Post by DJmatt123 on May 7, 2014 21:00:32 GMT -5
First I would like to give a huge THANK YOU to Bill and CCM for their help in this project! I spent numerous hours trying to create the perfect dial for this and could not fabricate a smooth enough spiral groove to work. I talked with Bill and gave him the specs of what I needed and he was able to create it perfectly! Now on to the details....
This is a modification to the HHA Optimizer. In it's stock form, you can only get between 35-40 yards of adjustment so it needs to be mounted on top of a different adjustable riser to be able to get the range needed for FS's which basically defeats the whole purpose and adds a lot of weight and guessing back into the package. I disassembled my Optimizer and found that it had enough travel in it's hinge that it could have over twice the adjustment as what it does with the standard dial with a couple small modifications.
There are four things that need changing to make this work. First and easiest is some longer springs between the rails. I had some laying around that worked perfect. Second was to remove the pointer since the larger wheel sits over it, so far I have just added a sharpie line beside where the pointer was to line up with the yardage and it works fine. Third is machine the groove that allows vertical movement. I had a friend with a lathe that helped to do that. Last was to make a new dial that had a perfect spiral with enough spread that it would raise the rail to the max the hinge would allow. As I stated above, that was the hardest part and CCM did a perfect job of producing exactly what I needed!
New dial:
The machined vertical groove:
Max angle before mod:
Max angle after mod:
Now for the results! I did a quick sight in the weekend before Supergame and while shooting at approximately 280 fps, I was able to start at 20 yards and adjust all the way out to past 100 yards. It was getting windy at the end but I was able to hit on target out to about 105-110 yards with the dial maxed out. If you have used the stock Optimizer, you probably know that the tapes with the yardage that come with it do not line up for FS rounds. With the new dial, I sighted it in as directed by HHA and got a reading of 31 for the tape strips and it seems to be pretty much spot on out to the 80 yards that the tape displays. After that the spread increases due to the loss of velocity of the FS and I hand marked the 90 and 100 yard marks. I took it up to Supergame and tested it out all weekend and it worked flawlessly! Just get your range, dial it in, and you are on target!
Now for the not so good news. This is not a cheap system. The HHA Optimizer by itself is around $160 plus getting the new dial made and machining the vertical groove. I talked with Bill about the possibility to produce these but it doesn't sound like it's going to be a feasible thing to do to make it worthwhile. We would like to get feedback if you are interested or have any other ideas to improve the design or reduce the cost. If there is enough interest (probably 50+), it might be a possibility that CCM could do a run or if not, maybe there is someone who has the equipment and time to do these on a smaller scale.
