Why Aren't More Optic Manufacturers Doing This?

Hey, what's up guys, Hop here. Today we're going to talk about something very near and dear to my heart, and that is when I can get the brands to match. Some of that's because I have a disorder, and some of that is because products from the same brand generally work together better than a bunch of mismatched random parts. And nowhere is that truer than when it comes to scope mounts, particularly piggyback optic mounting. Now, I like piggyback mounted red dots, maybe not as much as some people, but I think they can be very useful on either high magnification scopes, where you use the piggyback mounted red dot to coarsely align your magnified optic, then you drop your eye back down into the real scope, and then you are close enough to the target that you can locate it, zoom in, and take your shot. I think they're also useful on LPVOs as a passive aiming solution for use with night vision. I don't think a piggyback mounted red dot is the same thing as having a true 1X aiming system on your gun, though. That being said, I don't see any reason not to piggyback a red dot onto your magnified scope unless it's just a matter of cost, especially if we're piggyback mounting pistol red dots, they don't add a meaningful amount of weight or bulk to the gun. So they're kind of like a free upgrade to the gun, except in the sense that you may be doubling the cost of your optics package. Anyway, my favorite way to mount piggyback red dots is with systems like this. This is a Scalarworks Fuse optic mount with a Scalarworks Kick red dot extension on one of the top rings. There are several companies making scope mounts like this, where you can either replace one of the top rings with something that will directly accept a red dot, or will accept a mounting plate for a red dot, or even other stuff like laser range finders. It's also not even remotely a new concept. Burris has been making the pepper mount for ages, and every pepper mount comes with a spare set of rings that have Picatinny rail on them. What's a mystery to me is that more companies aren't doing this, even companies which sort of pitch themselves as being a total systems provider for optics. I imagine the obvious question you have is why would it matter if the brands match? And really it's not so much that the brands need to match, it's that the red dot needs to sit at the right height relative to the scope's top turret. You don't want the red dot to sit any higher than is necessary, because that just makes the shooting experience of trying to use that red dot a lot more difficult. Also, it would slightly increase the overall height of your rifle, which could be a problem when you wanna stow it in a bag. If the red dot sits too low, then part of the window will be obscured by the turret of the optic, and since we're starting with very small windowed pistol dots most of the time, we cannot afford to lose any more. No two manufacturers can agree how tall a scope turret should be, or how high the deck height of a red dot should be, much less where and how to attach a red dot mount to a scope mount. So your options boil down to lots of trial and error, buying parts, putting them together, and finding out that they don't work, or trying to stick with as many parts from the same manufacturer's ecosystem as possible so that we'll all go together fairly cleanly. I've got three examples today of modular scope mount systems that can be configured to accept a red dot, so let's talk about it. Stick around. Today's video is made possible by our channel sponsor, Venture Surplus. I like it when the topic of a video lines up with one of my sponsors. Today is not one of those days. But aside from being a great source for military surplus clothing and gear, Venture Surplus is also where I get my MREs. I love MREs, but I've never liked MRE cheese, until recently when a friend of mine convinced me to heat some packets of MRE cheese up in a pot of hot water. Turns out it makes a huge difference. Check out the link to Venture Surplus in the video description and use the code provided to save 10% off your order. If you get some MREs, here's hoping there's cheese packets in them. Thank you to Venture Surplus for supporting this show. Thank you guys for watching the ad. Let's get back into the video. All right, the first one that we're talking about today is the Scalarworks Fuse and Kick system. Scalarworks previously made the Leap mounting system for scopes and LPVOs. That one used kind of an innovative hinged ring top system, which meant that it really wasn't a good candidate for tacking on additional stuff like this. The Fuse Mount system is a lot more traditional looking, but it still has a lot of that clever Scalarworks bullshit mixed in. So unlike the Scalarworks Leap, the Fuse Mount is not a quick detach system. It's just got a very simple, but robust cross bolt. Instead of the hinged ring toppers, we've got traditional two piece ring caps, but Scalarworks has taken some cognitive load off the end user by designating one side as the no gap side, meaning the other side is allowed to have a little bit of gap. So you don't have to very carefully torque down all of the fasteners to make sure that your gaps are even on both sides. They also have one of the best scope leveling systems they call Level Drive, and that is a special little aluminum screw that comes with their scope mounts, and you can actually thread it into the mount for the bottom, push it up into the base of your scope, and keep the scope level while you tighten the fasteners. I know you can get scope leveling wedge kits and stuff, but those don't often work on scope mounts because the top surface of the scope mount doesn't really need to be flat, and so usually it isn't. The top rings of the Fuse Mount are compatible with the Scalarworks Kick Mounts, which can be had in multiple different heights and a bunch of different mounting interfaces, so stuff like RMR, Delta Point Pro, or extended 1913 rail sections for laser range finders. Like a lot of Scalarworks products, the Fuse Mounts are really, really expensive, but you kind of save some money compared to other designs because you don't have to replace the top rings if you wanna add a piggyback, and then the Kick Mount itself is just a basic plate of aluminum with a couple screws, so they're actually really cheap. The total package cost ends up being pretty comparable to a lot of these other modular scope mount systems. The biggest downside of the Scalarworks Fuse and Kick, to me, is that there's a limited selection of heights available for the Red Dot plates, and also, a lot of them just still have not become available yet. I initially set this thing up with a higher magnification scope, and I bought the RMR low mount because it was the only one I could get at the time, and unfortunately, that meant the Red Dot did not clear the turret of the scope I was using. Eventually, the high RMR mount Kick Plate did come into stock, and I picked one up, and it's way too ******* high. I think they've basically got the low height, which is for use with LPVOs, and the high height, which is for use with very large, high-magnification scopes that have massive dye-level locking turrets. But overall, I think the Scalarworks Fuse is really good. It's relatively lightweight, robust construction, great feature set, and the price is basically what you'd expect. It's very tactical, right? All right, so like, here. Up next, we have the Primary Arms PLX and SLX scope mounts with their replaceable ring toppers. Like with all of the Primary Arms stuff, there are multiple tiers, PLX being the highest end, and then SLX being the entry level, but you can get Red Dot ring toppers for both the SLX and the PLX. The PLX looks really cool. I think they're obviously going for sort of a knockoff of Geissele Super Precision mounts, but whatever. It looks very mil-spec. The mounts themselves are very good. They're lightweight, they're robust, they're made in the USA, and they're decently priced. The big downside to the Primary Arms system is that there's not a lot of variety in the Red Dot mounts. Up until recently, the only one you could get was the RMR mount in a low height, which is extra funny to me because Primary Arms used to not make a Red Dot in the RMR footprint. They do now, it's the RS-10R, and unfortunately, it's not a very good one, which is why we've got a Holosun on here instead. They've recently added another ring top option compatible with the Aimpoint T1, aka Aimpoint Micro footprint, which is kind of cool. That's not something you see available with a lot of these modular scope mount systems. If you're willing to commit to additional weight and bulk, that means you can put a real rifle optic, a real tube-style Red Dot on the top, and that would actually be a much better piggyback solution, at least in terms of raw light transmission, brightness settings, battery life, parallax, distortion, tint. But yes, it's likely to drive up the cost of the package as well as increase the weight and bulk. One small advantage to the system is because the ring top is a monolithic piece, it just replaces an existing part without adding extra screws. The downside, of course, is that now you are buying a ring and then throwing a ring away so that you can stick this Red Dot mount on it instead. Although each individual top ring has got to contribute to like, what, $4 worth of the cost of this thing? Anyway, this is a great scope mount system for LPVOs or other scopes that have very low turrets. Otherwise, you're probably gonna have some issues setting it up. And the third one we're gonna talk about are the new Trijicon scope mounts. I think these came out maybe a year or so ago. You can get these in a QD version with Trijicon's Q-Lock thumbscrews, or you can get them in a fixed mount like the one that I've got here. One of the selling points of the Trijicon mount ecosystem is just the sheer variety. They've got the QD and fixed mount versions. They also have them available in 30, 34, and 35 millimeter ring sizes. They also offer these mounts in three different heights. So they've got the standard heights, like 1.535. That's the one that we have here. I love the specificity. That is the common lower one-third equivalent for magnified optics. They've also got 1.93, which is one of the more common tall optic heights. That's a little bit too tall for me, especially if we're gonna be putting a Red Dot on there. That thing's gonna be in ******* orbit. They've also got a 1.59 height, which is kind of pushing towards the 1.7 intermediate height that you've seen with some companies like Badger Ordnance. I'm not sure that 1.59 is different enough to 1.535 that they need to have both, but whatever. The Red Dot piggyback setup for these scope mounts is a little bit of a mixed bag. For starters, unfortunately, you have to buy a replacement ring in order to even be able to mount a Red Dot plate to it. It may look like the default ring toppers are drilled for a Red Dot plate, but they are not. It's just aesthetic. You have to buy a separate ring topper that can then accept the Red Dot plate, which is also sold separately. So that's pet peeve number one, buying an additional part and throwing away a part we already paid for. The other downside is that the only compatible Red Dot plates I've seen from Trijicon so far are for the RMR footprint and the RMRCC footprint. Why RMRCC? Maybe because a lot of people bought RMRCCs on sale thinking they were RMRs, and now they're stuck with them because their resale value is essentially zero. If that's you, congratulations, you're in business. If that's not you, I would not recommend piggybacking an RMRCC. So that's the downside, but there's actually some more upsides that I didn't get to yet. First of all, these ring toppers are set up to mount the plates in three positions, not just at the 12 o'clock, but also offset to both sides if you prefer it that way. The Scalarworks Fuse System cannot do that. Similarly, stuff like the PLX has a one-piece top ring. Therefore, if you buy it at 12 o'clock, you gotta use it at 12 o'clock. Some of them are available at different offsets, but still. With the Trijicon system, you can buy all the parts, and if you don't like it at the 12 o'clock, you can move it to one of the offsets on the side. Another upshot to the system is that Trijicon makes three heights for the RMR plates, so you can definitely find a setup that'll work with any of Trijicon's optics, but also with a little trial and error, you can probably find something that'll perfectly fit other brands of scopes as well. Just not other brands of Red Dots because they only believe in one footprint there. This setup is the non-QD 1.535 30-millimeter mount with a Credo 2-10, the medium plate, and formerly had an RMR on this setup when I used it before. I'm trying to decide if I wanna drop the coin on another RCR or just pick up another RMR and save myself the tax on closed-emitter optics. Strictly speaking, in terms of function, I think Trijicon's mount ecosystem works very well. It is a little bit limited, and it's also definitely on the heavier side. These are some really beefy scope mounts and rings, and they're also really expensive, and the additional ring topper and Red Dot plate, although they look very simple, are still really expensive. That's a Trijicon tax for you. One honorable mention before we finish up is the Midwest Industries Mark II system. I don't have any of those on hand, but they have a pretty comprehensive set of modular scope mounts with piggyback ring toppers available. The Mark II mounts are a little slim down from the old Midwest scope mounts, which were obscenely heavy. They are no longer QD, but that's fine by me. You can also get the scope mounts in a 1.5 or a 1.93 height, and they've got a pretty good spread of ring top options, like the big 1913 diving board for the LRFs. They've got multiple Red Dot footprints accounted for, and they also have offset versions. So a pretty good option, and I believe they are slightly cheaper than the other stuff that we talked about today. All right, this felt like a long one. That's all the time we got for today. Thank you guys very much for watching. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and I will see you in the next one. It's separating from the cheese. The oil gets hot like that. You can tell this actually is sort of adjacent to real food. The bacon kind of overwhelms the jalapeno flavor. It does, too much. I like the jalapeno more. Yeah, same. The jalapeno has a little bit more actual flavor to it. The bacon's good, but yeah, I get no jalapeno, and it clearly had plenty of both. Yeah. Hmm, weird. Now that the hood of my truck is covered in MRE cracker crumbs and little blobs of ******* MRE cheese. It'll rain someday soon.