We are red dot junkies here at Reload­One. Some of us are worse than oth­ers. Okay, me. I am ter­ri­ble when it comes to find­ing the per­fect afford­able red dot. I tend to buy a new one every cou­ple months just to see what’s what.

Over the last year, I have pur­chased more than a hand­ful of cheap­ies from var­i­ous places to test them out and deter­mine for myself if they are any good. Most of them wind up stored neat­ly in the trash­can after fail­ing. It’s an expen­sive field of study over the long haul, but hey, I quit drink­ing years ago so that mon­ey has to go some­where.

I’ve pur­chased some real stinkers too. At least half a dozen of the micro red dots from Ama­zon have gone into the trash. How­ev­er I have liked some of the mounts so I kept those and the bat­ter­ies always come in handy. But for the most part, the glass sucked, they wouldn’t hold zero, the mount­ing screws stripped or broke off, they failed to turn back on after being slight­ly mis­used etc.

I do own a few nice red dots like Eotechs and Aim­points and one mid lev­el Holo­sun, but I still like to buy some­thing new every once in a while to test and see if I can run it every day with­out any issues.

Most recent­ly I have been run­ning a Vor­tex Strike­fire II on my dai­ly shoot­er which I have been very hap­py with. There are a ton of reviews out there for the Vor­tex if you’d like more infor­ma­tion on that. The Vor­tex has been a mid-price champ and it is going to end up on the 10.5″ pis­tol I am still fin­ish­ing.

The Vor­tex Strike­Fire II I run on my every day AR. It has been a champ all the way around.

The new Black Spi­der Optics 3 MOA red dot. Big improve­ment.

I have been wait­ing on a spe­cif­ic red dot to come out for a very long time. Now, if you are old enough to remem­ber the ear­ly days of the Inter­net, maybe a few years in, the promise of new soft­ware that was often dis­cussed pre-release always got folks excit­ed. More often than not though the soft­ware would nev­er mate­ri­al­ize in the real world. This was called “vapor-ware”. I hate “vapor-ware”. Well, Holo­sun has been piss­ing me off for the last 8 or so months with the promise of their upcom­ing HS510C mod­el, which has been list­ed on Optics Plan­et for about that amount of time. Every time I have con­tact­ed OP and Holo­sun, they have both told me it’s com­ing. The last time I was told mid-July and the damn thing still isn’t ready to ship. So screw it. I will offi­cial­ly call it, the Holo­sun HS510C is Vapor-Ware.

A few days ago, while on a late night shop­ping ram­page I came across the Black Spi­der 3 MOA Cen­ter Dot, they are an off­shoot of Spike’s Tac­ti­cal, that has been out for over a year. I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m not quite sure how that is pos­si­ble.

I did all the nor­mal stuff, jumped on YouTube to see if there are any video reviews of it and wammo, there are a hand­ful of them, with one espe­cial­ly gung-ho fel­la try­ing to chop down a damn tree with it. He was deter­mined to break the thing. Short of bend­ing the ris­er a bit, he couldn’t kill it. I was impressed with what he did to beat it down and it just smiled back and polite­ly called him a wussy.

So of course I ordered one. Now, I’m not going to be beat­ing it to try and kill it like this guy did, but it is nice to know that it will hold up to red­neck tor­ture and not fail. Here’s a link to my Ama­zon affil­i­ate page if you’re inter­est­ed. It helps us keep the site up and run­ning. Black Spi­der 3 MOA Cen­ter Dot.

It looks stur­dy as hell and one of my favorite fea­tures is that it doesn’t have all the gen­er­al non­sense like most com­pa­nies have with their logo appear­ing 4 times on it. Yes, Vor­tex, you. I’m look­ing at you.

So here is a quick gallery of this little beast.

Now, thank­ful­ly the week­end is upon us. Weath­er, please co-oper­ate. Check out the Black Spi­der 3 MOA Cen­ter Dot if you’re in the mar­ket!