This year at the SHOT show I made a point to stop by the Kelbly's booth to check out the March scopes that I have been hearing about so much. I spoke with Jim Kelbly about Tactical Precision competition and how in the 8 competitions I have shot I have seen every high end scope except a March. He stopped me mid sentence and said "Well I'll send you one to use for a while, kick some ass, and show my scope off". Sounded good to me, and I knew I could do just that (well, maybe at least show the scope off).

Initial impression:

Three weeks later the March-F 3-24 with the new FML-1 reticle arrived! First thing that struck me was how little it was. I did see the scopes at Kelbly's booth, but they were all side by side and no other brands were around. When I put it next to my SS 5-20 I was shocked at it being 2/3 the size. The weight was the same as the size.....small. On my wife's high tech $10 food scale it came in a 1 pound, 5.75 ounces, WOW. Now I started to worry what I was going to be giving up with such a small package, and such a huge range of magnification.

Brendan Atkinson, Benchrest World champion, writes an article for the Australian Shooter magazine.

In the very precise world of top level benchrest shooting, the quest for the perfect group and aggregate goes on. The standard of equipment has been refined to a point where just maybe the perfect one hole group may someday be possible.

There has, however, always been one weak link in the chain. It has long been acknowledged that the riflescope is the one area where the problem of holding absolute zero has not really been conquered. All sorts of after market methods have been tried, including gluing the internals of the scope into a solid mass and fitting external mounts. The major scope manufacturers have tried hard to produce a high quality benchrest product and some have pretty much succeeded – however, there is enough evidence to show that this standard of fine precision can sometimes fail at the worst time, usually in the middle of a match. Remember of course that 99% of rifle scopes are production line finished. Also, consider that we are talking about a scope ‘moving’ less than a quarter MOA, which a hunter would most probably never notice nor care about. Benchrest shooters know instantly.

A couple of years ago, word got out that there was a new scope being created in Japan - they would be hand built to extremely precise tolerances, and were guaranteed not to shift point of impact. Naturally, they would not be cheap, but the purchaser would be buying the confidence that this scope would track truly and hold its zero. The new scopes would carry the name March, and were produced by Deon Optical Design Corporation in Japan.

The Deon Optical Design Corporation was formed in October of 2004, by a group of engineers, and each one of these engineers had over 30 years of experience in high precision optics. Widely experienced in their field, members of the team had already achieved awards and honours from the Japanese Government. Under the direction of company President Shimizu, the companies aim was to produce extremely high quality scopes for those marksmen and hunters who were prepared to pay a little more for a hand built custom scope.

40x52BR
In 2007, the first March scope to appear on the firing line was the fixed 40x52 BR model. It cost over twice as much as the leading competitors equivalent, but as selected shooters started to win with a March scope on board, the demand began to increase.

Incorporating very high quality ED (extra dispersion) lenses, a side parallax adjustment and rear lens focus, the March 40x scopes were soon seen on the benches in Australia. They cost around USD$2200, and with the unfavourable dollar at the time, were setting shooters back well over three thousand dollars. The March 50x52BR soon followed, and proved a challenge for shooters on some of our mirage plagued ranges. An even bigger magnification 60x52BR is now available, should anyone require this sort of power in a fixed form.

Three reticules were offered. Shooters could opt for the standard fine x-hair, or choose either a 1/8^th or 1/16^th dot. Click adjustments were 1/8^th MOA and the scope featured 72MOA in elevation and 50MOA windage adjustment inside a 30mm tube. They can be focussed from 50 yards to infinity. It’s not a lightweight at 597 grams, and shooters need to weigh everything to make sure that they do not exceed the limit on the lighter benchrest classes. This can be critical in the sporter and light benchrest classes. Heavy benchrest won’t be a problem.

March scopes are constructed from a single piece of aluminium bar stock. As mentioned before ED lenses are used for superior clarity. The erector tube is made from the lightest materials available to reduce the effects of inertia during recoil. The erector tube and the body receiver are CNC machined to a convex/concave socket design with minimum tolerances. The engineers at March prefer to use a flat type erector tube spring, rather than a coil. They felt that a coil is more likely to develop a memory than the flat type. Hand lapping is employed in the mating of the focussing group tube and the tube liner – these are treated hard surfaces. It is emphasised that March scopes do not use any plastic internal parts.

All March scopes are filled with Argon gas after assembly and before sealing.

Having produced top quality fixed power target scopes, the team at Deon turned their hands to producing variables. For the benchrest and long range shooters they made a 10-60x52 and a 36-55x52 – I have used one of the latter for serious competition. The variable option is good for those days when mirage is fierce and a bit less power is actually an advantage. Deon also produce variable compact tactical scopes for those going ‘in harm’s way’, including a 5-32x52 zoom.

used a borrowed March 40x for the 2009 National Benchrest Championships in Brisbane, and was impressed with the clarity of the scope in the tumbling mirage of Belmont range.

It takes a bit of fiddling with the focus and the parallax to get them just right (especially for those like me with corrected sight), but once achieved the March is most impressive. Of late, I have been using a March 36-55 x 52, and have enjoyed the flexibility that this scope offers.

For the hunters
The hunters have not been overlooked, and the engineers at Deon have come up with a couple of interesting offerings for them. How about a 1 to 10x or perhaps a 2.5 to 25x magnification scope?

Many variables have a magnification range which is a factor of three – eg. 4-12x, 3-9x, 6-18x, etc. The March variable scopes employ 6, 6.4 and 10 times magnification ratios – the latter is the highest ration employed in any production scope at the present time. The 1-10x24 is a compact hunting scope with the usual 30mm tube and a side parallax adjustment.

The hunting scopes are based on the March tactical scopes, but do not have illuminated reticules.

I fitted the 1 to 10x to my 17HMR rifle, and found that I had a scope power for just about every situation. It was a bit like Goldilocks’ porridge – not too big and not too small, but just right. It is a compact scope, only 26.4cm in length with a weight of 525gm. It features quarter minute clicks, and has a staggering 200MOA of both vertical and horizontal adjustment. The objective lens diameter is 24mm. The side focus/parallax allows focussing from 10m – infinity. A duplex reticule was fitted. I would imagine that this scope would be right at home on a large calibre centrefire, where low power would be ideal for stalking in the scrub, with the option of more power for more open county work.

The slightly larger 2.5 to 25x 42 looked a good candidate for my DGA Shilen 220 Swift. It is also quite compact with an overall length of 314mm and a weight of 613gm. The click adjustments are quarter minute, and it has a generous 100MOA of both vertical and horizontal adjustment. A duplex reticule is fitted. This scope impressed me greatly with its clarity throughout the power range, but in a hunting situation it would be rare to use more than about 12 power. In fact, I had it wound down around six power until a target was identified, and then the power could be moved up until the intended victim all but filled the scope.

Conclusions
Obviously, these are high end top quality expensive scopes, and may be out of the financial reach of many shooters. For the money the shooters gets a hand built superb product from Japan. Are they worth the extra dollars? Well, that is a matter of perspective. If one checks out the prices of other manufacturers top end products (especially the European ones) you may find that the price difference is not that great.

Certainly in the benchrest world, these scopes have swept the field amongst the top shooters. The Australian A Team that won the 2009 World Benchrest Championships in South Africa all used March scopes. Stuart and Annie Elliott (BRT), who are the Australian distributors for March scopes, have been simply amazed at the number of orders that they have had for the product.

Prices fluctuate slightly with the dollar value at the time of order, so check with BRT for the latest figure.

Richard Wild writes an article for the Target Shooter on-line magazine and also for the Australian Target Shooter magazine.

I now have a good handful of top quality rife scopes that are constantly used for evaluation, testing and competition and mounted so they can be swapped around rifes easily. In my writing career, I have had the pleasure of testing European, U.S. and Japanese optics and have been generally pleased with the results. This refects not only the price of the piece but also, perhaps more importantly, the technological advances made in the past 20 years. The old scopes in my cupboard are from a time before CAD made uniformity easy and a time when variable scopes were expected to describe an "S" shape on the target as the power was increased! As long-range precision shooters, our requirements of a scope's performance have matured and we have certain demands of a product. At its most simple, we expect a scope not to fail as a result of the general wear and tear of range use. The March range of rifescopes is now well known in shooting circles and is a growing presence on the winner's podium. The 10 - 60 x 52 Tactical under review is an example of a scope that suits a number of target disciplines but is aimed at the long range shooter, who would benefit from a high magnification range.

March products are manufactured in the Japanese version of Silicon Valley in Nagano Prefecture. In line with the standard Japanese practice, parts are sourced from specifc feeder companies who produce a small range of precision parts. These are then assembled at the Deon Optical Design Corporation.

So what are we looking at?
The 10 - 60 x 52 Tactical has, at 60 power, the highest zoom magnifcation currently available in the market today. There are three versions of this scope, two with MTR-1 reticle (one version is illuminated) and the third option offers a choice of dot (1/8 or 1/16 MOA) or simple cross hair reticles. The 10 - 60 x 52 Tactical weighs 730g (25.7oz) and is 420mm (16.5inch) long. One of the tricks that budget scopes use to disguise poor lens-quality is to increase the thickness of the bars in the cross hairs so the eye is immediately drawn to, then pushed to, the centre of the image. Higher end scopes do not use this optical illusion with the March's reticles remaining uniformly thin through the range. The scope available for testing came with the non-illuminated MTR-1 cross hair pattern. The MTR-1 is an Imperial-based pattern that offers an alternative to mildot and other multiple cross hair precision reticles when it come to aiming off and range determination.

I have used the Nightforce NXS version of this pattern since it came on the market and for F Class and 1000 yard Benchrest shooting and I believe it to be the best pattern to use for holding off in the wind. At one hundred yards, each division subtends two inches with the scope set at 20 power, one inch at 40 power and approximately 3/4 inch at 60 power. Start moving down range and this scale quickly shows how much you need to aim off in the prevailing wind conditions. For me, having the magnifcation running at 40 power so the divisions represent MOA, allows me to develop an accurate matrix for aiming off. For example, a left dominant fshtail wind running with two minutes of defection can be measured during the sighting shots and an aim off established on the second stadia on the left of the cross and used as the de facto centre point. This avoids the need to adjust the windage turret and reduces overall wear and tear on a scope. There are three obvious differences between the benchrest and the tactical version of this scope - the turrets, the illuminated reticle and a zero stop.

The turrets are easy to access from a fring position and come standard with 1/8 MOA click adjustment for more precise point of impact tuning at long range. Each revolution of the turret works out to be 10 MOA for a total of 60 minutes of elevation and 40 of windage. The zero stop is a great addition for disciplines that require a lot of scope adjustments and means the elevation zero should never be lost, allowing el¬evation come-ups to counted from zero. I set the March up for a 300 metre zero and was able to accurately adjust for 400 and 500 metre ranges using my existing scopes elevation settings. With the illuminated reticle version, if the light conditions fail, the scope reticle can be lit up, so there should never be a reason to lose sight of the crosshairs. The challenge for colour blind shooters is to see the red light and this should be tested before purchase.

Setting up the March
The test scope came with a scope ring alignment tool and lapping bar made by Stuart Elliot of BRT Shooters Supply, the Australian distributor for March scopes. This really is a 'must have' piece of kit for any scope and is an important tool when you are using expensive optical equipment. Remember that recoil will bend any scope and a poorly aligned scope tube will suffer torque and twisting that will eventually affect accuracy. Unlike other scope-ring alignment tools, the BRT tool is not pointed. Rather, two fat ended cylinders are used. These offer a more exact indication of alignment due to the precise mating of the two fat surfaces. I was pleased to see that my Sportsmatch 30mm rings need no additional work! Each scope comes with a sunshade and a 35mm Modifer Disk. The Modifer Disk works to reduce the front lens from 52mm to 35mm to reduce unnecessary brightness and increase focus depth, which potentially helps with reading mirage.

Internal Construction
It is worth stressing from the start that there is no plastic used in the construction of the March. The scope body, for example, is machined from a single piece of aluminium bar stock and all the lenses are glued in. This makes for a structurally solid piece of equipment that is much stronger than possible through other methods of manufacture. But the offset is, of course, a considerably more costly manufacturing process. While it looks heavy, the March is shorter and lighter than comparable scopes on the market. All March scopes are purged with argon gas, which is heavier than the nitrogen usually used in scope manufacture and does not leak. Gas purging is used to minimise internal corrosion and prevent internal fogging during quick temperature or humidity changes. A lot of work has gone into the design and manufacture of the scope's erector tubes to lighten and strengthen them. The erector tubes are smaller and lighter than other brands' erector turrets. A lighter turret means less inertia and internal impact during recoil which leads to less incremental damage to the erector tube and components. It appears that a lot of research has gone into minimising the potential damage that a poorly placed or designed erector tube can potentially cause to the March's internal parts. This also includes heat treating key internal parts to reduce friction and galling during use -as unseen damage can occur as a result of the sudden stop at the end of the recoil pulse.

March scopes also use a heat treated, fat-type erector tube spring as the design engineers work on the guiding principle that coil springs tend have a memory problem, regardless of the material. All this heat treating means that parts need The heart of the scope, at least from the shooter's perspective, is the lens. March scopes use Extra-low Dispersion (ED) lenses. March's product notes that ED lenses have a smaller refractive index than a typical optical lens in the blue to red wavelength. This enables superior sharpness and color correction by reducing chromatic aberration. These specialty lenses are often used in microscopes, telescopes, semiconductor steppers, or high-end camera lenses.

Chromatic aberration is the failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point (the opposite to a rainbow). It occurs because lenses have a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens). The refractive index decreases with increasing wavelength. Chromatic aberration is easy to test for in a scope, if you can see "fringes" of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image you have found it. It occurs in poor quality scopes because each color in the optical spectrum cannot be focused at a single common point on the optical axis. I pushed the March hard on this, both on a range of targets and distances -fullbore and benchrest and against a Zeiss lens test-chart in order to find out when the blue and red wavelength got confused. For all normal long range shooting conditions and I would hazard some less than normal, sighting was 'very good to excellent' and provided all the detail needed but without any lens induced distortion. This devotion to detail takes its costs in the manufacturing process and one engineer at the Deon factory can only assemble two scopes a day. This is no high volume assembly line!

Testing and Retesting
Scope reviews generally follow a set pattern of behaviour. The writer places a grid at 100 odd yards and clicks around the square to prove the turrets work- or shoots a group with a shot at each power do see if the scope tracks a straight line or an "S" pattern. In the real world of long-range precision shooting we do not do this. We try to push the limits of our equipment and ourselves and during scope testing I try to do the same - sometimes to the chagrin of the distributor. And Canberra in the middle of summer is no friend to the scope tester. The March 10 -60 x 52 was used on a variety of rife platforms; a 284 Win. Improved, a 220 Weatherby Rocket and a 6.5 Shehane, across a range of shooting scenarios and ranges. Once the March was set up in the rings using the BRT scope ring alignment tool, initial zeroing occurred at 300 metres. Shooting at 40 power was pleasant and proved to be very similar to using my NXS. Moving up to 60 power was more of a challenge in the twisting mirage and ficky conditions of an Australian summer. What it did show and what I could learn from, was the ebb and fow of the mirage against the 10 ring. Picking the lull after the mirage dropped off was easy and more practice would show that a tricky mirage could be exploited using a combination of the high magnifcation and patience. At 60 power I was able to see the bullet holes in the black, which has not been possible at 42 power. It is possible to shoot at 60 power but doing so successfully at the start of an Australian January is diffcult due to the heat and strong light. Shooting at 300 metres, the mil graduations subtend approximately 2.25 inches, while magnifcation presents a dancing sight-picture due to the mirage fow. Staring at the mirage patterns over a period showed a cycle of build-up and let-off emerging but I was not good enough or clever enough to use it to my advantage. But the MTR-1 reticle can be used to offset a tricky wind. Dropping the magnifcation to 45 power at the next range and bracketing the ten ring between windage stadia proved to be an effective way of compensating for wind strength -and resulted in a high score in tricky conditions. Replacing the 7mm barrel with a 220 Rocket barrel is simple enough using an aluminium barrel vice. While the 7mm is a proven performer, I have struggled with the Rocket and needed to do some load testing with 50 grain bullets. Choosing 60 power, the grain in the paper was visable at 100 metres and groups formed around the point of aim. It was soon easy to see where the accuracy node emerged (41 grains of Varget!). The highlight of the afternoon was the surprising appearance of a bull ant behind the target that measured 3/4 MOAand was signifcantly bigger than the Rocket's groups. With a 60 power March, ant sniping could become the next big game in town!

Moving the March to another rife highlighted one of two negatives. Eye relief is hard to get consistent with such a high power range and there is a cross-over point of about four millimetres that needs to be finely judged. The second negative is focusing of the crosshairs; fine for my eyes but some new owners have struggled to get this right and the middle of a competition is not the place to find out how to adjust the eyepiece. The 6.5 Shehane appeared at the end of its competitive life and was in need of some coaxing to get the last of its barrel working for me. This 6.5mm barrel had proven 'diffcult' during its last few outings and some serious reworking of the bedding had been a Christmas priority. With temperatures on the range in the high thirties Celsius, and a swinging wind from over the right shoulder, it was always going to be a challenging day for scope testing. But this was the moment when all the words I'd written about the March suddenly made sense.

Without the 35mm Modifier Disk, the 600 metre target was a waving mess at 50 power; with the Modifier Disk screwed in a clear sight-picture emerged. The ED lens was more than able to discriminate between mirage shifts and provid¬ed enough confidence to predict mirage induced elevation changes. The small exit-pupil also means light changes are immediately obvious and can be factored into aim off. The bottom line was I could see things that other shooters couldn't and I was in better control of the conditions than with my own scope. The March 10 -60 x 52 clearly demonstrated that the work I had done on the bedding had paid off and was still a lot of accuracy left in the barrel.

The Last Word
March scopes are good, very good and deserve the reputation they are currently receiving. They are expensive for a reason but with the cost of a custom rife it is worth adding one to your decision list for the next build. I approached this review with a jaundiced view of the hype but have come away looking for ways to not give this scope back. As always, when shopping around for a new telescopic sight, the best piece of advice for the shooter is to compare a number of makes and models in the same light conditions at the same time. Whether this involves looking through a couple of different scopes on the mound or going through a gunshop's complete collection, the time spent at this point in making the correct decision with be worth it in the long term.

Paul Sullivan wins the Australian Centrefire Benchrest 4 Gun Championships (again) using March scopes. Phil Jones was 3rd also using March scopes. Both use the 40x Benchrest model. The Benchrest Nationals was held at Silverdale range outside Sydney, the site of the 2013 World Championships.

Adrian Abbott achieved the individual top score which helped Australia beat the Poms in the long range Match Rifle event called the Woomera Match right here in Brisbane. This is the first time the Poms have ever been beaten. Adrian Abbott using a 10-60 March scope finished the 1200 yard final stage with a perfect score of 75 with 10 centre V bulls. His total score for the 1,000 yards, 1100 yards and 1200 yards was 224.27 also the highest score. He only dropped one point! Adrian has several rifles with March 10x-60x tactical version and loves them.