Last month, I participated in the Budget Rifle and Ammo Challenge created by BoomStick @FukuYTmark6 and LongRilfe @MnShootingSports. This challenge target has six 3/4″ target rounds which are small but not unusual for a 50-yard rimfire challenge target. The real challenge is the limitations on the price of the gear and ammo you can shoot it with.
This challenge is limited to factory rifles (no upgraded trigger or barrel) and optic must have a retail price of less than $700 combined. Moreover, the rimfire ammo used must be bulk box 22LR and excludes more premium ammo types such as CCI Standard and Norma Tac22 (CCI standard is premium? love it!).
I accepted this challenge with a smile. My rifle is a factory Ruger Precision Rimfire which I bought on a Black Friday sale. I’m going to count the average sale price today which is about $400. That means the scope I choose has to cost less than $300. Fortunately for me, I recently reviewed the Discovery Optic LHD 8-32×56. A very high magnification scope for a very budget price of about $249 https://youtu.be/Jn7LcnJBsbg. For the challenge, I shot it with Federal AutoMatch a 40grn LRN round.
During the challenge run, my 3rd shot was a wildly off flyer. This inconsistency would plague the rest of my run. My best target was the 2nd with two shots going through the same hold. The rest were inconsistent. I ended up with a score of only 7 of a possible 18. Federal AutoMatch was even worse ammo in my rifle than Aguila, with which I scored 11.
This prize supplied by Discovery Optics and is awarded at their sole discretion and direction.
RULES
NO PURCHASE OR DONATION IS NECESSARY TO ENTER. YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING DO NOT INCREASE WITH A PURCHASE. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED.
1. Eligibility
Void where prohibited by law. Must be legal resident in the USA. Moondog Industries employees, subsidiaries, affiliates, suppliers, advertising and promotion agencies, employees’ immediate family members, are ineligible to participate in the contest/giveaway.
Entrants must be willing and able to appear on YouTube to discuss the contest and post images of the prize on their social feed should they win the contest.
2. Sponsors and Platforms
Discovery Optics (known as the SPONSOR) and Moondog Industries (known as the CO-SPONSOR) is a video Edutainment producer and game promotor based in San Francisco, CA. YouTube, TikTok, Rumble, X and online video platforms (known as PLATFORMS) are not SPONSORS or in any way affiliated with the contest or content.
3. Agreement to Rules
By entering the contest, participants agree to abide by the SPONSOR’s Official Rules and decisions. The SPONSOR retains the right to refuse, withdraw, or disqualify entries at their sole discretion. By submitting an entry, the participant agrees to accept the decision of the SPONSOR as final and binding.
4. Entry Period
Contest email entries must be received between: 12:00pm EST 1 April 2025 and 12:00pm EST 30 April 2025
5. How to Enter
This contest requires your skill in navigating your phone or computer controls to screen capture an image of the following YouTube channels/Social Media accounts. Subscribe or Follow and make a screen capture of those pages showing a greyed out Subscribe button or indicator that your account is Following that page. Send a screen capture image file of any of those sites to contest@moondogindustries.com . One entry per person or per Social Media account. Fraudulent methods of entry, photo retouched, or other methods of circumvention of the rules may result in the SPONSOR invalidating a participant’s entries.
6. Prizes
The winner must be able to receive the prize by e-mail or by physical mail. Prize may be substituted at the sole discretion of the SPONSOR. Acceptance of the prize grants SPONSOR permission to use the winner’s entry, name, and likeness for advertising, promotion, and trade without further compensation or remuneration unless prohibited by law.
7. Odds
The odds of winning is dependent upon the number of eligible entries received.
8. Selection and Notification of the Winner
The winner will be chosen at random by the SPONSOR from among the entrants who demonstrated the skill to navigate the electronic entry and have met the minimum requirements. Winners will be contacted via the email used to enter the contest. Winner must have a legal address within the US to ship the prize.
SPONSOR is not liable for the winner’s failure to receive notification of winning if he or she provided the wrong email address or if their email security settings caused your prize notification to go into the spam or junk folder. If a winner does not respond within 24hrs of sending a notification, the SPONSOR will select an alternate winner. Receipt of the prize is upon the condition of compliance with federal, state, and local laws.
9. Rights Granted by the Entrant
The SPONSOR, upon submission of an entry into the giveaway or contest, has the right to use the participant’s submission, voice, likeness, image, statements about the contest, etc., for publicity, news, advertising, promotional purposes, trade, and so forth, without any further notice, review, consent, compensation or remuneration.
Participants shall defend or settle against such claims at their sole expense, and shall indemnify, defend and hold harmless the SPONSOR from any suit due to damage of or by the prize.
10. Terms & Conditions
The SPONSOR reserves the right to modify, suspend, cancel or terminate in the event that non-authorized human intervention, a bug or virus, fraud, or other causes beyond your control impact or corrupt the security, fairness, proper conduct, or administration of the contest/giveaway.
11. Limitation of Liability
Entry into this contest constitutes the participant’s agreement to release and hold harmless the SPONSOR and PLATFORMS, subsidiaries, affiliates, employees, etc., against all claims liability, illness, injury, death, loss, etc., that occurs directly or indirectly from participation in the contest or use/misuse of the awarded prize.
12. Disputes
As a condition of participating in the promotion, the participant agrees to resolve all disputes with an arbitrator designated by the SPONSOR in the state of California, without resorting to any form of class action. Entrants waive all rights to punitive, incidental, or consequential damages, and waive all rights to have damages multiplied or increased.
13. Privacy Policy
Participants agree to abide by all privacy and NDA laws in the State of California and any federal laws of the United State of America.
14. Winners List
Participants may request a list of winners by submitting a request in writing to Moondog Industries for up to 30 days after the contest ends.
15. Social Media Platform Rules
Winners will agree to post a photo of the prize on their social media channels in such a way as does not violate any rules of that platform. The winners also agree to appear for an interview where they will discuss the prize and its performance. If there are functional problems with the prize, the winner agrees to make a good-faith effort to resolve all issues with the SPONSOR prior to posting reviews or opinions about the prize.
16. Affirmation of Acceptance of and Agreement to All of the Official Rules
By entering the contest, the entrant has affirmatively reviewed, accepted, and agreed to all of them.
Too Much Information live chat show. This episode we’ll be covering 2025’s most anticipated movies. This video is sponsored by Aura. Stop leaving yourself vulnerable to data breaches. Go to my link https://aura.com/moondog to get a 14-day free trial and see if any of your data has been exposed. Read my notes https://moondogindustries.com/tmi-live-250326/
This brand is a German footwear and apparel company. It is the second largest athletic and fitness brand in the world, behind Nike.
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Crunch Fitness is a worldwide fitness brand. Crunch was founded in NYC’s Greenwich Village in 1989 by Doug Levine, a former stockbroker. It’s tagline and philosophy “No Judgments” was ment to remove the intimidation factor from going to the gym.
I started working on Crunch Fitness advertising back in 1995. I designed an wrote headlines for a variety of print and billboard ads. Today I work on freelance creative projects for Crunch.
Special Guest: Tony Harl Author, serial entreperneur, Tony Hartl founded Planet Tan in Dallas in 1995 and built the company from the ground-up before selling it for millions. He has been a guest lecturer at The Caruth Institute of Entrepreneurship at SMU’s Cox Business School. He is a Partner and CEO of Crunch Fitness Texas.
CONTESTS March Multixel contest drawing
April 5 Contest
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This brand was named after it’s founder Adi Dassle. It first attained popular awareness in the early 1980’s among the hip-hop community. Rappers Run-DMC wrote a song estolling their name and footwear. Unfortunately they perpetuated America’s mispronouncication of the brand.
April Fools! The Bear Creek Arsenal does produce the Grizzly Glock-alike in a variety of sizes, including a compact 9mm. The pistol shown in the video by Patrick isn’t a real one. But they were gracious enough to let me film this at their booth at SHOT Show to mad props to them.
Last year, Discovery impressed me with the ED-PRS Gen2 5-25×56 scope with its high-quality glass, features, and street price under $500. They told me they were working on a 6-36x version but had delayed production until they were satisfied with the results. The wait is finally over with the XED 6-36×56 with a street price of just under $700.
This scope is share many of the features of the new ED-PRS Gen2 MOA like its new throw lever design and its tool-free turret screw tops. The XED is slightly longer and heavier overall with a noticeably wider parallax dial than the ED-PRS. The biggest change is the XED’s 35mm tube which allows a wider range of adjustments.
The XED utilizes Japanese ED glass for excellent optical clarity and brightness while minimizing chromatic aberration. Most high power scopes have tight eyeboxes, the XED is unforgiving at 36x. Tight eyebox aside, for those that require a bit more magnification than the ED-PRS 5-25x, the XED is tough to beat.
Luxgun is a shooting sports tripod brand made by Sunwayfoto. My buddy Slavguns introduced this new brand to me at SHOT Show 2025 where a sample of this new hunting and shooting tripod was displayed at Christensen Arms. He helped design and put together this product.
The Hunt Tripod is a 65″ tall carbon fiber tripod (it’s taller than me) with a 28mm inverted ball-head, and a quick detach ARCA/Swiss base. The tripod comes pre-mounted with a wide-expanding Sunwayfoto saddle mount. The Hunt kit is more than just the tripod and mount,, it includes all the accessories a new hunter or shooter needs to start shooting, including a MLOK-to-ARCA adapter, feet spikes, and a Picatinny-to-ARCA adapter.
Nightcore’s new NPL25 GL is one of the brightest compact weapon lights available. Its adjustable clamp allows it to be used on a variety of pistols. In my tests, my unit could output a maximum of 825 lumens, close enough to its rated 900 lumens. In addition to its brightness and CCW-friendly size, it also features a laser and removable built-in battery pack.
Its removable battery has LEDs which indicate its charge level. In theory, you could buy extra battery packs to swap out. But replacement battery packs are not available for sale on Nitecore’s website which seems like a huge oversight. A fresh battery pack can run the NPL25 for over 35 minutes in high mode.
My key issue with the NPL25 isn’t the battery pack, but with the proprietary magnetic USB cable used to recharge the pack. Unfortunately, Nitecore did not design the NPL25 to use a USB-C cable or a phone-compatible wireless charger. I spoke to them about this at SHOT Show 2025 and they revealed to me, they will be releasing a USB-C charging station that ships with 2 spare batteries. Problem solved.
NPL25 Max Output: 900 Lumens Max Beam Distance: 255 m Max Beam Intensity: 16000 cd Max Runtime: 0 h 35 m / 0.02 d LED: NiteLab UHi 20 LED Battery Detachable: 500mAh Li-ion Battery Dimensions: 56.0mm x 33.0mm x 32.0mm (2.20″ x 1.30″ x 1.26″) Weight 66 g / 2.33 oz
Athlon Optics is known for making a wide range of high-quality scopes on par with other Leupold, Vortex, and Burris at a more reasonable price. At SHOT Show 2025 the displayed design and packaging updates to their entire scope line. They have enlarged turrets to allow more visible markings, added screw-on throw levers, and added sunshades.
Like Vortex and other brands, I suspect Athlon is addressing competition from new Chinese-built budget scopes like Discovery and Vector, and even budget US brands like Monstrum. Those new brands include high-quality accessories with their scopes such as flip-up covers, sunshades, throw levers, and even scope mounts and rings.
As Dustin said, Athlon has been offering shooters great value, and with these updates, even more so. I look forward to trying out all of these new products in the coming year.
*CORRECTION* The co-host of The Dark Horse Podcast is Brett Weinstein, not Eric Weinstein as I mistated on the show. Eric Weinstein is a Mathematical Physicist and older brother of Brett Weinstein. My apologies to Dr. Brett Weinstein.
Too Much Information live chat show with special guest Allan from the YouTube channel @benchrestmarksman. We’ll be talking about growing up in Queensland, Australia. This video is sponsored by Aura. Stop leaving yourself vulnerable to data breaches. Go to my link https://aura.com/moondog to get a 14-day free trial and see if any of your data has been exposed. Read my notes https://moondogindustries.com/tmi-live-250319/
Founded in 1920 this brand is one of the oldest airlines in the world. It was featured in a memorable scene in the movie “Rainman” where Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond identified this brand the only airline that has never crashed.
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Queensland Queensland is an Australian state covering the continent’s northeast, with a coastline stretching nearly 7,000km. Its offshore Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef system, hosts thousands of marine species. The city of Cairns is a gateway to the reef and tropical Daintree Rainforest. The capital, Brisbane, is flanked by the surfing beaches of the Gold and Sunshine Coasts.
CONTESTS
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This airline is the official national airline of Australia and a founding member of the Oneworld airline alliance,[18] it is the only airline in the world that flies to all seven continents.
It’s hard to believe, but you can improve your long range accuracy for less than $20 by simply attaching a spirit bubble level to your scope. Discovery Optics makes such an accessory. It’s a spirit level mounted in a metal ring which you can clamp onto your scope tube to you can read the angle and levelness of your scope and rifle setup.
If your scope is not 100% directly above your rifle bore, which can happen as you press your cheek to your stock or simply adjusting your shooting position, or when setting up a hasty shooting position, this can create a slight canted angle either to the right or left of center. This will in turn can make your shot land ever so slightly to the right or left of your aim point. By assuring your scope is level to your bore with a spirit level, you can avoid this simple mistake.
This scope level is made of aircraft grade 6061 aluminum alloy with an easy-to-read bubble bead in the spirit tube. It comes with two ring adapters allowing the bubble level to be mounted on either 1″ (25.4mm), 30mm, or 34mm scope tubes. It is probably the best $20 you’ll spend on your scope set up.
