I bought the Ultraview 3 XL a few weeks ago. It looked like it was the coolest scope I had ever seen and was very adaptable to any situation in competition. There were no instructions with it but a method of installation could be found on Youtube by Chris Bee though it felt rather unauthoritative and proved to be lacking in some areas. The Youtube installation setup instructions seemed to assume an awful lot which I guess is not a surprise since so much of archery is tribal knowledge. It’s almost as if the people doing archery don’t have a written language and put all of their effort into telling stories at the range. I supposed this is good considering this is how history was passed down before the written word but we live in a world where everything can be written, stored and presented for no cost except time.
The task of installing the scope on my Axcel Achieve sight arm/windage/elavation module was not layed out by Ultraview except to tell you which scope rod to use. There were no printed instructions in the packaging and when asked for an instruction PDF Ultraview said, ‘We’ve been thinking about it.’ This was my first scope and felt out of sorts considering I had no knowledge of how it was supposed to be set up. I bought a 4X lens and had to rely heavily on videos of how to set it up from YouTube. I watched videos for about an hour to set it up and still didn’t really know if what I was watching was actually the right way to set it up. This concern with the correct set it up was brought to the forefront when I started shooting with it.
I’m somewhat new to archery. I have about a year of shooting under my belt starting with a Diamond Edge 320 in January 2021. After about 8 months I moved up to a Bowtech Reckoning 34″ with Easton Contour CS stabilizers figuring I would buy a bow that I could not grow out of. I have not done really much in the way of set up beyond a basic tuning but became respectively accurate at 20-yards on a five spot. I achieved relative satisfactory consistent success with the Axcel Achieve stock sight and expected that I would get a more consistent result with the Ultraview 3 XL with the 4X lens.
I was not consistent at all. I had shot better with my previous sight and found my score dropping rather dramatically sometimes even shooting an arrow or two into the no-score zone on the five spot. I kept tweaking the scope, adjusting the windage, elevation and twisting it until it seemed to line up with the line of sight through the peep so that I was not seeing both ends of the fiber optic. No matter what adjustments were made, I was still very inconsistent compared to my previous sight. I kept going back to Google to see if there was something that I had set up incorrectly but it was just a collection of opinions, none of which seemed authoritative. After years of reinventing the wheel as a rebellious adult, I just wanted to know the right way to use this scope rather than struggling to figure out the way it was meant to be used. I imagine the designers of the Ultraview had some sort of plan when they built the Ultraview 3 and expected it to function in a certain way. What are the set up rules for the Ultraview? Have I even set it up right?
The questions that really were not answered were:
Which side of the lens should the fiber optic be installed? The fiber optic strand slides through the lens and then both ends of the fiber optic are slightly melted so they are somewhat larger in the hole in the lens so it does not fall out. The fiber optic slides through the glass and ends up in different places as you move the bow around. Sometimes the fiber optic would be pushed all the way forward and sometimes it would be pushed all the way back. According to Chris Bee, the fiber optic strand should be about 1/2″ long. If this is pushed all the way back or all the way forward through the lens it would yield different positions for the center pin because the fiber optic could bend slightly causing an inconsistent place to aim. Does this matter? I don’t know. Is that how the fiber optic strand is meant to be set up? I don’t know.
I spoke to one other person about an Ultraview 3 at the local range but never really got into details because his sight was set up for hunting while mine was set up for target. He was not experiencing the same things that I was experiencing. I want to know what the right way to set this scope up and have disappointed with endless opinion. I come from a world where you RTFM and am annoyed about how few actual facts are presented by the manufacturer about this rather spendy scope.