Gun talk at your fingertips any time day or night at guntalk.com and guntalktv.com.

The latest guns, gear, reviews, interviews, and news.

Don't miss a thing and sign up for the newsletter at guntalk.com for bonus giveaways and more.

A lot of it is very technical and of course when we talk about target shooting and trying to do long-range shooting then everything has to be incredibly precise which means frankly difficult.

I mean the whole idea about long-range shooting or actually any competition shooting is it's hard to do it well it's difficult and that's what makes it fun.

It was that line in a league of their own you know if it was easy everybody could do it I guess so it's fun to find companies that are popping up and doing interesting things things you might not have seen before and then you find somebody go wait that's my old buddy John what's he up to so we're joined right now by my old buddy John the court who has been in the optics world for quite a long time. Hey John how are you?

I am excellent I mean you go back in the optics world I mean I'm think it's got to be 20 years it feels like it anyway.

Yeah a little bit over over 20 years you're absolutely right.

Okay yeah we've done a lot of stuff together and when you are with the companies everybody would recognize the names optics companies but you're doing something new now talk to me about what you're up to these days.

Yeah I worked for Nikon for 1999 to 2014 and then just so an opportunity to start you know our own optics company along with my partner John Allen and just try to do things a little bit different in that we're trying to change the way that people buy optics we are a direct to consumer brand so we do not sell our products through retail stores or distributors.

And what that does is cuts out the retail market and allows us to provide you know a high level product at you know a really good price.

Okay the company's tracked optics TRACT tracked optics so what do you guys make it what are you offering these days?

So we offer a full line of hunting and on range rifle scopes a full line of binoculars and just late last year we introduced our first spotting scope obviously with long range shooting growing as rapidly as it is a lot of our new product development has been focused on that long range market.

Sure and when I go to the website for those want to follow along track optics dot com you know the first thing you see is the long range competition but then when I started drilling down see what you talk about you got the scopes for hunting got a lot of different things one of the things I mean you can address this is it.

You know pretty much all the optics are made or at least the major components are made somewhere in Japan China Philippine someplace over there so if you know what you're doing as you do you can go over and deal directly and get them to make what you want right.

Well yes thankfully we had pre-established relationships with some of the best subcontractors in Asia the majority of our products are made in Japan all of the toric products which are our flagship lines are made in Japan and the response which is our AR line of optics and the limb fire scopes are made in the Philippines.

Most class in any optics either comes from Asia or Europe there's very very few optical facilities that can provide the quality and quantity here in the US so that's why a very large portion of optics are made overseas.

What is it you have to think is specifically about scopes rifle scopes what is it that people may not understand or misunderstand about what makes a rifle scope good.

Well probably you know the most important thing you know is the fact that the scope has to hold zero and right in line with that importance is the ability to see through the scope clearly especially low light situations.

You know a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on the clarity in the low light performance and that's extremely important but in the scope is great optically but it's not great mechanically you're going to leave a lot on the table and especially as you mentioned long range shooting you know precision becomes more and more important obviously the mistakes that you make shooting at a hundred yards are magnified ten times in a thousand yards.

So you know mechanical integrity optical quality those really are two things that come in tandem and you know finding the balance of of specifications is extremely important you know the one of the most important things though is the mechanical integrity every time you pick that rifle up to make a shot especially in situations or as you're shooting in terms of this and you can't afford for that rifle scope to fail mechanically.

I was hoping you would go there I left it wide open to see what would happen but yeah knowing you you went right to the right point which is and I was told people it's that we don't this thing these scopes are really bright these are really clear you know i'm sorry but.

...