by wildcard6 » 09 Apr 2019, 3:43 pm
As Bladeracer said, many good quality scopes have been destroyed by putting them on to springer airguns. If you wish to find out for yourself, go ahead and put an expensive Leupold or such on it and see what happens. Some folks just have to put their fingers in the flames to find out that it will burn you, but it's your money. The reason scopes not designed for airgun use fail is because on a cartridge-firing rifle, the scope tries to move forward under recoil. The rifle moves backwards at high speed, while inertia tries to hold the scope in place. With an airgun, the recoil direction is reversed due to the forward motion of the spring/piston and the sudden stop. This tries to move the scope BACKWARD off the mounting rail. Internally, an airgun scope's lenses are braced to survive this backwards recoil, while those on 'normal' scopes are not. Hence, the internals are not built to survive this reverse recoil and they will fail. I bought a Hawke Vantage rimfire scope for my .22 - the one with holdover marks out to 200m, but I eventually upgraded to a Vortex for even longer range rimfire shooting. I contacted Hawke Optics and asked whether that Vantage scope was okay to use on my Diana 340 N-Tec airgun and they said it would be fine "and thanks for checking". I have had the Vantage on my airgun now for ages and it's working just fine, exactly as promised. Hawke Optics are big in the airgun scope world, so I guessed correctly that their Vantage-line of scopes is built to a very high standard internally. The only thing the Vantage doesn't have is parallax adjustments, which are necessary for airgun TARGET shooting, but if you want to shoot small pests etc., it makes no difference. Hawke makes a line of airgun scopes [AirMax I think] and I would not hesitate to recommend them to you. If you decide to put a rifle scope on your airgun, don't forget to buy a big box of tissues too. You'll be crying when it sh*ts itself!