The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 067: Vortex Optics Headquarters, Wisconsin. Steven Rinella talks with Paul Neess, Mark Boardman, Ryan Muckenhirn and Reuben Aleckson of Vortex Optics, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: June 8, 2017

Subjects Discussed: Bushwhackin', roost-tree shootin' and Mark's elitist turkey hunting attitude; "The 10th Legion"; Bowhunting for turks; Aluminum billets; The thickness of a human hair; Meat tenderizers vs meat mallets; Sunshades; Straight vs angled spotting scopes; The late Duncan Gilchrist's seminal masterpiece, "Hunt High"; The best all-around spotting scope; Giving critters a detailed stink-eye with your spotter; Eye and body fatigue while glassin'; What the hell is parallax?; Scopes and red dots for turkey guns; What the hell are red dots and green dots?; Minute-of-jug accuracy, and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, so raise your left hand if you've shot a turkey so far this year.

And your right hand if you found a morel. You guys are doing good. But only Johannes, what did they call you today? Only Johannes has a hand up. Two hands up. Yeah. But, Reuben, you're going morel hunting tonight? Yep.

It's like on right now starting it's the the morel harvest in the vicinity of vortex world headquarters is rocking getting there and you got like uh you got like a significant chunk of land you're gonna look at tonight yeah it's a pretty sizable spot. Did you have your left hand up a minute ago? Oh, so this is your inaugural trip out. Yeah. Now, Ryan, how have you killed turkeys but not found morels? Oh, good question. You don't care about mushrooms?

No, I'm a freak for morels. Oh, really? Yeah. I just haven't had the time. I was in Atlanta last week. Ryan and I have a good excuse. We were out of town? Yeah. I just haven't had the time. I was in Atlanta last week. Ryan and I have a good excuse. We were out of town. Yeah.

We're like a week back, so. But you've already done all kind of turkey hunting, haven't you? Yeah, yeah. I was in Nebraska really early part of April for the archery hunt. So Nebraska has a separate turkey archery hunt? They do, yes. That's a good idea. It is.

Late March to April 15th, and then it transitions to gun. Dude, that's such a good idea. Yeah, it was fantastic. Because they make you, most states make you like, right? They make you, archers will be offended by this, but they make you handicap yourself, right? And I only enjoy bow hunting when I can't use the other thing. That's why I have a bow yeah

like you know you bow hunt because it's like because you can't right yeah and then i'm out there and i'm like sitting there man like man if i had my gun i would have got that thing every but i can't yeah i'm trying to remember now ryan from when i lived there though because we'd do that early archery hunt and then at least I'm going off memory, but I think it was actually a separate archery-only tag. Yes. So it didn't even – You couldn't even get into your tag.

It didn't eat your tag supply up. No. Yeah. Three birds. You can shoot three birds in the state of Nebraska. But if you didn't fill it, then you couldn't use that tag on the shotgun. It was like archery-only. Are they still killing all kind of turkeys in the fall out in Nebraska?

I haven't done the fall hunt. Dude, I kind of feel like I don't have an ax to grind here. Like, you know, I've shot, I'm trying to think if I've ever killed a turkey in the fall. I shot at one one time. I was trying to hit him in the head with a 300 hunting mule deer in an area where we could kill turkeys in the fall. I can't think if think of ever killed one.

But I feel like turkey populations are so high. And now they're starting to see some declines in some areas. And everybody's got ideas about this. There's some talk about some kind of disease that strikes domestic turkeys that may have spread into wild turkeys. But one of the things people are throwing out there is that that fall hen harvest could be so i feel like in the future you might see um you might see less fall hunting opportunities i wonder how many are actually killed in the fall you know we all we all go out and everybody's got a fall turkey tag in your pocket when you're bow

hunting deer but man you never very rare it seems like. I know I have never killed one in the fall either. I know a guy that I went to high school with who gets after him real hard because he's got a dog. So he likes to hunt. He very much likes to run, likes to train turkey dogs and hunt turkeys because he likes working with a dog. And they do good.

Yeah. Kind of like that going out on purpose. Yeah, because if you read that Colonel Tom Kelly's book, The Tenth Legion. Have you guys ever heard of The Tenth Legion? Must read. Yeah. It's like if you haven't read that book, you got to read it. It's about turkey hunters.

It's about a turkey hunter. It's a turkey alabama who was hunting back when there weren't any turkeys it's just kind of like it's the it's it's one it's hilarious i mean he's a very funny writer and it paints a really good picture because this is like an old guy who started out hunting turkeys when if you saw a track it was a a successful hunt, like back in those days, you know. And he sort of tracks kind of everything about turkeys. He's got observations about turkeys that will surprise you and things he's watched turkeys do, including feeding on crayfish, that he's just like an acute observer of turkeys.

What the hell was I talking about him for? Fall turkey hunting, I think. Somehow you were jumping and you ate a turkey. No, I was going somewhere else. Dogs, maybe. Dogs. Dogs and turkeys. No. Damn. Really?

Really? That's unlike you, Steve. And none of you guys were listening carefully enough to follow what I was talking about. Am I just talking to the air? I was right on track. Tom Kelly. Tom Kelly. 10th Legion.

Yeah, who cares? So, really? Just, that's it? Tom Kelly. Colonel Tom Kelly. The 10th Legion. Oh, we're talking about turkey populations overall in general being down or lower now or seeing some decline?

That was the transition. Now, he, I'll tell you, just to salvage my point, I'll tell you that Tom Kelly did not think highly of people that bushwhacked turkeys. Mm-mm. He felt that like- Or decoy users. They're only like slightly- Yeah.

Just above a bushwhacker. But the first turkey I ever killed, I bushwhacked. I bushwhacked probably the first half dozen turkeys I killed. Oh, my total turkey numbers would be cut at least in half if you took away all my bushwhacks. I don't like it so much anymore. I like it more than having no turkey. But if I had to spend one day

bushwhacking them or three days calling one, I would spend the three days to call one in. Somewhere on that person. So the old guys that used to shoot them out of the roost tree, that's down on the bottom. Tom Kelly talks about that. He talks about roost tree shooting. No, but he likes

a good, clean call and the turkey in. I'm going back to my memory banks and i've shot a fair amount of birds i'm not i don't think i've bushwhacked a single bird oh come on and i'm not and i'm not an elitist i'm not any sort of elitist because i would definitely bushwhack well you can't say something elitist and say you're not an elitist i'm not saying i'm against it and I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. You're just not that sneaky. That could be it. You could

do like a humble bragging, right? You could humble brag it and make it seem like you're like, yeah, I'm just not a sneaky guy, so I've had to call in all my turkeys. I'm not trying to humble. I was just looking back on my history of turkey hunting. Where have you killed most of your turkeys i'm not trying to humble i was just no i'm with you it's just i was looking back on my history of turkey hunting so where have you killed most of your turkeys washington nebraska here

oh kind of even numbers mostly mostly washington nebraska i've killed like three birds here so did you learn how to hunt turkeys from someone that knew how to hunt turkeys uh well when we first got birds man like if somebody killed a turkey like they were like a very like interesting person to know like in washington when it started you know people started to get into it so like you'd like talk to some guy you're like oh my gosh you've killed one like this you know tell me you know and people nobody really had it figured out so people would tell you stuff and then like now i look back i'm like yeah that's just like incorrect information you know and I don't think they're a sandbag and, you know,

but there's kind of this mysterious new thing, but yeah. You decided to get into it for real and like learn how to call. Yeah. Yeah. I only, I learned how to call turkeys just because I knew that sometimes bushwhacking didn't work out.

I was like, I needed like an ace in the hole for when you were in a bad bushwhack situation. Right. And it wound up being, we would bushwhack them out in like the badlands, right? So you can see, you know, good visibility. Then we start, then they started having this, there's this area that's a heavily timbered area

and you can't see a thing there. And they started issuing some number of tags. And it was like, at first, they would issue 25 tags for this big valley. And you just weren't going to bushwhack a turkey there because they were in the timber. Right. So then we started, like, just getting box calls. But then you're hunting turkeys that had never been called. Right.

Because it was just the first couple years. I drew the tag a couple years when there weren't even, I drew the tag a couple of years because people didn't even really know about this yet. They hadn't caught on. So then I thought turkey calling was easy. Then later I went to call turkeys in places where turkey knew about calls. And, you know, it was a lot different.

Now, Colonel Tom Kelly, who wrote the 10th Legion, thinks that, like, I think that if you call a newTurkey, he didn't come. It was because you were messing up. You weren't calling right. Right. He thinks that that's not even kind of it.

That it's unpredictable. I could agree with that. Because he's like, I've watched Toms feeding and watched hens yelping at them and the Tom won't lift his head up. Right. So it's not that you can't call because she damn sure can call because she's a turkey, you know, and he's not coming to her. That makes sense. I mean, it does seem like oftentimes, you know, I'm sure you've experienced it too, but like they either want to come or they don't. Like they're just in the mood and they'll come in or they're not in the mood and they're not going to come the mood changes all the time yeah

very fickle well that's good to hear makes me feel good for being a fairly poor turkey caller that i can just flail away on that box call out there and it's not my fault when they don't come right right it might yeah it might be uh janice so, so you hunted Montana, Ryan, two states? Yep, Nebraska and Minnesota. So is that like a normal thing where you just do all kinds of turkey hunting? I try to. I try to. And then you got, like whose property are you hunting on?

I've got some family property back in Minnesota and a lot of public land. I hunted all sorts of places, Nebraska now. Does Nebraska have good public land turkeys? Quite a bit. Right along the plat. Get your on X maps and open it up and it's anywhere that's blue. Really? Yeah. It's great. I mean, I think, well, actually you go up into like the Northeastern part of the state too, just South of Yankton, South Dakota, right over the state line there. There's a lot of good stuff up there and they're turkeys, man. They're, they're all over the place down

there. And are they gobbling good when you're hunting that early bow season? Um, so last year I hunted it, uh, on opener, which was like March 25th. I'd have to look back at it and they were gobbling, but they were not ready to be decoyed. They were just, they were not feeling it. They were, they were early, I think. it they were they were early i think and and they didn't um they didn't really know how to react yet but this year i was a week a full week and a half after that um so i was into april yet and it was i decoyed 13 birds in three days and they were hot and ready what constitutes a decoyeded bird? Like at what point do you say like, I decoyed that bird? When he can touch my decoy.

Oh. Yeah, or he's in the vicinity. So decoyed. Yes, decoyed. Like with a capital D. Yes. So it was, I had one bird. I didn't have a decoy out.

So I guess it was 12, but I called him in, no decoy. He got to about 40 yards and kind of spooked off and paralleled me uh for a little bit but then everything else was was in the spread in the flock if you will so they were in and and uh i had birds strutting and i had uh birds gobbling and and it was it was a good time i couldn't put it together though just using the stick and string so it's tough you mean and string. You mean like a trad bow? No, not that good yet. Like a bow bow.

Not that kind of struggle. A souped up regular bow. You know, I wonder though, I think about that. And the traditional bow, I'm not going to say it's like a spot shot, like a point and shoot kind of thing. But there's less going on, you know. I don't have to set up and draw back and settle into the pocket and all that stuff. I mean, if a traditional bow is there, you

can sit and you come up and you let go right away. And so I'm thinking about going to a traditional bow for turkeys. And I don't know how that's going to go on like plains turkeys, Western turkeys, where they might be at a little bit more distance. But it was tough. No blind. Weather was kind of spooky. Yeah, I'll give you hats off doing it without a blind. Yeah. That's tough stuff. With a bow and no blind.

With a bow and no blind. I have yet to pull that off. I've tried that several times. Closest bird was seven yards. There was actually four birds at seven yards. And then that one that was that you know outside of 40 when he came in and but yeah it was tough i is that a personal like like an ethical decision to no it's total speed i wanted to be mobile oh gosh and and

move and and depending on where the birds would come in i would put myself you know behind a different bush or something like that before they showed up or try to reposition. No, so it was completely just speed. What do you mean an ethical decision? Challenge. Yeah, like your personal hunting ethics, if you want to use a blind or not. Yeah. I gave up on that idea with a bow.

That's some tough stuff. Yeah, it's a lot of movement you can sit there and they can come in but when it's time to draw that bow on them man it's that's where the totally rubber hits but we have it with a long bow or recurve though because a turkey there's like he registers the threat right and then there's a pause like while he assesses like he registers assesses and then with a shotgun that's all the time in the world. Absolutely. Right.

With a shotgun, like I don't, you know, people like so painstakingly like bring their shotgun up. I'll kind of like have my shotgun kind of ready. Yeah. And a lot of times when I shoot, I'm just like, I bring it up and shoot. Yeah. It's like calling pull. Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's like, they're just not that fast. You can't do like a huge move, but you can get away with a fair bit of movement while he kind of goes like, man, I should probably get going. There's like a guy right over there. But like, yeah, to shoot a bow, no. He's going to move.

And that's where the thought process comes in with the traditional bow, is it's going to be a little bit quicker, perhaps. But you got to body shoot them, and that's tough. Yeah. God, they can suck up arrows. Giannis, he killed one with his bow on accident, is how good he is. Giannis, tell them. Tell them what happened. Johannes, tell him. Tell him what happened.

Well, two things. We used to hunt in the spring. Before I started shotgun hunting turkeys, I thought I was too good to kill them with a shotgun, and so I was trad bow hunting them. But we used to hunt with a buddy, or I did hunt with a buddy, and we would just set up just like we would with elk,

and guy in the back would be calling 50 yards back. A lot of times we'd have birds come in full strut and the way we got a lot of shots off is that we just wait for him to turn and when he's got his fan to you you got everything you want and they say that a good spot to aim is you know right at the base that tail fan and the texas heart shot yeah but uh all my arrows would always go right between their legs. Because of what reason? Because you're like.

Yeah, just bad shooting. Oh, okay. But yeah, one fall, we were hunting turkeys with our bows in Nebraska and we were hunting this giant, like, well, a giant rafter. I just relearned the other day of turkeys was roosting moment that's not even in 10th legion

a rafter is a collection of birds up in a tree no what I thought was a flock of turkeys is not it's a rafter learned it on Michigan's DNR site the other day well they don't lie they might be mistaken but I doubt it.

But anyways, we had like a couple hundred birds. Pride of lions, rafter of turkeys. Yeah. Okay. 200 birds coming in to roost into these cottonwoods. So we would just get in there and wait. And an hour before dark, man, it was just turkeys coming from all directions. It was fun.

It's a lot of shooting you know and i have these two jakes that like maybe 20 yards coming in like neck wrestling you know like they do and uh that might be what doug's talking about farm wrestling maybe something like that but but uh anyways i take the shot and i'm thinking uh you know i'll just say like right between their two necks and, you know, hopefully I get one. Well, I,

I missed a little bit to the right and the arrow just kind of sails just behind them. And it was just a little back up. So what was the plan? I was shooting the base of their neck. Cause they're so wrapped up together. I like was like putting, I try aimed at the base of their two necks thinking if I missed

left, right at all, you get one or the other. If I went through the middle, then well, maybe I'd just get lucky and have two or cut one, whatever. Anyways, missing both clean and the arrow zips by. I'm like, oh.

Just as my voice finishes going, oh, I hear, I'm like, what? I go running over the hill and there's a hen running off with my arrows stuck in her. So then it turned and it got wild and I emptied my quiver. She was

actually dropping arrows and I would pick them up and then shoot some more. It wasn't the nicest way to put down a turkey. But I ended up getting her. Earned it. Yeah. And luckily you could shoot hens. Fantastic. That's why I like have never, yeah, I've never felt even the slightest desire to bow hunt turkeys.

Because you just talk to so many guys who have them run off. Get hit by the arrow. I'm going to head loppers. I got to. Magnus bow hunt. You're going to hit or miss? Yep. Kill or miss?

Yep. I'm'm gonna maybe have one or two expandables in the quiver but it's gonna be three three magnus bull heads from here on out yeah that's the third time i've heard that this turkey season some guys were just like man i'm just seeing too many walk away i've talked to guys that have had like been shotgun hunters became archery hunters, and after a while just went back to shotguns and started dealing with it. Because the distance is the same. You still got to get close.

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be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all.

Yeah, it's like you're shooting from way far away now is it fair to say am i allowed to talk about how how vortex is starting like a whole new place and you guys are all moving absolutely yeah yeah sure that's it's it's widely. This place is so much bigger than it used to be. You wait until you see the new place. Yeah, the new place will just dwarf what you see here today. But yeah, this place has sort of grown piecemeal, section by section, by warehouse. As the company's grown, we've swallowed up other businesses that have moved out because it's all rental property here. But we've kind of used up about everything that's available here now. So the timing was right.

How long have they been building that new place? I think we broke ground last spring. Yep, because I was on my way back from Nebraska. March. It was March 2016. Yeah, that sounds about right. It's been in the works now. The plans have been in the works for a few years.

I mean, just kind of looking for a place. It was, you know, deciding what town to move to, what direction. I mean, there's a lot of thought that the owners put into, you know, deciding where we were going to move to, where we were going to call home. And ultimately, we're moving out west of here a little bit, a little town called Barneveld. And I think we're going to be in about double the space that we're in here. Really?

The two things that surprised me most today looking around is, one, what's the scope you guys are the manufacturing that we're looking at that starts out with the amg that the scope starts out with a with like a three inch diameter aluminum billet yeah big chunk of 60 61 94% of that block of aluminum is carved away leaving a scope tube. Yeah, there's a razor hidden in every little one of those blocks. Yeah. I just can't believe. I mean, once you explain it to me, it makes sense.

But just as like really surprising that that's. It is interesting. You start with like. And like, you know, Everything's like aluminum's life. You pick one of these things up, man, it's just like a really satisfying feel, like a giant aluminum cylinder. And it'll just chisel...

Not chiseling quite the right... Yeah, they take hammers and chisels and... We got a little caveman back there. Yeah, and then the other thing is... So a human hair is 100 microns, I think? Yeah, it's between 90 and 100. It depends. And carving that, like those components, there's 80, 70 or 80 pieces inside a scope, right? Right.

Right, and I forget what it was, 83? The AMG 624, I think, has 83 moving parts. Individual parts. Individual parts, yeah. And that those parts, so a human hair is 100 micron, and that the parts, some of the parts, need to be within, I think, 5 microns? There's one part, yeah, there's one part in the zoom cell

that has to be within plus or minus two. So we're, yeah, you're splitting a human hair anywhere from 40 to 50 times. That's amazing, man. The other thing that surprised me is that a dude had a scope that was in a house fire. And it's just like a melted blob and sent it in as a warranty claim yeah but it was honored yeah oh yeah house fires truck fires i mean i had a customer in uh in texas actually super good friend of mine good guy and he's like he was out on his ranch and his his truck caught on fire you know it it his muffler heated up the grass enough to where it lit up end up burning his whole truck and he's like i got parts from like seven optics can i send them

all to you we're like sure wasn't his fault it wasn't intentional damage you know just so that's what it goes by yeah and then people i mean it be someone's fault, but as long as it's not intentional. Like a guy can't say, the limit is of a guy who says, I smashed this because I just wanted to smash it and send it back as a warranty claim. Then you would say no. I think we would, you know, ultimately, like, nobody really admits to that. I don't know if we've quite had that happen yet. You can kind of like Jimmy was saying before,

you can kind of read like, it kind of looks like this thing went with a meat tenderizer. And so like, you know, but kind of like, oh yeah, I dropped it. And it's like, well, make sure you don't drop it again. Into a grinder. When you say meat tenderizer, I missed that earlier. Because we asked this question earlier during our tour.

And I keep thinking like, how does someone get a sculpt through like that? You the machine that has the crank yeah yeah tenderize the meat no you guys are talking about the mallet yeah different size yeah yeah got it when i go to mallet me at home with like a meat mallet like my kids get like actually upset something about they do not like they do not like that you're're taking a hammer and smacking the dinner. I think the trick is you just need to let them do it. Oh, no, I think it was great then. But they come in and you're in there, twap, twap.

They get visibly upset. There's something about it that's very upsetting. Dad just looks too aggressive at that point. I got a bunch of questions for you guys. So how many of you guys. So, how many of you guys' scopes do you include the sun shade on? Quite a few. Yeah, maybe half, somewhere in that vicinity.

Do any of you guys use the sun, like leave it on? Yeah. Some stuff. It totally depends on what it is. Yeah, break that down. Like, Yanni's dad showed up moose hunting with us, and he had his sunshade on. I remember I just took it off.

Came with the scope. He's probably kind of like, you can't come with it. Can't leave it at home. Good example is the range where a lot of us shoot just north of here, like 20 miles. Our range is facing right into the sunset. Okay. So, like, if there's a scope that we don't make a sunshade for,

if I'm going to shoot it any time after I get off work in the summer between 5 o'clock and 8 o'clock, like, I bring a toilet paper tube and tape it around the end of it because you just can't see. Yeah. So you do hang on to it. Oh, yeah. I have quite a little pile of those sunshades somewhere, man.

But, yeah, I have been in situations hunting where I was like really wishing I had the sunshade. And then you got like your buddy holding like a baseball hat, which is more difficult than you think. Cause you're like, no, no, no. Out farther up. He winds up being like four feet away trying to cast a shadow, you know? Yeah.

I think, I mean, a lot of customers will never come into a scenario where they'll use one, but you put them in just the right scenario and they'll wish they had it. Yeah. So do any of you guys, like if you're out like Paul, like say you're out hunting doll sheep, for instance, did you have your sunshade tucked in your pocket? No, no sunshade on that one. So you didn't carry it? No, I didn't bring it on that one. No. Not that, you know, not that it couldn't possibly have. Oh, yeah. You're just weighing the hassle of carrying it with the likelihood of beating it.

And you've been there too, Steve. That type of deal, usually you've got, if it is that bad, you've got that low sun angle or direct sun angle, you can find something to shade it, whether it's your jacket or someone with you. You can cover it but it doesn't happen all that often you know things have to be just oriented right for it to be an issue just horrible enough and then uh moving on the next one what is when you when people call and ask you guys like hey man do

i want a straight spot and scope or an angled spot and scope what do you tell them i tell them angled all the time ryan's a tall guy like myself if you're if you're tall you should prefer angled they just they work better i i look at it like i do the majority of my spotting seated right and so and i'm usually looking i'm not down steep angles you know i I don't hunt the Brooks range or anything like that. And so, you know, if I'm antelope or muley hunting and I'm usually seated and for longer periods of time. So I can like use my bone structure to lean over and just kind of slump into myself and look through my spotting scope. I know that feeling. Yeah.

I know that slumpy feeling. Without having to have my head up and craning and like poking around, trying to look through it. So I definitely prefer angled. without having to have my head up and craning and poking around, trying to look through it. So I definitely prefer angled. And then when I shoot with it, when I'm on the range, I go prone with it. You can look through it when it's angled. I look down and do it when I'm on my shooting mat. I do tell people, though, because a lot of folks will primarily use it from the vehicle.

They're not going to rock it out. Yeah, then you can't use angled. Right. Not can't, but it's difficult. It's very challenging anyway. And so I'll tell them that if they are using it from like a vehicle position, then straight's the way to go. And if they're looking at extreme downward angles,

like extreme downward angles, straight's the way to go. What I found, because I like the angled, I started using angled because the late, great Duncan Gilchrist, who wrote the book Haunt High, among many other classics, he didn't carry a tripod. He just liked to carry the, and put it on his pack,

which I don't like to do, but he liked to do it. Set it on his pack or set it on a rolled up jacket or whatever. And that way you can lay it down and then kind of like lay down on top of it and look into it which would be impossible with that strategy so then i started using them but the the drawback to them is it takes you a lot longer to find what the hell it is you're looking at yeah it can until you unless you get like kind of good at it yeah you get right you do it all the time. You get better at it slowly. You guys used to make a tube. I used to have a tube that sat on the side of that thing,

an aiming tube. Is that what you guys called it? I think that might have been a technical term, aiming tube. What happened to those? We upgraded the razors to another new body, so you can't. They don't have an aiming tube. They don't have an aiming tube. Or you could call it a thing that hangs up on your backpack tube.

That's true. That's true. The Vipers have a section of Picatinny rail that you can mount a little red dot to. A laser. Oh, is that what that's for? Yeah. I was looking at that. Yeah.

The other thing, like the way I always explain it to people is when they're deciding between angled and straight, first off, no tripod is tall enough where if you're using it for extreme up angle, where you're going to get it above your head, right? No tripod is tall enough. The other thing is if you have people that are, like if you're using it for observation or hunting and you're standing and you have people that are different heights,

like you got one guy that's 5'5", and one guy that's 6'0", and one guy that's 6'5", a straight spotting scope is going to have to be perfectly in line between the person's eye and the target that they're trying to see. So your guy that's taller is going to have to squat down to see it, and he's going to become very shaky and very fatigued after an amount of time. The guy that's shorter, the 5'5 guy, he's not even going to be able to use it because he's just not tall enough. So they're going to have to lower it to him

and then re-find whatever they're looking at. An angled tripod or an angled spotter, you could set at the height where the shortest guy can use it, and the other two guys, all they have to do is bend their head, bend their neck down. So if you're using one spotter for multiple people, an angled is really the only way to go. Yeah, definitely.

The only thing I like about the straights is I can find something in my knockers. And I'm sure I could do this with the – this isn't even particular to straights now that I think about it. I can find something in my knockers, pull them off, put my my scope on and it's dead on but that's not particular to the straight you could calibrate you could calibrate anything that way yep oh no no here's what i'm trying to say i yeah that is something i do like i calib like i'll find something in the center in my binoculars whatever some object a few hundred yards away. Then I take my spotting scope and put it on the tripod and fidget with the mounting plate and retighten it so that I know that when I take my binoculars down and put my spotting

scope on, they're aiming at the exact same spot. The reason straights work better there is because when you're looking through the binos, it's that direct straight line. That's what I was going to say. The basic orientation is so you don't need to move your you don't need to move your like setup you know right because if not you do it and then you got to adjust and get where you can get that down but i still like the angle do you sell more angled or more straight surprisingly i think it's pretty equal i think it's pretty close but yeah yeah yeah i remember asking that question last year just because, you know,

we're always trying to decide, you know, what do you make more of? And I believe I was surprised to hear that it's very similar. What's your take on that, Mark? Man, I agree with everything those guys are saying as far as the benefits of both. I mean, they both have a home, you know, and it depends on your application. But overall, at least personally, I mean mean an angle to me is just way more versatile i mean oftentimes you're hunting in a group you know and like you said you know you spot something you want to bring your buddy over to look at it you know he doesn't have to adjust

the tripod where you might lose the subject or you know stand on their tippy toes or crouch down unnecessarily. I just think overall it's just more versatile. Mark had made a really good point about the new helical focus razors, the straight specifically, pointing out the side bag on his Kefaru pack and how this new spotting scope and this new form factor, I mean, it looks like a pirate telescope. And it's perfectly straight,

so there's no little S shape in there. It fits really nice, so that's one thing. The packability of a straight is arguably better. So something to weigh in and consider. Overall, I'd still be all about the angle, but something to think about. Now, there's a dude wondering. I can't even tell if it's Natapi.

He's wondering, what's the best general purpose Western spot and scope? If, big if, if you only have money to purchase just one? That's a question we get a lot. I'm sure. Yeah, it is. I guess I'll weigh in on this first. And what I'll tell anybody when they're looking at a spotting scope, because they're so unforgiving,

is the first priority on your list is optical quality. So if at all possible, move yourself into the razor level and even at the cost of magnification. So in looking at this, I want an image that's as clear, bright, and sharp as possible with a spotting scope. So I will sacrifice magnification, go down in cost and size and weight and get something like even the 11 to 33 razor. If you're on a budget, it's a $700 spotting scope. And it is phenomenal. It's a powerhouse and it's 25 ounces

and it's the size of a soda bottle. So you can play the affordable field there and do that. A lot of people are hesitant because of the magnification. I think they kind of shy away from it. But really when I'm hunting, most of the time I'm turning my magnification down anyways. I'm around 40, you know, because of mirage and how unforgiving the image gets. So why carry around a huge spotting scope and a tripod to tout it and to support it

when you can get away with 25 ounces and something that we can run on like our Summit SSP, have a package that weighs about two and a half, three pounds total. So I'm a huge fan of that little thing. Overall, I think that probably the 65 millimeter spotters are a little more versatile, maybe well-rounded. That's what I was going to say. That's a good middle ground look at there. If you're going to do, to me, if you're going to do one to do it all, you're like, I want one. And there's no one magic bullet or magic fix, right? I mean, there's always give and take. But if you're going to get one to do it all where you're like, yep, I don't mind packing it up the mountain,

or it fits in my pack nicely. The 65 is definitely super versatile. Like Ryan said, it's just a really nice middle ground that's super versatile. And, yeah, I just don't spend that much time at 60. No, I only use mine. Yeah, it's tough. Generally, I do not use mine to find a game anyway. Right.

I used to give something like a detailed stink eye after I've already found it with my knockers. Now and then, it might be some little spot, some little dark little pocket that I get real curious about, and I want to take a gander in there. But generally, it's like I've already found it, and I want to look at it real careful to assess legality. If you're hunting moose like does it have four brow times which two miles away does it have four brow times is like is a question that you could spend hours

trying to solve right or like is a sheep full curl that's like a thing you could spend days arguing about whether that thing is full curl or not with your friends. So it's like when I'm doing that, I'm doing like very detailed stuff. And when I'm doing very detailed stuff, I find that you're not cranking the magnification all the way up anyways because, again, like issues like mirage and other things, you wind up kind of playing around the middle ground where you get like your crispest, like you said, your most like forgiving crisp image.

Yeah, every day is different when you're doing that. You know said you're most like forgiving crisp image and um yeah every every every day is different when you're doing that you know how high can you run that scope oh and it changes throughout the day the sun angle throughout the day right the minute like it like there's a time in the morning when everything's like you got good light and it's still real cold and everything is just beautiful beautiful and then all of a sudden that sun comes you start feeling on your shoulders and you look out and your spot is going. It looks like you're looking down a desert highway, man. All of a sudden the air is all moving.

Yeah, then it just goes out the window, man. Can you guys all weigh in on that? I'd like to know, is there anybody at the table that will actually glass with their spotter? No. Very, very occasionally. But I've done it for years and years and years, and it's just really tough to do that. You know, it's hard to stay behind a spotter for a very long period of time.

You're looking through a single barrel. You get more eye strain. You're going to get tired. You're going to want to rest your eyes more often. So there's no doubt. I mean, you're way more efficient behind a bino than you are a spotter. But there's every now and then. I mean, you'll get some situation where just due to geography or whatever it is, you can't get remotely close to an area.

And, you know, so you, I mean, it could happen. It could happen that you might spend a day trying to glass some very distant face primarily using a spotter. Yeah, if it's so far away. You try to avoid that if you can. If it's so far away that you can take in, when you're talking about distances where you're actually taking in a considerable chunk of ground through the image, it's cool. You know, because you can watch a whole basin or something

because it's so far away. Then it's helpful. Yeah, the picture looks a little more like what you see in the bino at that point. But eye fatigue's a big thing, man. It's huge. I will get like, if we're up somewhere and just like glassing all day,

by the end of the day, I get where, yeah, I get where I just close my eyes for a while. It's just hard to focus. If you're actually spending like eight days on many levels, one, just your posture, right? That you don't realize, you know,

how much you move until you're sitting there where you can't move your head. It just is taxing. Oh, it is. Absolutely. It's just like even more taxing when you're trying to do it with one eyeball, which is not how you're. You can, you can always tell in the field when you get out with guys, instead of spending a lot of time glassing and looking,

and you watch how carefully a guy usually will sort of set up his position before he's glassing. I mean, the seat angle and the place to rest your neck back and a shade and a cover, rather than just sort of plopping down and sitting there behind it. And then like you say, you're no time flat. You've got a sore back and a sore neck and you're stretching.

But if you can really get yourself comfortable, you'll spend a lot more time. Yeah, when I crawl up into a good spot, man, I'm in there like kicking rocks out, moving chunks of moss around. Getting all this, everything laid out right. Yeah, getting it just so just so man it's like you're making a like making a little bed up there exactly uh paul explain explain for me

this is something that i've actually had to call you to ask you about uh explain like what what what makes the scope suitable for.22s and BB guns and whatnot, air guns and not. And I'm referring specifically to how fixed parallax scopes. Just explain that whole deal. Well, there's a couple things going on there. I think what you're mostly talking about is a scope that's going to be used specifically for stuff like.22 and air gun. One of the first things you run into is you're just not using it at the same distances that you'd be using a centerfire rifle. So one of the things that happens is the focus on the scope is set into a closer point,

usually 50 yards, whereas a rifle scope that's set up for centerfire use, big game hunting, if it's non-adjustable it'll be set out to a hundred yard focus point and then many of those scopes are also going to have a separate adjustable focus a side focus or an ao that can go when you're talking about focus points something like the parallax adjustment well focus focus and parallax tie in together at each other if if a rifle scope is focused perfectly, there will be no parallax. Is that right? Yeah.

So those two are joined at the hip. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here. When Paul's talking about parallax, be like, if you're looking through a scope and you move your head, it's like a picture that you're staring through a scope. You've got one eye looking through a scope. And you move your head. It's like a picture that you're staring through a scope. You've got one eye looking through a scope. And you move your head around in circles. Do the crosshairs appear to move on the target?

With parallax induced. Yeah, that's what you're trying to avoid. Correct. So when you have a side dial on your scope and you're setting the distance there, you're reducing at that distance you're reducing the chances that your head movement is going to cause yeah you could the crosshairs to appear to move around the target right you can eliminate that with that focus because you could be slightly off like you could be you could your head could be slightly left right up down and as long as the crosshairs are on they're actually on

one way i drew this up i tried to explain this to someone one time or in writing is like your head could be slightly left, right, up, down. And as long as the crosshairs are on, they're actually on. One way I drew this up, I tried to explain this to someone one time in writing, is like if you're in the passenger seat of a car and you're looking at the speedometer from the passenger seat, right, you get like a different reading that the needle seems to be covering a different number than it does if the driver's looking at it.

From the driver's perspective, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly how we explain it when we're on the phone with the customer and you know you have your eye you have the needle and then you have the actual speedometer and that's the same as your eye the reticle and the image yeah right so the guy the passenger looks over and he's like hey where are we where are we only 55? And you're like, hmm, we're going 60. Yeah, from my angle, we're going 60. Yep, exactly. And a way to think about that, when you have a scope that has an adjustable focus to it, a side focus or an AO, effectively to sort of meld those two images together,

when you tune that side focus, what you're doing is you're effectively going back to that speedometer analogy. The back plate of the speedometer then would slide up until it's overlapping the needle. And then if you think if those two are on the exact same plane, then the passenger is going to see exactly the same reading that the driver does. Oh, good work, Paul. It's kind of how that, you know. Nice. What's your job title again, Paul? Paul's been here how many years?

22, halfway through 22. That's why I finally put a parallax on my speedometer. You got sick of arguing about that. You got sick of arguing with your passengers all the time. Damn it. 55. It's a lot, but yeah, passengers too. So a scope that's rigged up for a 22 will have oftentimes fixed 50-yard focus.

Right, right. And the reason that may not be immediately apparent to listeners is that when you're looking at an object through an optic, a rifle scope or a spot or whatever it is, the distance that that object is away from the objective lens, that affects the internal, the focal distance inside that scope. So that and the focal distance of that scope is where that small focused image comes down. We just talked about moving that with that side focus. So that's why when you have a near object or a far object, that focal length inside the scope becomes very, very slightly shorter, longer,

and it walks off of that slice, that plane in the scope where the reticle is sitting at. And when you can adjust that side focus, you can effectively, you can always overlay those two on that same plane is why that works. So do people make like specific, like do people make just lines of scopes that are meant for rimfire, meant for like 22 small game hunting

or whatever. There are some, you know, that, that, where that focal blank, that focus is set at, that's one of the, the, the most common ways a scope would be distinguished for that. Just recognizing the fact that it's going to be used at shorter distances. Yeah. There are other things, you know, the, sometimes the, the adjustment range that might be available on a side focus will come in very close. You know, maybe 10 yards on a scope design for that type of thing. Oh, I got you. Where you're probably not generally shooting deer at 10 yards away. Or if you are, you're not worried about the fine details there.

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OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What do you got, Jan? You got questions? Yeah, I got a question. I was looking through the questions and I'd like to this comes back to turkeys a little bit. Eric West asked if we can speak to the advantages, disadvantages

of using red dot scopes versus low-powered scopes versus no scope on turkey shotguns. An example, follow-up shots with a low-power scope impedes target acquisition, battery running out on red dots, lens flare, et cetera. From a gun standpoint, I think a lot of people take for granted that a shotgun's a shotgun. And so they think, you know, you're going to shoot this big pattern out there and hit whatever you want. And so they go down to the local sporting goods store and they pick up a turkey choke of XYZ Manufacturing, the closest box of turkey loads they can get.

It has to say extreme on the box, though. That's right, yes, it does. Well, they're extreme. I don't anticipate any troubles. And you don't want it. That's why they make the extreme shells. So what we found a lot is that a lot of shotguns have a lot of misalignments that you you wouldn't expect to be there you just don't think intuitively that

a shotgun i would say i would say that there are some misalignments in most shotguns absolutely absolutely you're surprised when you take a turkey load and shoot it out of a shotgun you're always like holy cow yep it's hitting exactly where i thought it was. And so rarely do we have this ideal, we'll call it a 60-40 split of our pattern or maybe like a 70-30 split of your pattern to what you're looking at. So I think the biggest advantage to something like a red dot or a scope, a low-powered variable,

is being able to place the pattern, if you will, where you want it. So like I, I, before I started hunting with, with, uh, uh, a red dot or a variable power scope, which I hunt with both, um, I missed a Turkey really close because the gun shot remarkably lower than my bead. So like my 40 yard pattern was like eight inches below my point of aim. And I missed this turkey at like breathing distance. If I'd had like a spear, I would have had that turkey. And I literally shot under his head. Well, that would be his neck. Well, he was like side face. I literally shot under his head and I couldn't believe it. And so then I then i i said enough is enough and maybe you know there's some other things i could have done there to make that turkey happen but um so i did i switched to a low-powered variable at that point

in time and and um you can you know zero your pattern just like you would your rifle scope and yeah you know if you got guys that are thinking about, you know, taking a 35 or a 45 yard shot, which in reality is a long shot. Yeah. People talk about like crazy shots on turkeys, but most, if you pace off most turkeys that you shoot, you're not, you're shooting that far. 25 yards, I would bet or in. And, and if you're thinking about that, your pattern placement, like relative to your, your sighting device, whether it's a bead or a red dot or an optic, could be remarkably different. So having the red dot and the scope on there

helps you kind of pick that spot out. One other thing, too, is that I think, number one, people think that with shotguns, gravity doesn't apply. You just think that it just goes out and whatever disperses. My pellets actually leave in a vacuum. Right, yeah. So that allows you to actually adjust for that for a longer range shot. The other thing is that turkey load, one and three quarter ounce

or two ounce turkey load shoots a lot differently than a one ounce double a trap load and so your shotgun might shoot that trap load like perfectly where your bead is and you go out and you throw out this load that's twice as big with much bigger pellets and it's off to the right and high so i actually like a low power variable like a one to four or something like that. It allows me to not see my bead at all. Like I can zoom it up a little bit and then I don't even like, that's not distracting me whatsoever. So I know where it hits.

I know where my pattern hits in reference to the reticle rather than, rather than, you know, focusing only on the bead. Because a bead is really hard to if you if your pattern is low and you have a bead well how do you know where you're covering up right yeah i think i'm i think i'm high enough but in reality you might be a foot over the bird when you break the shot and your shot goes completely over the top so that's the that's my first thing i'm almost almost done here the second thing is low light like you can use obviously you can use fiber optic stuff but if you have you know either a red dot or low power variable it just allows you to place your shot much better in low light which is a lot of the time where we're shooting birds at

i thought about i thought about it i think about all the time i was thinking about it today in fact but um i still man i have never shot off anything but like a bead and a you know yeah just a beat trusty 870 i'll throw but i've only ever i've never i don't know how i'm gonna sound like i'm gonna sound like old boardman over here never miss a turkey i've waited i never made that claim now i haven't missed one but i do see the limitations though and i expect it'll happen at some point. And I should clarify, I did hit one one time that fell over and then got up and flew away.

Yeah. So that's kind of like. You weren't using that extreme shot. No, I didn't have. But you know what? A thing that I do do, and I feel like it might just be all in my head, is I do like those blends, man. Yeah.

But I just feel like I like them. I don't know if I like them. I don't have like empirical reasons to like them the 2x4 no the 4, 5, 6 you know yeah I use those blend loads

but I haven't I'm gonna rig up a shotgun and start I would like to use a scope sometimes I just don't I just shoot off the you know

I'm gonna throw out one other quick advantage or potential advantage of a red dot and not that they're they're not just for kids but if you're introducing a youth to turkey hunting no yeah um i was just gonna say the same you don't

want them wounding up turkeys yeah i mean they're just they're gonna be able to find that dot put it where it needs to go i mean bearing down on a shotgun or learning how to do that you know can i think can be difficult at times and I think it just really simplifies it. They can still acquire the target easily because it is a one X optic. But it's essentially, you know, essentially parallax free. And they, you know, so if they do have maybe not the best head placement, as long as the dot is on that turkey's head or on his waddles, you know, the shot's going to go.

It becomes such, so second nature to like put the bead on the rib and know what the proper sight picture is. I mean, if you've been shooting your whole life. And the other day with Helen Cho. Yeah, I only had a couple people miss some turkeys this spring. Yeah, but Helen was just shooting a target. We're just practicing a little bit, getting comfortable.

I think we had the target at another 25 or 30 yards, you know, and sitting down, you know, a nice solid rest. Her first shot, not a pellet on a two-by-two, you know, box. Because she's just putting the bead and not worrying about the bead's placement relative to the rest of the barrel. Sure, but I've even gone as far to explain as like, yeah, the ramp has to not be there.

It should be just a line and then the bead sitting on top of it, and even bury it just slightly, maybe even do a six o'clock hold. You can see the whole target above the bead still, and still shot out completely over it. Then we went back and said, all right, bury that bead even a little bit more, like actually start to lose the bottom third of the bead when you're looking over it. Then we went back and said, all right, bury that bead even a little bit more. Like actually start to lose the bottom third of the bead

when you're looking down it. And she smoked it. It was perfect. But I mean, it's just like... But then went on to miss a turkey. Not Helen. Her boyfriend did. But I think that's your point.

Also getting a new hunter to remember that when a gobble sounds like thunder, the ground shaking, it's tough yeah it can be really tough yeah i should i don't know why i don't have i don't even have a i don't know why i haven't see i haven't because the what the guy said in the question is about like batteries running out the whole technology yeah but a scope doesn't do that no you're right i mean how many i mean i've all ever you know i hunt scope all the time i hunt i put scopes on rifles through far more extreme environments than you'd ever encounter hunting turkeys how long will a battery last on one of these red dots you just leave it on forget about it it? Most have auto-offs, so that's kind of a handy feature.

So, you know, I think the Spark 2 is the ideal dot for the turkey gunner, if you will. You can mount it pretty low so you don't have to get a cheek piece on the gun, or like an elevated cheek piece. And you should expect three to five

hundred hours of battery out of it. A lot of turkey hunts. Yeah, that's a lot of hunts. So two MOA dots, just perfect for that. Covers up a gobbler's head just right. Even a StrikeFire 2 green, you know, because a lot of people have a color blindness issue, and so they'll have to run a green red dot.

Oh, that's interesting. A green red dot? Yeah, a green red dot. Yeah. Green dot sight. The StrikeFire 2's got the same battery life, roughly, a green red dot that's interesting and so like a green red dot yeah green red dot yeah green dot site um the strike fire 2's got the same battery life roughly and the only downside to that is you have to mount them a little bit higher but even so i mean change the battery once a year it's it's yeah it becomes a laziness issue and it wouldn't be any worse than like mounting a regular rifle

scope either just sort of a similar height to that. Now, there's a couple things to be clarified here because I think there's confusion when people hear red dot. So in many states, if not most, you can't hunt with a firearm that projects light. Like a laser. So they're not talking about a thing that casts out. Yep.

What do you call those kind of things? Laser. Laser sights, okay. It's not like a thing that casts out and Yep. What do you call those kind of things? Laser. Laser sights, okay. It's not like a thing that casts out and puts a red dot on the turkey through a laser. It's just like instead of looking into a scope, it's slightly different than this, but instead of looking through a scope and seeing the crosshairs, you're looking through the scope and seeing a red light. You're seeing a reflection of an LED, whether it be red or green,

that comes off of, you know, the LED is planted in the bottom of the tube or on the side of the tube, and it points at the objective, which is basically a parabolic lens. So it's set at an angle, so that no matter where you move your head, up and down, left to right, it kind of goes back to what Mark said about them being parallax free. That dot actually looks like it's following you when you move your head. So it's tracking up and down, left to right, as you move your head. And that's not a laser sight. That's just a little LED that's being reflected. Yeah.

But there are even some states where you can't use that. Yeah. For big game, at least. I don't know if they regulate it on turkeys. I don't know about the Midwest. You can't have anything. Anything that takes a battery on your bow or on your gun for big game is sometimes illegal. So you do got to check into that stuff.

Yeah, or muzzle loading, too. That's one of those weird things where every state is different. Because states define muzzleloading equipment differently. In some, you can't use anything with any magnification, anything with any kind of electronics on it. It just depends on how much they're trying to cripple you, cripple efficacy out of your muzzleloader. Now, here's a good question. This is going to be our last one.

Really? Yep. This is a tricky question. What standard of accuracy should first-time hunters achieve before heading out that's a tough relative to where they're shooting and what they're hunting yeah when i i've told a thousand times when i was a kid the standard of accuracy was that my old man would take a milk jug full of water and march it across Eugene Groters yard to the tree line and set that milk jug and set that milk jug on a stump

and then you would take in my case my lever action 32 special Winchester model 94 the peep site and you would take that and if you could hit the milk jug you were ready to rock and you couldn't tell where you hit the milk jug anyways because it'll blow up when you hit it because it's full of water i think that my old man still adheres to that and that was like you were ready to rock that is minute of jug minute of jug accuracy but to paul's point consider where we were hunting we were hunting in like like michigan brush country you know i mean if you took a long poke it was because you were taking a long poke across a small field would be like a long poke but most of the deer um the first quite a number of deer i shot i shot within within 100 yards, you know, it was just like,

cause that was just the kind of stuff you were hunting. You could shake hands with these deer. So there it was fine in other situations. Um, it just differs, but I think that like, here's a good way to put it from, and everybody has their own definition. I don't think that when you're shooting a big game, I don't think there should ever be a sort of like, let me see if I can hit it. I think if you rule out the idea that when you take a shot, you're curious about what will happen when you shoot. That's a bad shot.

Absolutely. I think that's the perfect barometer to make that distinction. If you're like holy cow i hit it i would say you just took a shot you should not have taken in this case it worked out in your favor but you should have not have registered so you could register excitement pleasure but you should not be registering surprise when you hit something right that's out of your range of accuracy if you have some doubt. But other than that, I think it's really difficult to define.

I think what you could do is you could pick whatever game animal is you're hunting and sort of look at what a typical diameter and a vital zone might be, whether it's four inches or six inches, and use that as your limitation, that at whatever distance you can still keep those in that vital zone, that that could be a fair estimation of your sort of max range. No, that's good. That's good. Like how big is, like if you're going hunting antelope, like how big is that circle?

Pick a diameter. It's not that big. No, it's not. It's probably smaller than what most people would think it would be. So if you're going to go hunt antelope and you're thinking that, you know, oh, I'm good at 300 or 400 yards, okay, then you should be able to go to the range and with the equipment you're hunting with, not off a bench, but with the stuff you're carrying with you in the field.

And in the typical method that you might be shooting off a pack or sitting or whatever, not knuckled down hard behind a bench with a salad, sandbags, and all that. And then you go out and you can put nine out of ten shots into that six-inch circle at your shooting distance. Then you could argue that you did your due diligence. Now, of course, you've got issues of you're excited and messed up. All that good stuff. Your buddy's going, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot shoot shoot shoot when you're not ready to shoot which tends to rattle people myself included um and all these things you can't factor

all right mark you got any concluders man i think we covered some good stuff you know um my usual concluding thought when it comes to optics is they're about the most important thing you can carry in the field. I think that was my same concluding thought last time, and I'm not trying to sell optics, but, man, they're a difference maker. I heard it. I can't remember how it went now. Some guys, like, if you had $1,000 to spend on a rifle, what would you buy?

And the guy's answer was, well, I'd spend $900 on my scope. Yep. And I'd take my last $100 to get a rifle or something. It was something to that effect, you know? I've got an additional concluding thought, too. If you were talking about spotting scopes and stuff, if you haven't been tripod glassing with your binoculars, start doing it.

Change your life. Correct. I was going to do that for my concluding thought. Darn it. Sorry. The fact that you'll start glassing up quail at 500 yards away will convince you that it's the way to go. You don't realize how much that stuff's moving.

And when you're glassing, a lot of what you're seeing is movement, and a lot of movement gets camouflaged by your own movement. Yanni, concluder? We got the full tour of the Vortex factory today, and I just want to say that I learned that I don't know shit about what it takes to build optics.

I know a little bit now, but when you actually see what goes into it and the scientists that are being employed here building these things, you're like, wow, I had no idea. So, so cool to see. Yeah, some of the machining dudes are impressive guys, man. Yeah.

They start talking like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Now what? Yeah, you mean to tell me. Ruben? We covered a lot of great stuff. Check out an optic for your turkey gun. I mean, as simple as it sounds, I think for a lot of people, it'll really increase your odds of bagging a bird.

I'm trying. But you guys don't make a thing called the turkey slayer or something like that. Well, no. We try not to use the term slayer in many of our optics but i can guarantee you yeah the extreme version um give one of our guys a call uh ryan myself paul scott you know mark any of us would be happy to chat with you about yeah that's my i'm gonna do my concluding thought out of turn when you call vortex there's a bunch of dudes sitting there whose job it is to take calls

from people and answer their questions like honest to goodness people who do all kinds of shooting and hunting to answer your questions part of your job i think a huge part of your job here is being knowledgeable on your whether it be western hunting whether it be you know competitive shooting whether it be hunting the midwest you know part of my job and it's nice because i get to tell my wife hey i gotta go to the range today. But that's staying sharp is part of your job. And that's why our crew, I think, is some of the best guys out there. Pretty tough to beat.

Ryan? I think that, in general, Americans like things big. We like jacked-up trucks. We like big, knobby tires on them. If I could give anybody listening a piece of advice and conclusion of today's, do not put a precedence on the size of your optic. Put a precedence on the quality of the optic. So take optical quality over magnification or simplicity over complexity, that kind of thing. It'll make you a better shooter. It'll help you determine or set that gauge of whether this is a shot you should register

as exciting and confident or surprise, you know. So go big on optical quality. Skip the magnification, if at all possible. Yeah, optical quantity. Yeah. Paul? Good stuff, Good stuff. I think for me,

all this talk about turkey hunting and red dots, and it makes me think I'm still shooting a bead off of the top of a barrel, so I need... A guy who's got, like, unfettered access

to, like, some of the greatest optics in the world. I need a red dot on my turkey gun. Yeah, how have you done this so far? I don't know. I'm going to try it, man. Yeah, it's time. All right, everybody.

Thanks for tuning in. If you got questions, what I would do, if I had a question about any of this stuff, I would just call, what's the phone number here? 800-426-0048. Yeah, and ask these hosers yourself. All right, thanks again. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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