 Welcome to the Pyramid Insider, I'm Tyler Patner and today we're going to be giving you seven things that you need to know about air gun optics. More specifically scopes. The wide world of air gun optics can be a little bit tricky to navigate so the goal here is to get you guys more familiar with what you're going to see on our website and hopefully give you a better idea of what you're going to need when we look at air gun optics. Now starting with our first point, there are three different tube sizes that you need to be aware of. There are one inch tubes, 30 millimeter tubes and 34 millimeter tubes. There are other sizes out there on the market but those are the three predominant ones. And when we talk about tube size we are talking about the outside diameter of this tube here. What this really determines is what size mounts you need and that's an important thing as well that we'll get to in a little bit. But the tube size is typically going to be related to the amount of travel that the internal tube inside of here has. So the amount of adjustment range you have for long range shooters, this is going to be a very important thing. It is also going to play a big part in the weight of the scope. Now that's not to say that every one inch tube scope is going to be lighter than every 30 millimeter tube scope but as a general rule of thumb the larger the tube size typically the heavier the optic. The second thing to be aware of is what's called parallax adjustment. Now parallax is basically focus for the layman but it's kind of more complicated than that but the whole idea is to get the scope reticle inside of the scope on the same focal plane as your eye and your target. Usually you adjust for this with either a front focus or a side focus system. Now these are just two different systems of achieving the same thing. There are also a couple other types of parallax adjustment out there and also there are fixed parallax scopes like the one on this gamma here. Personally I would not recommend those for air gun use because when I say fixed parallax what that means is that that is set to be very clear at like 35 50 maybe 100 yards depending on the scope and it's not going to be super crisp and crystal clear at other distances. Now again this does depend somewhat on the magnification of the optic overall but basically having an adjustable parallax system allows you to get a nice clear clean image at just about any distance and when we talk about typical air gun distances that's from 10 yards out to infinity however far you are going to shoot your air gun. So you really want to key in on optics that have a 10 yard minimum parallax setting. There are a few that go under that but there are also some that are set much longer than that so you will see 25 yard minimum parallax settings, 50 yard minimum parallax settings. It really depends on what you want to do. Most of the stuff that we sell here at Pyramid Air is either 10 or 15 yards so you're safe there but something to keep in mind as you browse optics elsewhere you want to make sure that you're getting a minimum parallax setting that is going to correspond to the shortest distance that you want to shoot. Next up at number three we are talking focal planes. Now a couple more examples here you have second focal plane scopes and first focal plane scopes. Practically what this means for you guys out there second focal plane scopes are going to be great for target shooting people shooting at fixed distances or folks looking for the thinnest reticle that they can find at every magnification because the reticle does not scale with magnification though as you change mag you are going to need to kind of recalibrate your holdovers or holdunder so if you are clicking a lot if you're making click adjustments for different distances to compensate for your trajectory a second focal plane scope is going to be just fine for you. First focal plane optics though that reticle scales with magnification so your holdovers never change. What I typically recommend first focal plane scopes for are people that are hunting at different distances that don't have a lot of time to react to those distances and aren't going to be click adjusting that's where the big one comes in. If you're doing a lot of long range target shooting or hunting at different distances second focal plane is probably not going to serve you quite as well as first is so first focal plane is going to be the way to go for those applications. The big distinction outside of the function is the price. Typically your second focal plane optics are going to start lower priced than your first focal plane stuff so you're going to see second focal plane scopes from fifty dollars and up. Really where first focal plane comes in is right around three hundred bucks right now and obviously they can go up into the thousands of dollars like this element nexus here so there's a lot of different examples there and obviously you have a lot of different features built into these scopes but for you hunters out there first focal plane is going to be something that you're going to want to look at or if you are shooting a lot of different distances quickly and you don't have time to click adjust that's where first focal plane is going to shine as well. At number four reticle types there are a million and a half different reticles out there you really have to do your due diligence on what's going to work best for you and your application. Simplistically you have like your standard crosshairs or duplex reticles then you kind of work into mill dot reticles which is going to give you a bunch of different reference points and then from there it really explodes into a world of craziness some good some bad it really depends on what your use is whether you like a cleaner just kind of standard windage and elevation line type reticle with marks on it or not or if you want something that has what we commonly referred to as a Christmas tree style reticle these are super common now Hawk, Athlon, Miopta element they all have them in their lineups and they're all different purposes in terms of what you're going to use them for or where you might use them and it really is going to behoove you to do a little research to find out maybe for your applications what you're going to need most now personally i'm not a huge fan of those Christmas tree style reticles i find that they get in the way a little bit but if you have to make elevation and windage holds at one point in time they can really come in handy out in the field so it is something that you should consider depending on what kind of shooting you're doing. At number five we're talking about Springer ratings now this is going to be applicable to those of you that are using your scopes on spring or gas piston air rifles where you have what we call a bi-directional recoil so that's where the rifle recoils backwards and forwards in a very fast time and even with spring guns you do have some torque involved in there as that spring lets its energy out now most of the optics that we sell actually almost all of the optics that we sell here at Pyramid Air are spring gun rated from pretty much every company that we represent whether it's Leapers, Hawk, Athlon, Miopta or element optics any of those brands are going to be springer rated and it is something that you should keep in mind but if you're looking elsewhere in the optics world for a scope it's something where you can always call the manufacturer most of them know what you're asking when you say hey is this scope springer rated it's a good thing to ask to make sure at the very least that they will warranty it if you have a problem while using it on your spring or gas ram gun. At number six we're going to talk a little bit about mounts now this is an even broader world than the optics themselves I'm going to try and parse this down as best I can for you guys so a couple considerations you have a two-piece system like you see here and you have one-piece mounts now typically one-piece mounts I'm going to recommend for spring and gas piston guns predominantly this takes up a lot of rail space so if you're not using a spring or gas piston I would go with two-piece setup what this one-piece setup is going to do is actually cancel some of the recoil that would happen with a two-piece mount setup from that spring gun kind of kicking back and forward there in that bi-directional recoil sequence the second thing to consider is Dovetail or Weaver Picatinny style mounts so if your gun has an 11 millimeter Dovetail these are the kind of mounts that you're going to want to go with if you are dealing with a Weaver Picatinny system like you see on this Ad Gun Leshi 2 then you are going to want to go with Weaver Picatinny mounts pretty simple there but within that you do also have some quick release options like you see here just different ways to mount the optic something to consider as you're going along if you are going to be taking the scope off QRs are nice to have another consideration to make there is making sure that you're getting the right height mounts now this is a question we get a lot there are three common types I suppose low medium and high basically guys if you are using a 40 millimeter or smaller objective lens that's this part of the scope right here you're going to want to go with a medium or maybe a low mount if you are going with 44 millimeter or larger you are going to want to go with high almost every time so something to keep in mind there as you are looking some other considerations you may have to make you may want to get a dovetail adapter if you want to go from a dovetail to a Weaver Picatinny system like this UTG adapter they're all over the place they make little single ones as well for your PCP guns so a lot of different options there if you have a dovetail but you prefer Weaver Picatinny the other thing to consider is droop compensation now this is actually a droop compensated mount so there's a bit of a downward angle to it which is going to be very beneficial for you long range shooters they also make adjustable mounts here you can see these FX no limit rings that actually pivot there what that's going to do again give you that same ability to adjust your scope angle which is going to allow you to use more of that scope's adjustment range particularly as you start to stretch out to longer distances at the seven spot we are going to talk about proper scope installation now for me i really detest the act of mounting a scope with levels because you gotta you gotta fight with the gun you gotta make sure it's level not only the scope itself on the rings but the gun wherever you're holding it it's it can be a pain all right let's be honest one thing i found really helpful that we just started selling here at Pyramid Air are fixed sticks this is the scope jack this thing is awesome this will mount to any Picatinny rail and basically this will level you up just right off the scope saddle here it's a super simple system Matt Dubber turned me on to this this is a great tool to have in your arsenal and if you have dovetail airguns predominantly you can always grab you some of these utg picatinny adapters slide it right in there it'll work on your dovetails as well the other part of scope installation that's really important to know is making sure that you're using the right torque specs for your mounts and your bases if you're not doing that you can run into issues down the road you know maybe your scope's moving or something like that or if you torque it down too hard you can actually hurt the scope internals themselves so something to keep in mind fixed sticks makes a torque limiter kit that's going to be great for all of those purposes comes with a bunch of different bits as well as the torque limiter this is going to come in really handy you know as you kind of use different stuff right if you have different types of mounts they all come with different ratings in terms of torque specs so that kit is going to set you up for success when it comes to mounting your scope and quite frankly it's something that you should have in your toolkit in general thanks for joining us today as we tell you seven things that you need to know when it comes to airgun optics hopefully you found this video helpful you know if you did drop us a comment below let us know what you didn't know before that you know now or if there's something we missed let us know down below we can always do another video on it obviously this is just a brief overview we could go way more in depth on all of this stuff so if there's something you'd like to see let us know as always throw us a like go ahead follow us on facebook and instagram as well we'd appreciate that a ton and i appreciate you guys for tuning in i'm tyler patner for the insider we'll see you next time