Dots, Crosswires, Posts
During my youth, reticle options were limited to crosswire, post or dot. I marveled at TK Lee’s 0.008″ dot on spider web! A dot obscures nothing in the field except your point of aim. Properly sized, it’s also quick but even big dots can get lost in poor light and against mottled backgrounds. Long ago a dot in a Lyman Alaskan hid in the shadowed hide of an elk at dusk. Frantic, I searched for it in bleached grass under the bull. Faintly, it winked! I jerked it up onto the elk and fired. Luck and short yardage blessed me.
The best size for a dot depends on magnification. To me, a 2-minute dot seems right for a 6X scope, a 3-minute for a 4X, a 4-minute for a 2-1/2X. Powerful target scopes have dots covering as little as 1/8” at 100 yards. For bulls-eye shooting, however, I think a crosswire works as well. Very fine crosswires, like small dots, can be hard to find, and hard to track when pulse and muscle twitches bounce the sight picture through powerful lenses.
In a hunting scope, a crosswire must be thick enough to acquire quickly in dim light. An intersection covering a saucer-size patch on a distant deer denies you nothing. As with the bead on an old carbine, if it hides the middle of the vitals and your bullet hits what you can’t see, you’ll still kill the beast!
Magnification and reticles allowing you to quarter bullet holes are useful only if you’re shooting at targets the size of bullet holes.
The best reticle? Leupold’s Duplex and “plex” spin-offs afford precise aim with their thin center wire. Posts comprising the wires’ outer sections draw your eye in dim light. Better yet is the similar German No. 4 — without an unnecessary post at 12 o’clock. It excels as a range-finding device, because its three posts are squared off, not tapered. Such reticles have been made in various ways. Leupold has used .0012 platinum wire flattened to .0004. Premier Reticle Ltd. has supplied wire ribbon, twisted. These and more complex reticles can also be photo-etched with .0007 metal foil. Chemicals strip away all but the final form.
Range finding reticles have accelerated the trend to long-range shooting. Most popular is the mil dot. A mil (for milliradian) is an angular measure spanning 3.6″ at 100 yards. A mil dot reticle has a series of dots one mil apart along a crosswire. To find your target distance, divide target height in mils at 100 yards by the number of mils subtended. Result: range in hundreds of yards.
If a moose 6 feet tall (20 mils at 100 yards) appears to stand four dots high (20/4 = 5), the moose is 500 yards away. You can also divide target size in yards by mils subtended, then multiply by 1,000 to get range in yards: 2/4 x 1,000 = 500.
Among my favorite range-finding reticles is the Burris Ballistic Plex. After zeroing, check ranges at which the three bars on the six-o’clock wire give you dead-on hits. Those bars don’t impede quick aim with the otherwise clean plex reticle. A Ballistic Plex helped me kill a fine pronghorn that had me pegged at 393 steps. I’ve less enthusiasm for range-finding reticles cluttering the field of view with something resembling sheep fence.
