Depending on who you talk to on the subject of eye relief, you will likely get one of two schools of thought. One school seems to feel that more eye relief is better and the other school that 3 inches or slightly more is adequate on all but the hardest kicking rifles.
I tend to favor an opinion by Randy Wakeman in an article he penned entitled, "The Straight Scope: On Riflescopes" item IV:
"Certainly we need adequate eye relief. Very few rifles move rearward more than a grand total of one half of one inch during the entire recoil pulse, recoil pad collapse excluded. Unless you are a stock crawler, or shooting .338 Win Mag rounds, three inches of eye relief should be adequate, and anything more than that is generous for all but the most abusive recoling rifles. Particularly with muzzleloaders (as we are reloaders by nature) an invasively recoiling load is of our own construction, no one else's......................"
Most of the cut above or on the nose situations I have seen are a result of the scope not being mounted forward enough to begin with. It goes without saying that a properly mounted scope and one that is designed to fit adequately in the rings of your choosen rifle should be a first step to avoiding problems.
I realize that sometimes shooting from an awkward position or from prone can make eye relief more critical than shooting off a bench. That being said, I try to mount my scopes as far forward as I can still get a full sight picture when I throw the gun up to my shoulder quickly as if getting ready to make a snap shot.
In my hunting experience mostly in N/E woods and fields, I get very few opportunties to take a prone shot. In fact, I do not think I have shot prone since I was a kid when my favorite big game was woodchucks with a SAKO .222 and a Baush & Lomb Balvar 8 riflescope with the adjustment in the mount itself and not the scope.
I have a Mueller 2X7X32 red dot scope with 3.25 inches of eye relief mounted on a Marlin Model 1895 lever action in 45-70. Is the 45-70 a "Hard Kicking Rifle"? It depends, I guess on what you are loading it with. The typical 300 grain JFN and JHP bullets loaded for deer at around 1800fps are very mild and kick less than the 12 guage slug shooting shotguns I have taken approximately 30 deer with over the years. Stuff a Buffalo Bore 405 grain JFN up the spout, the 45-70 does get your attention, however I have never come close to cutting the bridge of my nose with the Mueller scope. Again, mounting the scope correctly "fore and aft, with the reticle alligned properly and making the MOST out of the 3.25 inches of eye relief built into the scope goes a long way. The scope by the way has fully multi coated glass and a red dot with 11 brightness settings and is a dandy scope for the money. Only the top two or three rheostat settings are useful in my personal opinion, however I liked the scope well enough to put one on my TC Encore 209/50.
As mentioned I have shot a lot of deer over the years with an Ithaca Deerslayer with a Weaver K2.5 scope on board. I am NOT positive, however if someone out there has one, I believe the eye relief on that particular scope is right around the 3 inch mark and I never had a problem with that set up either.
There is a relationship between "field of view" and "eye relief". In general terms the higher the magnification and larger the field of view, the shorter the eye relief. I tend to like lower powered variable scopes on most of my rifles. I have a 1.5X5.32 Weaver Gand Slam on my .350 Rem mag, the Mueller 2X7X32 red dot on both my 45-70 and my TC Encore 209/50, a Mueller 3X9X40 Red Dot on a Savage 30:06, a 1.5X4.5X32 Simmons pro-Diamond with an illuminated reticle on my Marlin model 336 lever action in .35 Rem and mostly 3X9X40 scopes on my other rifles. I do have the newer Bushnell 3X10 Elite 3200 on my .308 and an older Simmons 2.5X10X44 Aetec on my Ruger .270 Win.
I have nothing against more eye relief and if were to purchase a .375H&H, or another dangerous game rifle, I might decide to put a scope on board with over 3.5 inches of eye relief.
In the interim, I do not feel I am being short changed in that department.
Dan
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