Re: Nightforce Unimount. Are mounting bolts close?
A couple words on this. I fully agree that in a perfect world, on applications for which a cantilever mount is not needed, the ideal mount is a non-cantilevered as it can be made stronger for the same weight.
However, in this imperfect world, if the only mount that will fit your application, is available, is in stock and in your price range is cantilevered, using it will certainly not hurt anything (provided it’s the right one). By “the right one” I mean one designed (well) to handle the recoil and one that is well made.
Obviously taking any given mount and making it cantilevered will weaken it do some degree in some ways. Some cantilevered mounts really are relatively weak/flexible due to this, but that doesn’t mean they all are. And there’s a lot more to the design that’s arguably more important as well.
A large percentage of my customers using my cantilevered mounts on—not just monolithic AR’s—but DTA’s, Barretts, AR-50’s, etc, in 338 Lapua to 50 Cal aren’t doing it because it’s the first mount they happened to try. A great many only felt the need to get my mount after less than acceptable performance from other mounts they were using—many of them non-cantilevered.
From losing zero, groups not being as tight as they should be, to simply rattling loose, to needing a bunch of locktite all over everywhere, to scopes sliding in the rings, to stripped screws, to stripped screw holes…you name it, I’ve seen it. The big guns really expose weaknesses that may never be noticed on a 5.56. Just as many of these with non-cantilevered as that particular design aspect has nothing to do with the above failures.
Both fixed and QD as well, though the greater percentage of problems naturally come from the QD mounts—even the “big name brand” or “best” QD mounts according to so many. Why people would choose them for a 338 or the like, especially one without BUIS, always confounds me a bit. I guess most people don’t realize what a dramatic amount of clamping force one gives up with even a quality QD mount compared with a well designed fixed mount. We’re talking orders of magnitude here (depending upon which exact mounts you’re comparing, of course).
Which goes back to the original question about the NF bolts being close together. Yes, they’re close together but the dramatic increase in clamping force they provide over the QD mounts most are used to makes them much less likely to move than a non-cantilevered QD mount with them spread farther apart or fixed mount with less substantial clamping system. Very much like the “short base” on my cantilever mount (which allows more room for BUIS and other things you may want to mount on the rail) for which I get questioned occasionally—if it’s designed well enough and built well enough, it’s not a worry at all, even on the big guns.
I should note since they’re talked about in this thread, none of the “problem mounts” described above were Spuhr.
