Cheap Scout Rifle Scope Alternative

Well it’s actually a pistol scope, and an extremely inexpensive one at that. Before I drop $300 on long eye relief glass for my makeshift entry level Mosin Scout Rifle I want to make sure it’s going to fit the bill of what I want it to accomplish:

A SCOUT RIFLE ON A BUDGET…

I can’t remember if I posted what I paid for that already modified Mosin Nagant 91/30 Scout Rifle I picked up last weekend, but it was approximately $50 cash. The numbers on the bolt and the rest of the gun don’t match and the stock has a light crack in it. Fortunately the bolt throw is actually smoother than my original authentic Mosin and the stock can be easily glued from the inside. The previous owner left the scope mount on where the rear site base used to be but sent the rear site with me even though the front site is gone.

With the scope mount still there all I need to do is find a decent quality optic at an affordable price. Rather than horse around with a Nikon, Leupold and Burris Scout style scope right off the bat, I settled on the NcStar Pistolero 2.5×30 fixed power handgun scope. The eye relief distance from the comb of the stock to the middle of the rifle is very similar and the reviews on this scope (for the money obviously) are a solid 4 of 5 stars on sites like Buy.com, Opticsplanet.com and Amazon.com, the latter being where I ordered mine for $31 total and free shipping. Opticsplanet.com has them for $29 but ironically they require a $30 for free shipping so it would have topped forty bucks after shipping costs came into play.

All in all I’m happy with the find, BUT I don’t have it and it hasn’t been mounted to the gun yet. So next week when it gets in I’ll mount it, boresight it and take it out to see how well it adjusts to zero and holds true with recoil . Why only a 2.5x magnification? Well NcStar makes the same series scope in a 4×32 power but with no iron sights to fall back on I didn’t want to have that much magnification for closer quarters type scenarios. I may find that the 2.5x just isn’t enough and I want to go higher, OR I want a variable power scope. But with the idea of a scout rifle being primarily for snap shooting, I doubt variable power magnification is something Jeff Cooper would have demanded or even allowed.