@CheasyPoof
Yeah I remember that stage, you can’t post wall-o-text for awhile after first joining. Still, your questions are very intelligent and worthy of a dignified answer even on a Saturday evening.

1. We aren’t going to make a larger cover for the Ironsides applications, to my knowledge. If enough people ask us to, this could change but right now only a couple of guys have brought it up. Frankly the original rubber covers often times don’t fit great when you actually put the dot sight on a pistol, because the dot kinda sinks down into the optics cut and rear iron sights get in the way, etc. I’ve seen guys modify the original rubber covers with an X-acto knife to help fitment once installed on the pistol, but I don’t think the same approach would work with the Ironsides add-on.

2. When Aaron Cowan smashed up a Kingslayer I wasn’t super happy about it. I hadn’t talked with him or sent him the optic, and I could have told him not to bother with it. We were already working on Liberty and Justice before that even happened, if he had contacted me I would have asked him to please wait until we had a better product for him. But I can’t get mad at him for doing what he does, and frankly the Sage Dynamics brand name has a bigger reputation than the Swampfox brand name. Picking a fight with him over it wouldn’t be a good look for us. Plus, he’s not WRONG—dropping the optic smashed it, fair and square. The only response was to engineer a better product that would hopefully come closer to meeting his (and his fans’) expectations.

Even with the Ironsides Shield, you can get unlucky and break them with a big drop onto concrete from shoulder height. But usually the Shield gets all beat up and the optic is ok, and we expect that the customer would  then replace their Ironsides with a new one if the Ironsides was obviously damaged. If you drop it enough times in a row, you’ll defeat Ironsides and wreck the scope and you’ve Cowan’d your way to an optics failure. But in the real world most people will drop their gun on accident one time, hopefully succeed in whatever type of shooting they were doing, then re-evaluate afterwards whether things need to be repaired or replaced. Dropping it on the same patch of bricks in the back yard 6 or 7 times in a row is really a YouTube-only scenario.

3. On the glass strength stuff, I find it fascinating and more than a little counter-intuitive. Glass seems to shatter before the frame does because the frame bends, dents, deflects a very small amount, smaller than the eye can perceive, but glass is unable to do that. Metal has a “bounce” to it, a flexibility, that glass does not. One “solution” already on the market is polymer lenses, which handle shock better than glass does. We’ve looked into adopting it, and rejected that approach. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea for Sig or someone else to it, that means at the level of tech we have access to, the toughness advantage of polymer is not worth the disadvantage of how easy it is to scratch up, overall clarity, and the issues with trying to apply similar coatings that we have already mastered with glass. One thing that I’ve learned about glass is that thicker and heavier does not always mean stronger, which goes against what you might expect.

4. Holosun is making a fantastic product. It is too bad that they are such jerks about everything. I don’t like to disparage other brands so I will leave it there—first, they have really nice products and second, I hope we can eat into their market share and help deliver humble pie to their door in the future. Any day that someone chooses Swampfox over Holosun feels like a good day to me. But yes, their red dots are really good for the money.

@That_Guy_Mike,

A reflex sight or tube type micro with your circle dot reticle and shake to wake feature would really be nice for use on shotguns. HINT HINT!

I do love the Kingslayer with circle dot but want something with shake and wake to put on my  Mossberg Shockwave.

Thanks for the reply Mike!  Glad to see you guys have already considered factors for glass, I look forward to hearing what you guys have planned for the future!

We probably won't do another circle dot until we can do one with industry standard battery life. The battery life hit on our Kingslayer's circle dot emitter is just too big to ignore. We are working on it.

Hopefully you all can come up with something in a decent amount of time.  I would rather stick with your products since I have been treated well between the MIL discounts and the great customer service when I had to return one (out of 7) optic.

If you're taking votes I'd rather have a better brighter reticle with a shorter battery life than a poorer reticle with a longer battery life.  YMMV.

It doesn't really work that way. Maximum brightness is more like, would you rather have clear window or a The-World-Is-Now-Blue Trijicon window. We could make our dots brighter at max blast if we made our windows darker to reflect more of the emitted light.

If you like a really bright dot (like I do), try Sentinel-A. We sometimes have people asking how they can turn down the brightness because the dot is too bright for them. A couple  of guys have tried applying clear tape over the emitter to cut down on the amount of light coming out of it.

I found the same thing with the Sentinel -A.  I actually keep a small piece of electrical tape covering about 50% of the sensor and I get something a little less distracting (to me). The dot always seems to be a little to bright for my liking, but easily solvable and you cannot see the tape if you're not looking for it.

After hearing guys bitch about "daylight bright" for the past 5 years or so in this industry, the fact that the biggest complaint people have about the dot I helped develop is that it's too bright, makes me not-so-secretly pleased. Sorry not sorry my optic is too daylight bright for ya.

I told the engineers, the goal on LPVO illumination is to make the customer see stars and not be able to look through the scope if they put it on maximum brightness in a dark room. I want them seeing spots and getting dizzy!

Having a Justice, RMR and 508T, the easiest to see through and the dot easy to see yet not block the target is my Justice. I use a Justice on my carry optics pistol.

Yep, if getting a circle dot means shorter battery life, count me in, too.  Assuming you don't have to remove the sight to change the battery.

@That_Guy_Mike

Any updates on the AK-specific (but reticle should also be correct for 300BLK?) x1.5 prism scope that has been mentioned in the past?

Thanks, and Happy Holidays!

I would give up some battery life for a circle dot reticle with "shake to wake" feature and not having to remove the sight to change the barrel.

when do you recommend the 6x, 8x, or 10x varient of the arrowhead? I mostly shoot 556 up to 300yd but also have a 6.5 grendel in the works.
seems like just getting a 10x arrowhead would cover any needs of a lpvo Unless you never really shoot past 100 so you don't need the higher zoom and the way the reticle is true for max zoom

I got the 1-6 using the old logic that you really only need 1 power per 100 yards to hit man or game sized targets, and I wanted to really just own 300 yards with a 5.56. After testing the optical clarity by seeing what I could identify on a target at a distance, I think if I had to do it again I would pick the 1-10. Being able to hit a target at distance and being able to IDENTIFY what you are hitting are 2 different requirements. With the 1-6x I felt like my ability to spot something like a badge or a handgun would be limited to 100-200 yards at max power. This is generally acceptable for defensive use as long range firefights in civilian life is in the realm of fantasy. Yes, I can make all the hits I would require out to 600 yards if needed, but I would need to glass with binoculars or something else to really see small details at that distance. I'm happy with the 1-6 and won't be in a hurry to get a 1-10, but if your primary reason for wanting glass on the rifle is target identification then more is better, with the caveat that glass quality trumps magnification a lot of times in this regard. The 1-10 mil reticle that they offer is also their best design and the 1-10 might be worth it just for that. I wished they would offer that reticle on the lower models or at least add the 3,6,9 crosshair posts to the other reticles.

ETA on 1-6 Arrowhead with the MIL reticle? Either red or green.

anyone got a review on the new sentinel... is it a good to go range/truck gun optic? i got one for Christmas and am deciding if i should keep it or not. im not overly hard on stuff but i want it to work when i need it and on the ppq i would mount it on there are no backup sight options.

thanks

I can't give much of a review on the Sentinel since I have only had it for 1 1/2 months. But it has done just fine so far. I have it mounted on a Polymer80 (G43) build that I carry daily. I ran about 200 rounds through it before deciding to carry it and I try to send a few rounds down range every week. I have the always on auto brightness version.

thanks, i have the shake to wake model, with buttons for brightness. it also came with a  metal shroud that frankly i think looks cheap.

i think ill give it a shot without the shield and see how it runs, the company seems to stand behind their stuff from reading the last few pages so what the hell ill give it a whirl.

pete

So has anyone compared the Liberty glass to a holosun 507 glass? Looking to see which one is less tented. I have a dual illuminated rmr and it is almost purple, terrible in low light. Couple holosun original gens that are better. Would go Liberty if the lower battery life is an indication of a cleaner glass view.

I have a Justice and the glass is as close to clear as possible, I also have a RMR and a 508T, the only thing the RMR has going for it is it is real tough, the Holosun is a bit better to in glass and dot quality but the Justice beats it. My Justice has over 3,000 rounds on it, it is on a P320 X-5. It has never missed a beat. I have the RMR on another X-5 and the Holosun on a spare X-5 slide.

May have to grab a couple and see how they do. I notice my dot is better on my holosuns  than my rm06 and my tritium rmr is on the dim side and the tinted lens makes it harder to see. I am not here dropping guns from head high so I shouldn't be smashing a swampfox.

I got a used rmr gen 1 and it was dead on arrival with a stuck elevation screw. Trijicon replaced it with a new gen 2 no questions asked. Even the big boys have to fix an expensive optic once in a while.

Hey,

Just reading through the long swampfox post. What mount is on your gun in the pics with the Arrowhead 1-10 scope?

@That_Guy_Mike I would very much like something in this extremely lightweight category. While I don't put numbers in a spreadsheet I do try and keep a _very_ lightweight pistol/SBR build. It's less about getting 8x or 10x for the same price, I'd rather trade magnification for lighter weight.

The use-case would be for HD, and currently running a red dot. So 90%+ of it's usage would be red-dot-like inside 50yards, but every so often want to reach out a little further or more accurately even if it's just punching paper for groups at the range without needing to swap out to a different optic.

I don't know where the weight needs to be, but I've looked at something like the Steiner which is right around 1lb (without a mount) and go "nah". Shorter length is better than longer length.

The reticle would need to be as effective (or nearly so) as a red dot for CQ as it's primary function. That means a really generous eye-box, simple-dot or donut-of-death (or something as effective) reticle that is fast up close.

It wouldn't need to be "duty-grade" per-se, but it does need to be durable enough that in that HD usage you don't worry about it failing when you need it.

Max magnification doesn't really matter as long as it's just "more" than a red dot. If you can make a super lightweight 1-10x that would be great, but 1-4x is plenty for this usage.

That's my $0.02, thanks for reading!

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas, I did. Took the weekend off and have had a busy week so far, so I didn't answer a lot of these questions as they came up.

@HEATH223 wrote: ETA on 1-6 Arrowhead with the MIL reticle? Either red or green.
Not anytime soon. The plan was to start the MIL reticle in the 1-10x and then, if people liked it, migrate it to the other magnifications later. Then the panic buy hit and we are scrambling just to try to get existing SKUs back in stock. Once the panic buying subsides and we get caught up, we want to expand SKUs and we’ll probably get around to making the MIL reticle in the 1-6x and 1-8x flavors. When will that happen? Well, around the same time that 9mm and small pistol primers become available again, I reckon.

@icecold1 wrote: anyone got a review on the new sentinel... is it a good to go range/truck gun optic? i got one for Christmas and am deciding if i should keep it or not. im not overly hard on stuff but i want it to work when i need it and on the ppq i would mount it on there are no backup sight options.
If you are worried about durability, snag the Ironsides Shield add on. That link goes to the version that fits the manual push button Sentinel, the auto version has a slightly different shape. Ironsides is cheap insurance and adds another layer of toughness. There are some YouTube reviews of Sentinel out there if you search for it.

@dustycoyote wrote: Just reading through the long swampfox post. What mount is on your gun in the pics with the Arrowhead 1-10 scope?
I’ve posted a few different pics. If it’s an AK the mount is from RS Regulate. If it’s my 10.5” SBR double stamper, it’s our 1.93” Freedom Rings. There might be other pics too, it’s a long thread now!

@elconejito I saw your post and understand and agree with your proposed use case. Can’t talk much about that project yet but I hope it turns into something cool.  

Not going to read though all of this, but when will the Kentucky Long and Warhawk be in stock again?

Don't have a really firm, quality answer yet but we are hoping they come back in Q1. The Warhawks are so nice and so few people have gotten to experience them so far! Argh.

I have been following this for some time now and wanted to give them a try after watching all the reviews and YouTube vids.
Ordered from Dvor just now.  

Did I do good on the price on these.   If it take 4 weeks I don't mind.  

Swampfox Arrowhead LPVO 1-10X24 Riflescope, 1/2 MOA, MOA Reticle, Second Focal Plane, Matte Black, 30mm, ARH11024-M
3Q9-RS-AS11024RS-ARH11024-M

Estimated Shipping: 4 weeks
$419.00  1  $419.00

Swampfox Arrowhead LPVO 1-8X24 Riflescope, 1/2 MOA, BDC Reticle, Second Focal Plane, Matte Black, 30mm, ARH18241-B
3Q9-RS-AS1824RS-ARH18241-B

Estimated Shipping: 4 weeks
$369.00  1  $369.00

@That_Guy_Mike:

how much torque is provided for the arrowhead lvpo 1-10x24 during assembly? i cannot find any corresponding data in the manual for the arrowhead.

the following values are available for the used mounting: top srew torque value: 25 in.lb (=2.8 N-m)

25 inch pounds would actually be a lot for many top screws. 15 is more standard, once you get past 20 you start either popping screws or breaking tools. As far as how much torque the tube can take before tube pinch occurs? I don't know, in testing we always broke mount screws before we got that far.

thank you.

next week go to the shooting range and will shoot the scope and then report...

i am so far already very taken by the scope!i

I am so glad you actually got it! You may be the first man in Europe with a Swampfox optic, you know.

i am honored to be possibly one of the first in europe to use a swampfox scope. the effort to import it here was worth it.

Anybody rocking the red dot mounted on the Hostile Engagement mount or rings? Looks like a cool setup, but I'm curious how easy it is to use and zero.

Just took the leap on a Justice and ordered during the new year sale based off the reviews and feedback here.  

Thanks for doing what you do Mike. MO misses ya but excited to try this optic out!

I got a Liberty and guard in just last week. Pretty clear glass with minimal tinting. I will try and get a photo of my trijicon rm06, dual illuminated, holoson 507 and liberty so you guys can see the difference. Will hold a piece of white paper up to get a better idea.

I grabbed one too for $100 off!  Will be a nice pair with my Kingslayer which has been problem free.

@That_Guy_Mike

I tried emailing and calling to have an order cancelled. Emails haven’t been replied to and there is no answer when I call.

We answered 800 emails in the past two days. Check your spam folder. The phone system is down, we are trying to convert to VOIP so we can just take calls over the internet and we are waiting for that to get set up (we've done everything we can and we're literally waiting on the internet service provider to do their part of it now).

At the risk of committing heresy I just put my Blade 1x prism scope on a 1/2" riser to put it to a more natural height for how I mount the rifle.  For me it works much better, and it gives me a much improved sight picture.  Yes, I'll have to recalculate what the hold-ups work out to be now, but I can live with that.

Nice optic, BTW.

I would like to see a pic of that setup, actually. And let me know how playing with the holds works out for you, please!

Sorry, I don't have an online photo site.  How do I post an image?

My Justice came in today.  Well pleased.  Wish I'd bought another one during the flash sale.  

Email it to me at [email protected] if you want and I can post it up if people want to see it.

Also, @Croak, 3x prism + 45 degree offset RDS is LEGIT. I suggest the same thing at the end of this video.

Heh.   Used to have an Arrowhead 1-10 on that 12" Grendel, but it's now on a 16" Grendel build.   I kinda got carried away with the 12" and besides the Arrowhead, I further bulked it up with a JP SCSS, chunky WML and Law folder adding a lot of weight on top of the heavy 20-24rd Grendel mags, making it really...dense.

Could have shaved more weight with a regular RDS instead of the Trihawk, but really wanted some magnification for hunting and plinking.  And while I really didn't need the Justice on an offset after putting in some reps with the Trihawk, the offset is faster up close, once again provided you put in the reps.  Plus, it was on sale!  :)

Wow just got my SENTINEL manual adjustment brightness and would like to say Thank Y’all for including everything and then some for installation!! All the screws, drivers, gasket, battery and then some! Outstanding job and thank you again. I look fwd to a range trip.

Thanks for letting me know, More than I'll need but I went ahead and ordered the 1-10 anyway.

I just setup my Justice on a Glock 34 gen 5 with Overwatch Precision Have Blue MOS back up sights and they give a perfect lower third cowitness. They were the best deal on backup sights with their mil discount and they’re nitrided something I like over Dawson’s I’ve used before.

I like the Sentinel. It is a great little sight. I think the Holosun 507K is the best value for red dots, but the Sentinel is solid. I didn’t like the king slayer. I sold it and got the Holosun. The liberty and justice look promising. I would love to try one out. I have 5 swamp fox optics and I look at them objectively. They are all on guns that I train with, but don’t yet trust with my life, aside from Sentinel. The Kentucky Long is has great glass, nice reticle and just a great layout and well thought out

Hey Mike

I got my Sentinel in November. Couldn't get the EL adjusted to point of hit (at 5 yds with a rest) and the screw was much harder to turn than the az screw. Thought I mounted it wrong so removed and remounted (over 2 trips to the range) and made sure it looked level, no gaps, waterproof spacer is on correctly. Then I discovered it was already near a stop so no adjustment left. Then I discovered it wouldn't go more than 2 turns the other way - so I think the el screw thread is buggered out of the box.

Short story long I got an RMA and returned it. You guys received it Dec 29 I think and opened case #1832 showing "defective elevation".
Status today still shows "awaiting processing".

I liked all the features and function on my new Hellcat (except for the defective el ). I may get another of some brand if its going to be a while.

Whats the prognosis/prediction for getting it or a replacement back? (Case #1832).

PS: I forgot to put the manual in the return box and have it here. I don't need another.