one or 2 piece bases?

The Warne picatinny gives the most leeway followed by the two piece extended bases. The standard two piece and one piece are tied for the least amount of leeway for eye relief. I use either Warne or EGW bases for everything but Marlin leverguns. With those I use the ubiquitous Weaver one piece base. They are about 1/3 the cost of Warne and are just as good for this particular application IMO. I'd bet nine out of ten Marlins have one piece Weavers.

The two piece mounts are more susceptible to misalignment, movement under recoil, and loosening fasteners - you have 6 links in your chain instead of 5; rifle receiver, base(s) rings, and optic, and if one base fastener comes loose, it can induce movement, as opposed to needing 2 or more to come loose with a 1pc base.

Looking at the different products on the market, you can see the "options" available for mounting position within each product - more slots = more positions.

As @cdb1 has noted, the Weaver 1 piece mounts are widely popular for the Marlins. I'm happy with several of them myself.

Doesn't really make any difference. Eye relief can be fiddled with by moving the scope in the rings. Whole thing is more about the scope anyway.

Have both type. Over many years, no problems.

ohihunter2014 said:

the warnes are the lowest to let me use irons from what ive read.

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The Weaver, Leupold Rifleman, and Warne are all grooved, supposedly to let you view the sights down the middle of the rail. For my 1894's and 1895's, I'm not sure I'd believe that's a realistic endeavor. If I sight FLAT down the belly of the mounts, the bottom of the V notch in the semi-buckhorn rear sight and the bead setting in the V are sitting level on the belly. In other words, I can see the sights, even with the thicker weavers, but even with the thinner leupold and warnes, the rail obscures everything below the aiming point, and the shoulders of the mount obscure anything to the sides - so it's kinda like the rail is a big, wide, clunky rear sight. It could be done, but it's a bit less than convenient if I were planning to use QD's and shoot the irons on a regular basis. Without getting out calipers and pulling scopes off to measure them, I might be surprised if the Warne is thinner than the Leupold. Eyeballing them, it looks like the Leupold is the thinnest. Any of them are thin enough to see the sights, but I wouldn't call any of them really serviceable for anything more than an emergency situation.

A better mode is the XS rail with the integral ghost ring and taller front sight, like that included on the 1895 SBL. One of my Guide Guns wears one, and my wife's SBL came with one. I'd like a smaller arbor insert for the ghost ring, but have never taken time to produce one, and the ghost ring shoots plenty precise enough for any shooting which would dictate removing the optic.

go with the weaver. Once you have your rifle sighted in you will never remove the scope.

I have always used one piece bases except on rifles like a Sako that has integral
bases. They have worked great for me.

Zeke

Sunray said:

Doesn't really make any difference. Eye relief can be fiddled with by moving the scope in the rings. Whole thing is more about the scope anyway.

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It makes a huge difference. I've experienced situations where s scope couldn't be mounted with regular two piece or one piece bases much less be adjusted for eye relief. Extended two piece bases worked sometimes but I've encountered a situation numerous times where the only way to adjust eye relief to the shooter was to install a picatinny rail.

Tube length on today's scopes is all over the place. Some tubes are very short. On some the placement of windage and elevation knobs along the tube is such that they are hard to mount using regular two piece and one piece bases.

Some people object to one piece regular and picatinny bases thinking ejection of spent cases will be interfered with(mostly on bolt action rifles). I've never seen it happen personally but have heard of it happening in rare cases.

Have you looked into a cheek piece for the rifle? I got a few Hornady stock packs for free (buy enough damaged bullets from the factory and they feel bad for a guy), so I use those on top of some home made foam riser shims on two of my Marlins. So that's another part which has to come off if you're going to remove the scope and shoot the irons.

My "hillbilly version" might be faster for dropping the comb - just a simply Allen elastic stock wrap cartridge holder, plus some foam rubber wrapped in duct tape as a molded shim. Slide out the foam shim and it drops an inch and a quarter within a few seconds.

@ohihunter2014: Been there, own the rifles, got the t-shirt.

Old picture, need to take a new one, but take a look here - the 4.5-14x40mm Buckmaster is ALMOST touching the rear sight at the front, but there's a mile of air under the tail of the stock above the comb. Pretty sure that's a Weaver with Millet (CHEAP CHEAP) low rings, they might be mediums. You can see the top of the comb vs. the top of the cheek riser, and the top of the sights vs. the centerline of the scope. Before I changed to this Nikon Buckmaster, I had a Bushnell Elite 3200 on top, which is in the second picture, and I remember I couldn't get the scope covers onto the objective because they hit the rear sight.

You might be able to drop a straight tube optic - meaning like a 1-4x24mm without a belled objective - a bit lower, but like I said, I'm pretty sure these are low rings, and there isn't a lot of room to drop the scope before the tube is resting on the rail itself, which would buy you only about 1/4", and the optic would still be WAY high over the top of the comb. Even if you laid the belly of the scope right on top of the receiver, you're talking about a half inch of comb height difference vs. the irons, so even adding 1/2" of mount and ring height with a straight tube scope puts about an inch difference between the two. Unfortunately, that would mean with the scope - likely when you were making your longest shots - you'll be floating your cheek weld to reach up to the scope. And of course, you're talking about something I haven't seen for mounts and extra low rings to get yourself down that low with a straight tube scope - maybe a set of rings with integral bases? And of course, that doesn't account for any clearance for the eyebox over the hammer spur. I have plenty of room under my scope pictured here, but For any flared objective scope, like normal 3-9x40mm scope, forget about dropping any lower than what I have pictured below, it's just not gonna fit over that sight.

A guy can lift his cheek over an inch off of the stock to use the scope, but a riser is a much better option.



Here's the only picture I have of the older Bushnell on this rifle - you can see that the objective bell is even with the folded rear sight, and this was using low rings. For a 40mm scope, there's gonna be about 3/4" difference between your cheek position when using the irons vs. the scope, even using lows and a low mount. No sense in sacrificing cheekweld on your longer range shots.

Sunray said:

Doesn't really make any difference. Eye relief can be fiddled with by moving the scope in the rings. Whole thing is more about the scope anyway.

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It does make a difference when you're using a short receiver like the 1895. There's not much room between the rings to play with eye relief, and there aren't a lot of options to move rings forward or backward on a short rail.

Take a look at my pictures above - there's only about an inch and a quarter of play where I can slide that scope forwards or backwards, or move the rings on the rail. I have a very short neck, so I tend to need my scopes setting far to the rear - note in the bottom picture, the Bushnell is mounted absolutely as far to the rear as it can be mounted, as the adjustment housing is against the rear ring, and the rear ring is in the rearmost slot. Take a 1/4" off of the eye relief for that scope and I couldn't use it with this rifle/ring/mount combo, as I'd never be able to reach my eye relief.

Varminterror said:

Have you looked into a cheek piece for the rifle? I got a few Hornady stock packs for free (buy enough damaged bullets from the factory and they feel bad for a guy), so I use those on top of some home made foam riser shims on two of my Marlins. So that's another part which has to come off if you're going to remove the scope and shoot the irons.

My "hillbilly version" might be faster for dropping the comb - just a simply Allen elastic stock wrap cartridge holder, plus some foam rubber wrapped in duct tape as a molded shim. Slide out the foam shim and it drops an inch and a quarter within a few seconds.

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I've been agreeing a lot with you lately. Brilliant minds and all that noise I guess.

The following statements are my opinion, I'm not insisting they are fact but believe them to be true. You can't have it both ways with a levergun stock. They are either designed to be shot with iron sights(vast majority) or telescopic sights. Marlins stocks are for iron sights.

Thus, when adding a scope to a Marlin lever gun you have a significant cheek weld issue unless you have an unusual build. The comb isn't high enough. You can purchase a ready made comb riser like I did-Beartooth, or DIY like Varminterror. Once you build up the comb, if you want or need to use irons, just removing the scope doesn't cut it as the cheek weld again will be messed up. You have to remove the added material from the comb. I have the comb raised on my Marlin for shooting with a scope and consider it permanent. The only time the comb raiser would be removed would be in an emergency because the scope failed and I didn't have another rifle availabile.

The XS rail with integral ghost ring is something I've thought about before and now I'm thinking about getting one again after being reminded of it. It would also allow NV to be mounted along with the scope for night hunting.

If you can afford it get QD rings.

As you see in my pictures - I have fixed rings on mine. The irons are zeroed, but if something goes wrong with the optic and I'm insistent upon finishing a hunt, I have a multi-tool in my pack which would let me remove the rings and remove the base, then slip off the stock pack (which has replaced the hillbilly cheekriser in the photos). My wife has QD's on her SBL, but more for the fun of it than anything else, and to let her swap to a red dot when she wants a bit more precision, but needs more speed. If I take a tumble and the scope is tanked, but the rifle is OK, I'll pull the rings, and pull the mount, and the irons are wide open. If I lose the screws, eh, they're cheaper than the scope I just tanked.

A guy has to recognize - if they've taken a fall which incapacitates an optic, the rifle itself might need attention, or at least the iron sights. A guy's going to need to take a shot or two to confirm the rifle hasn't shifted zero, or confirm the iron sights weren't bumped offline also, or broken the stock, etc. So the hunt that day is most likely a wash. If you're on a camp hunt and you didn't bring a back up, and nobody else in camp has a rifle to borrow, sure, pull the mount, take a shot that afternoon, and get back out there the next day. If you're on the typical American weekend warrior hunt, get back to civilization, service the issue, and get back out the next day or two.

I've just never been a big follower of the "QD's for damage recovery" paradigm. If I'm carrying a rifle, I'm carrying a knife and/or multitool which can be used to remove fixed rings almost as easily as QD's. I own QD's for the voluntary sight system change paradigm.

I go through an elaborate procedure to get two piece bases co planer, co linear, and parallel to the bore.
I would not trust anyone else to do it, so if I had to give advice to anyone, it would be to go with the one piece.