Month: September 2020

Range Report: CZ 550 American / Meopta Optika6

Gun/Ammo Tests, Optics, The Gun Thing

Yesterday I took the new toys out to work, said toys being a CZ 550 American (6.5x55mm Swede), topped with a Meopta Optika6 3-18x50mm scope.  Here’s the tout ensemble:

…and the illuminated reticle:

…which I would only use if I were hunting at dusk or dawn.  (On paper, the cross-hairs work just fine.)

Now, I’m pretty sure I heard someone saying, “Meopta-whut?”

Me, too;  until I discovered who they are.  Here’s the full scoop, but the executive summary is:

  • Czech company
  • been around since the 1930s
  • mainly makes commercial photo-enlargers
  • renowned for the quality of their glass
  • started making scopes a couple decades ago
  • if you’ve ever bought a Zeiss Conquest scope [raises hand], it was made by Meopta and stamped by Zeiss
  • congratulations;  you just paid two hundred-odd dollars more than you had to, for the identical scope.

Let me get the basics out of the way, first.

This scope cost me about $650, and I honestly think I got $1,200 value for it.  Holy cow:  the precision of the scope is astonishing, and the clarity as as good as any scope I’ve ever looked through.  I was originally going to get a Minox ZX-5i of similar power for about $100 more, but nobody had it in stock at the time and I was antsy, so I took a flyer on the Meopta, and I don’t regret it, at all.

That said, there are a couple of things that irritated me about the scope’s setup operation.

I’m using Warne Maxima rings, the tallest you can get, because the 50mm bell needs to be raised off the barrel and CZ bases are quite low.  As it turned out, the bell wasn’t a problem.  What was a problem was that yuge magnification adjusting ring on the scope:

…which proved very good at preventing the bolt from being pulled back — which, in a bolt-action rifle, is Not A Good Thing.  I had to put a shim into the rear scope ring to raise the scope the requisite millimeter or thereabouts so that the bolt handle would clear the adjusting ring.

The second issue also involved the adjuster, and it was the little stick screwed into it, supposedly to aid the easy working of the mag adjuster (which, by the way, is hellish stiff, more than it has to be, I think, but it should ease up with use).

Well, maybe the stick helps adjust the ring, but what it also does is get in the way when you’re working the bolt — and yes, there are several threaded holes to choose from to overcome this problem:  but what I found was that moving the stick so that it stayed out of the way worked for one magnification setting, but as soon as I changed the magnification (from, say, 10x to 5x or 12x to 18x), the fucking thing would catch on my hand when I worked the bolt.  And nothing makes Uncle Kimmy crankier than when something interferes with him working the bolt.

So I unscrewed the little stick and threw it away.  Don’t need it, won’t need it, especially as the adjusting ring has those deep, thick grooves to provide a decent grip*.

But those were the only issues I encountered at that session.  The scope worked flawlessly, and zeroing it took just under an hour (I generally let the barrel cool between strings, especially a skinny lil’ thing like the 550’s.)

Like an idiot, I hadn’t bothered bore-sighting the scope before hitting the range, and I paid for it by having to waste over a dozen rounds just to land the boolets into a dinner-plate group.

I had no intention of going for MOA (except by luck) during this session, anyway.  This is a hunting rifle rather than a precision target piece, and in any event, I was only shooting one brand of ammo to get everything into the same zip code.

The ammo was my standard sighting-in choice:  bottom-of-the-line no-frills Federal 140-gr Soft Point:


…with which I managed this 100-yard grouping with the last 5 rounds in the box.

That’s close enough for government work (or anti-government work, depending on your circumstances).

Now that the scope is roughly zeroed, next week I’ll get serious and start running through the dozen-odd different brands and bullet weights I have lying around in Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer, to see which one works best.

What fun.

*I don’t wear heavy gloves when shooting, anyway — in very cold weather (e,g, Scotland), I use the flip-off mitten type over thin gloves.

Har Har Har

Food & Drink, Funny Stuff

Responding to yesterday’s post about Glen Fohdry single malt, Reader Roy waxed rhapsodic about various single malt Scotches, ending with:

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I still like fine bourbon whiskey too.

…which reminded me of the old homo joke:  “Women are okay, but they’re not like the real thing.”

I feel the same way about bourbon.

Evolution

Snowflakes, Sports

One-time F1 champion driver Kimi Raikonnen is famously bullshit-free;  while driving for Ferrari a few years back, he got irritated by the constant stream of advice and orders coming over the radio from the pit wall team, and uttered the immortal line:  “Leave me alone;  I know what I’m doing.”   He finished on the podium, driving a car that was truthfully speaking nowhere near the level of his competitors’.

And he’s back in the headlines today, posting this pic:

For those not in the know, that’s one-time F1 champion James Hunt in characteristic pose (missing only a pit bunny on his errr  arm to make it completely accurate), while on the right is Mr. Woke, Lewis Hamilton.

Now the Hamilton fanbois are going to point out that whereas Hunt and Raikonnen only won the F1 championship once each, Our Lewis has won it six times.   (In their defense:  Hunt and Raikonnen won their respective championships driving cars that were charitably called “competitive” at the time, whereas Hamilton is driving a Mercedes which has outstripped all other cars by a wide margin, for the past four or five years at least.)

Whatever.  Raikonnen is in the right, while Hamilton is left — far Left, with his BLM-kneeling and wokey T-shirts.

I wish Hunt were alive today:  he’d piss all over that T-shirt, probably while Hamilton was still wearing it.

News Roundup

Bad News

All the news that’s fit to shorten, like 5′ tall Kylie Minogue.


…ahhh there’s nothing like young love.  You may all puke, now.


…ChiComs apologize for error;  missile was actually aimed at a Uighur village 200 miles away.


…Aberdeen, Glasgow, it doesn’t matter;  nobody south of the River Tweed can understand either of them.


…more good news for the anti-gun crowd.


…at least he has supporters — unlike you, Mayor Butt-Boy.


…change “two-thirds” into “99.999%”, and we’ll all be happy.


…good question.  Enjoy the fruits of your labors, Minnesoduh assholes.


…but is still younger than Willie Nelson’s little swimmers.


…from the numbers, “Anywhere else” seems to be the answer.


…didn’t Lady Gagging or whatever she calls herself already do this?

Stealing Power

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Elections, Marxists

It’s become a fact of modern American life that whatever the Left accuses the Republicans (specifically Trump) of doing, the Left are either already doing, or plan to do themselves — what Glenn Reynolds often refers to as “projection”.

So, for example, the Republicans are “denying people the vote” by attempting to stop voter fraud, when in fact it’s the Left who are nullifying registered voters’ franchise by encouraging non-citizens to vote, or else busing people from poll station to poll station so that they can vote several times in the same election.

And of course, there’s the “Trump will refuse to leave office if he loses” trope — i.e. he won’t accept the result of the election, when in fact it’s the Left who won’t accept their loss:

A loss by Joe Biden under these circumstances is the worst case not because Trump will destroy America (he can’t), but because it is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles.

(The article, by the way, is the biggest load of shit, but read it anyway — at least the asshole admits that the Left has no interest in accepting electoral loss.)

In presidential elections, once is a fluke; twice is a pattern. I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favorite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change—at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.

Thus, Trump’s first victory over the most unpopular candidate ever fielded by the Democrats was a “fluke”, and now, aided by skewed, inaccurate and dishonest polling that missed the entirety of Trump’s support in 2016, the “more popular” candidate losing will trigger dissatisfaction in the voting process?  (Oh yeah… let’s hear it for “the Russians”, for whom even their own investigation — remember Robert Mueller’s little gang of hatchetmen? — couldn’t prove collusion with the Trump campaign.)

It couldn’t possibly be that American voters might reject the Left’s politics — how could it be, when the Left is inarguably so correct? After all, doesn’t everyone want open borders, sky-high taxes, a welfare state, a nationalized health system, disarmed citizens, diversity-led racist hiring- and education practices and redistribution of private wealth?  (Those who don’t, of course, are EvilRaycissFascist Trumpalos, because without a class enemy, Marxism fails:  time after time after time.)

No, it can’t be rejection:  it must be the process.  After Trump wins again in November (and assuming he doesn’t get a popular majority of the vote), expect a full-frontal assault on the Electoral College, with intimidation and threats directed at electors as well.  And that’s just the political response.

If what this asshole (and many others) are telling us is correct, then in the event of a Biden-Harris loss in November we can expect not this:

…but this?

Let’s see how that plays out, shall we?

We conservatives may actually have to start living up to the Leftists’ depiction of us.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.