chrisward3
Regular
- Location
- Ottawa, ON
I've been getting a lot of PMs on how I went about making my own IOTA, so here's the quick and dirty story behind it.
First off, was all set to order the actual IOTA from Chuck in Nevada but since he would only accept USD cash mailed to him, and the price+shipping ($70USD total), I decided to reach out to some local optometrists to see if we could achieve the same results. The first one or two shops played dumb and said they didn't think it was possible, but the third was very interested in solving the problem, and I brought the scope to them, and was in and out in a less than 20mins with my own IOTA.
What you need:
- Butler Creek scope cap (that fits your scope's objective lens)
- +0.25 diopter lens (talk to the optometrist who will get an oversize lens in, which are available in different materials, I went with plastic for $20+$10 labour)
- Electrical Tape (this will be used to tape off part of the lens like a camera's aperture to cut down the amount of light collected into the scope)
Bring the scope (or scope cap) into the optometrist, and he will be able to cut the lens diameter to fit inside the cap.
Once you get home, tape off roughly 2/3 of the lens, leaving only about 1/3 pin hole in the lens (this will not affect your FoV, just the amount of light collected)
This brought my focus range between 10-14ft depending on parallax setting, from the low 10m/30ft setting on my S&B to infinity.
I did notice that my eyes got tired very quickly without the taped-off aperture, and eye strain was significantly reduced with the tape.
Target-wise, I took some PRS match books and scaled the targets (squares, diamonds, circles, IPSC) to a 12ft range. IE...a 12" square at 529m in an actual match, translates to a 2.1mm target at 12ft). I then drew these to scale in Photoshop and set them up as different stages so I could practice transitioning, and dialling/holding and the sight picture would be comparable to the target size in real life through the scope.
Pics below, hope this helps!
First off, was all set to order the actual IOTA from Chuck in Nevada but since he would only accept USD cash mailed to him, and the price+shipping ($70USD total), I decided to reach out to some local optometrists to see if we could achieve the same results. The first one or two shops played dumb and said they didn't think it was possible, but the third was very interested in solving the problem, and I brought the scope to them, and was in and out in a less than 20mins with my own IOTA.
What you need:
- Butler Creek scope cap (that fits your scope's objective lens)
- +0.25 diopter lens (talk to the optometrist who will get an oversize lens in, which are available in different materials, I went with plastic for $20+$10 labour)
- Electrical Tape (this will be used to tape off part of the lens like a camera's aperture to cut down the amount of light collected into the scope)
Bring the scope (or scope cap) into the optometrist, and he will be able to cut the lens diameter to fit inside the cap.
Once you get home, tape off roughly 2/3 of the lens, leaving only about 1/3 pin hole in the lens (this will not affect your FoV, just the amount of light collected)
This brought my focus range between 10-14ft depending on parallax setting, from the low 10m/30ft setting on my S&B to infinity.
I did notice that my eyes got tired very quickly without the taped-off aperture, and eye strain was significantly reduced with the tape.
Target-wise, I took some PRS match books and scaled the targets (squares, diamonds, circles, IPSC) to a 12ft range. IE...a 12" square at 529m in an actual match, translates to a 2.1mm target at 12ft). I then drew these to scale in Photoshop and set them up as different stages so I could practice transitioning, and dialling/holding and the sight picture would be comparable to the target size in real life through the scope.
Pics below, hope this helps!
