AIMPOINT ACRO S-2

Most of the products I review, I only get for a short time, with only a handful of outings to evaluate them. But if this is the rule, then Aimpoint’s Acro S-2 shotgun sight has been the exception. Over the last year, you see, I have travelled to Sweden to visit Aimpoint’s production facility, spoken to the S-2’s designers, and used the sight on clays and game. I have also shot with it again at the Bisley Shooting Ground alongside some of the UK’s best clay coaches, and I have definitively integrated it into my own shooting practice by acquiring one for myself. Shooting a shotgun without a red dot now feels as ‘retro’ as shooting a rifle over iron sights, although, as we shall see, the Acro S-2 has a strange ability to work even when it’s not there!

What’s it all about?
So, what is the Acro S-2? One answer is that it’s the successor to Aimpoint’s original and pioneering rib-mounted shotgun sight, the Micro S-1, but this isn’t really the point, as both models represent a paradigm shift in how we get a shotgun to hit its target.
Within this new paradigm, the traditional bead and rib become redundant, except insofar as the latter is required to mount the sight. This brings several positive consequences. First, gun-mounting is made easier because the sight is parallax-free, meaning that whatever your head position, if you can see the dot, you know where the shot will go. Second, with your eye freed from the rib, your head can come up, so the action no longer constrains your view, and an ill-fitting stock can no longer slap you in the cheek.
Third, the sight shows you exactly where the gun is pointing relative to the target as you acquire, follow, and engage it, giving you a precise reference point in the moment, and building a memory bank to draw on in the future. Thus, the more you shoot, the more immediately and instinctively the correct sight picture springs to mind, informing where the next shot should go. Moreover, as you learn how to shoot a given clay, having a distinct aim point (QED) enables you to experiment, adding or subtracting lead more precisely and systematically until you find the solution, which, as we have seen, is readily visualised and memorised.
You might retort that being able to look above the action means nothing when the Aimpoint’s housing simply takes its place. I’d make three points in reply: 1. unlike a shotgun’s action, the Acro S-2 has a transparent window in the middle of it; 2. though tough, the Micro S1’s aluminium alloy housing was already slender, and –as we shall see- the Acro S-2’s is even more unobtrusive; and 3. The human brain becomes quite blasé about the things it sees all the time, so the more you shoot with an Acro S-2, the less you perceive it. Indeed, this is true of the red dot itself, which becomes something you barely notice.
If this has a familiar ring, then perhaps that’s because it’s what we train ourselves to do with the traditional rib-and-bead: i.e., focus on the target and not on the gun. The differences with the Acro S-2 are that there’s no need for an initial glance at the rib to check our mount as we shoulder the gun and acquire the target, and that the area immediately around the target is never obscured by the sighting system. If “blotting out the target with the barrel” never previously struck you as a bizarre way to hit something, a session with the Acro S-2 is sure to change that!

Improvement, for sure
I have always considered myself a thoroughly average shot with a smoothbore. So, very much a “hit-and-miss”, “good-days-and-bad-days” shooter. But my expectations have changed radically since acquiring a Micro S-1 and now an Acro S-2 and using them on all my modern guns for the last year or so. Mentally, I’m no longer playing some sort of lottery. Instead, I expect to succeed, and when I do miss, I expect to understand why. As you can imagine, this makes shooting a shotgun a much more rewarding and enjoyable experience.
An unexpected benefit is that the enhancement in my perception of how to move the gun to hit the target that comes from using the Aimpoint on my modern guns has carried over into outings with my classic ones. It’s as though my brain thinks the red dot is there, even when the foreground is occupied by a pair of hammers or cocks. The results are not as good, of course, but there’s still a noticeable change for the better.

The hardware
OK, so that’s the principle and the effect, so now let’s look at the hardware. Probably as a consequence of a market sector skewed towards airsoft skirmishing and airgun plinking, and duly flooded with disposable knockoffs from China, we tend to assume red dot sights are never very good. Indeed, this may explain why we can be so oddly tolerant of how bad more expensive units from reputable brands can be.
Aimpoint is nothing like this. Their main markets are -and have been across the last half century- seriously uncompromising ones: driven hunts, military combat, and top-level practical competition. They employ people who are shooters, recruit ambassadors in relevant fields, and reach out to their dealers and customers for feedback in events such as the ones I was privileged to attend in Sweden and at Bisley.
Their products are manufactured entirely at their Swedish headquarters, with all that implies by way of close oversight; cutting-edge technology in design and manufacturing; rigorous quality control; a skilled, experienced, and nurtured workforce; and investment in the future. Aimpoint is also a privately owned company, enabling profits to be reinvested in the business, not dissipated among shareholders.
The factory itself is spotless and almost noiseless. Every consignment of raw materials and every component is tracked through every stage of the production process. And, in the tranquil returns department, the items in the caddies were there because customers had neglected to read the manual (psst! The front screen is supposed to be tilted), or because they’d had a catastrophically kinetic experience.
I first encountered the Acro S-2 on that Swedish trip. Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Micro S-1 could be improved upon, but Aimpoint had done so superbly by adapting their Acro pistol sight, which, with its lighter weight (74-grams), lower profile (15mm) and slimmer housing, provided an even better basis for a shotgun optic. The Acro S-2 also reduced the Micro S-1’s silhouette by replacing its protruding capped elevation and windage adjustment turrets and rheostat wheel with a pair of flush-mounted Torx sockets and rubberised buttons. At the same time, it introduced a bigger 9 MOA dot that delivers a triple advantage: it stops you from hunting for the dot and shifting your focus away from the target; it lets you dim the dot further without losing it, further facilitating target focus; and it intuitively suggests the spread of the shot pattern.
Also notable is that the Acro S-2 will run for five years on a single CR2032 lithium battery and that it mounts via a clamp with interchangeable polymer ‘jaws’ that will securely grip a comprehensive range of ribs without damage (though care should still be taken).
Once mounted, the sight needs to be carefully bore-sighted at whatever distance the bores converge, using a secure rest or clamp to immobilise the barrels. This process is usefully refined by inserting a pair of fired cartridges with their primers removed and sighting dioptre-style through the vacant primer holes. As with a rifle, a good zero makes all the difference!

Conclusion
To close, I’ll offer a quartet of ultra-brief field reports. First, when shooting clays in Sweden alongside 20 dealers from all over Europe, I amazed myself by coming an improbable 3rd in a nerve-wracking knockout competition. Second, on a fabulous duck shoot on Aimpoint’s hunting grounds, my kills:misses average rose rapidly from 1:3 on the first drive to 4:1 across the last three. Third, at Bisley, a morning’s clay-breaking felt effortless, and when I tipped over what was probably an inevitable fatigue threshold after a packed week and suddenly couldn’t hit a thing, my teammate Mhairi-Ann Troup (Dynamic Ladies Shooting Club), stepped up and turned almost everything to dust on her first time out with the Acro S-2. Fourth, and finally, I have had a simply stupendous summer decoying season. My only questions now are what the results (and reactions) will be when I bring it to my peg in October, and when the bodies governing competitive clay shooting will embrace the progress it represents.
On sale at around £700, the Aimpoint Acro S-2 is unquestionably a purchase to ponder, but its design is unique, its construction peerless, and the chance of it taking your performance with a shotgun to a new level is such that it must be worth the cost of a couple of rounds of clays and four slabs of good cartridges!