Packrat
Member
Hello Kowa enthusiasts,
I just thought that I would drop in and say a word or two. I'm not a bird watcher per se, but do like nice optics and equipment. Maybe you have already done what I did. Anyhow, here's my longish post. Hope the pictures load.
I just picked up another Kowa with 25X LER eyepiece on ebay. It needed a finder scope so I dug around in my junkbox, and came up with an old Bushnell 1.5 – 4X riflescope. It has a small objective lens so it will has a “universal focus” if you know what I mean. You can find plenty of cheap $10.00 scopes on eBay. Scopes for high power rifles are parallax adjusted for about 150 yds., and scopes for .22s are normally set for about 50 yds. There is a long story here, but just think of parallax as being fo-cused at a particular range – but it also involves the crosshairs. Parallax comes into play at long range or high precision target shooting.
Weaver type rings and bases are a standard type in the US, so that’s what I used to mount it. The “Weaver” part is the shape of the mounting base. Sort of opposing V-blocks if you will. There is a long story here, but I’ll spare the details.
My wife donated some old leather-like purse straps for this project. I secured a strap with black Permatex silicone adhesive to the bottom of the Weaver base. I smeared (and let dry) a film of it on the bottom of the strap too. This gives a good coefficient of friction between the strap and the top of the scope. The Kowa has a flat top which provides a good mounting surface and makes things very simple. I spray painted some old radiator straps, and used some more strapping for protection and mounted the Weaver type base. Radiator straps are a crude way of attaching objects, but the al-ternative is to drill and tap for screws. That wouldn’t be pleasant either. Anyhow, I installed a ring, clamped the scope - and aligned it at some tree branches about a half mile away. The final alignment was with the scope’s internal adjustments which move the crosshairs. Now my Kowa ‘looks’ where the Bushnell is pointing – just like a rifle barrel.
Anyone should be able to build this setup for less than 50 bucks - and probably less. Any gunshop or sporting goods store will have the base and rings. I’m a hard person to please, and I can’t find anything that I would want to change –right now anyhow. It works perfectly. Did you ever try to find the moon at night with an angled Kowa? You have to fish around for a very long time before anything interesting shows up. Now it is a breeze.
Everybody says the LER eyepieces have a narrow field of view. That may be true, but US rifle shooters have never known anything else. So to us, the LER version is plenty wide.
We used Unertl scopes before the Kowa’s were introduced here in the ‘80s. Kowa now OWNS the shooting sport with their long eye relief eyepieces. John Unertl (sen-ior) was a WW I German sniper and came to this country after the war and went to work for Fecker Scopes. Then he launched his own business in the ‘20s or so. The company is still in business (different owners now), and provides 10X sniper scopes to our Marines. Some of my info may be out of date, as I’ve been out of competition for about 5 years now. That’s about all I know – and remember.
If you want to see some other machining projects, take a look here:
http://www.pbase.com/packrat
Sincerely,
Ron N. …………from Ohio
I just thought that I would drop in and say a word or two. I'm not a bird watcher per se, but do like nice optics and equipment. Maybe you have already done what I did. Anyhow, here's my longish post. Hope the pictures load.
I just picked up another Kowa with 25X LER eyepiece on ebay. It needed a finder scope so I dug around in my junkbox, and came up with an old Bushnell 1.5 – 4X riflescope. It has a small objective lens so it will has a “universal focus” if you know what I mean. You can find plenty of cheap $10.00 scopes on eBay. Scopes for high power rifles are parallax adjusted for about 150 yds., and scopes for .22s are normally set for about 50 yds. There is a long story here, but just think of parallax as being fo-cused at a particular range – but it also involves the crosshairs. Parallax comes into play at long range or high precision target shooting.
Weaver type rings and bases are a standard type in the US, so that’s what I used to mount it. The “Weaver” part is the shape of the mounting base. Sort of opposing V-blocks if you will. There is a long story here, but I’ll spare the details.
My wife donated some old leather-like purse straps for this project. I secured a strap with black Permatex silicone adhesive to the bottom of the Weaver base. I smeared (and let dry) a film of it on the bottom of the strap too. This gives a good coefficient of friction between the strap and the top of the scope. The Kowa has a flat top which provides a good mounting surface and makes things very simple. I spray painted some old radiator straps, and used some more strapping for protection and mounted the Weaver type base. Radiator straps are a crude way of attaching objects, but the al-ternative is to drill and tap for screws. That wouldn’t be pleasant either. Anyhow, I installed a ring, clamped the scope - and aligned it at some tree branches about a half mile away. The final alignment was with the scope’s internal adjustments which move the crosshairs. Now my Kowa ‘looks’ where the Bushnell is pointing – just like a rifle barrel.
Anyone should be able to build this setup for less than 50 bucks - and probably less. Any gunshop or sporting goods store will have the base and rings. I’m a hard person to please, and I can’t find anything that I would want to change –right now anyhow. It works perfectly. Did you ever try to find the moon at night with an angled Kowa? You have to fish around for a very long time before anything interesting shows up. Now it is a breeze.
Everybody says the LER eyepieces have a narrow field of view. That may be true, but US rifle shooters have never known anything else. So to us, the LER version is plenty wide.
We used Unertl scopes before the Kowa’s were introduced here in the ‘80s. Kowa now OWNS the shooting sport with their long eye relief eyepieces. John Unertl (sen-ior) was a WW I German sniper and came to this country after the war and went to work for Fecker Scopes. Then he launched his own business in the ‘20s or so. The company is still in business (different owners now), and provides 10X sniper scopes to our Marines. Some of my info may be out of date, as I’ve been out of competition for about 5 years now. That’s about all I know – and remember.
If you want to see some other machining projects, take a look here:
http://www.pbase.com/packrat
Sincerely,
Ron N. …………from Ohio
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