride went out last weekend and bought a deep freezer.  I gotta go get something to put in the stupid freezer so I got to studying on how much metal I'd need to remove from the ring to make it fit between the two bulges in the scope.   It looked like a pretty substantial chamfer on both ends would do it so I snugged it up in the ol' lathe's four jaw chuck and commenced to beveling the edges.



It actually worked pretty well. 




Now I have two rifles that need to be sighted in all over again.   Not a bad problem to have as long as you have more than two rifles.

The previous owner painted the scope green but I don't hate it that way.  One thing that I really like about this scope is that I absolutely can't see a thing through it if I'm looking through my glasses but the reticle and the target are both in perfect focus if I look over my glasses. 

That's important because I have gradient lenses and it means I won't have to waste time trying to find the sweet spot where my glasses focus at whatever range it is where the given pig is standing before I can shoot.  Another thing that I like is that the reticle is lighted.   Its black when the light is off and its red when its on.   It has a rheostat to adjust the brightness and it really stands out against the palmettos.  On top of all that, its built like a Stalin Tank.  The recoil of an unbraked 50 Beowulf can be a little rude and the extra weight won't hurt.




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