SHIELDPSD

SHIELD
Torture testing the
Shield CQS red dot
ture we had planned for the optic we chose
to employ the ADM mount instead. Boasting a very repeatable zero out of the box,
the largest deviation we saw in five optic
mounts and dismounts was a half-MOA
shift, tested after our environmental tests
had been done at the office but before we
began our destructive tests at the range.
Environmental Test 1: Heat it.
For those familiar with red dot optics, heat
seems to be the one specification to which
they all adhere to the same standard: 120
degrees Fahrenheit maximum operational
temperature, and 160 degrees Fahrenheit
maximum storage temperature. In order
to test this, we used a heat gun to warm
up our Shield optic, and a Seek thermal
camera to check the temperature. Without
removing the battery (which we believe
is probably the cause of the standard heat
specification for red dots) we got the sight
up to 120 degrees for five minutes, and
checked its operation. The dot was illuminated, and the unit functioned normally.
The serrated plastic switch on the front of the optic can be slid to cover the electronic
eye, which automatically adjusts the red dot’s brightness. The entire optic weighs just 2.3
ounces (above). Encased in ice, the LED emitter is still visible as a small red dot (below).
Environmental Test 2: Sink it.
Words and pictures by Daniel Fritter
In Dorset, England, a relatively small
family-run company has quietly been making some of the most durable and highestperforming red dot sights around. Earning
military contracts from the UK MOD for
their work, Shield sights can be found atop
a myriad of British military small arms,
where the Shield Close Quarter Sight (or
CQS) is mounted atop Elcans and other
magnified or night-vision optics. In fact,
while the vast majority of the 50,000 plus
Shield sights purchased by the UK Ministry of Defence have probably led much
less exciting lives, nearly each and every
Colt Canada rifle issued to members of the
infamous 22nd Special Air Service regiment is topped off by one of these diminutive red dot sights.
But for a while, due to both their relatively
low company profile and general rarity, finding a Shield sight in the civilian
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market was somewhat difficult. Although
initially imported by Tactical Imports and
available exclusively through their online
store, Shield has since entered a distribution agreement with Canadian distributor
Outdoor Escape Sales, a deal that appears
to be part of a larger global effort to raise
their profile on the civilian market.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, we
at Calibre have been fans of the Shield
product line for quite some time. Eagleeyed readers will note there’s been a few
Shield optics seen atop Calibre’s various test guns, and for good reason; we
love the combination of durability and
compactness their CQS sight provides.
With a rugged and ridiculously overbuilt
CNC’ed aluminium chassis, automatic
brightness adjustment, and an overall form
factor that’s smaller in every dimension
and significantly lighter than an Aimpoint
Micro T-1, there’s a lot to like. But therein
lies one of Shield’s largest problems: The
automatic Aimpoint comparison. With a
much more recognizable brand name that’s
seen plenty of hard use in everything from
competitions to war, Aimpoint has become
the 900-pound gorilla of the red dot
market, and anything else considered to be
a military grade red dot is automatically
compared to that benchmark. And whilst
it’s easy enough to compare things like the
Shield CQS and Micro T-1 on spec, at the
end of the day the one thing Aimpoints are
known for is being durable. So we thought
it was about time we tested how tough the
Shield sights were, once and for all.
Our test unit is a CQS model, fitted to
Shield’s more affordable polymer picatinny riser and mount system, which is in
turn screwed onto an American Defense
Manufacturing QD mount. In most cases,
the picatinny riser and mount system is
easily sufficient to get the height required
on an AR-15, but seeing as we didn’t feel
like subjecting our testbed rifle to the tor-
Like most modern military-grade red dot
sights, Shield’s CQS does boast a water
submersion specification, albeit one that’s
not quite as good as the Aimpoint Micro
T-1’s. While the Aimpoint spec sheet says
it remains water tight up to 25 metres with
no time window mentioned, Shield specifies the CQS to be waterproof to one metre
for thirty minutes. In order to test this as
best we could, we placed the optic in a
sealed plastic container that we purposely
overfilled prior to fitting the lid. With no
air in the container and the lid fitted, we
placed a two pound weight on the container to pressurize it in an effort to simulate
a deeper submersion, and left it to stand
overnight. The next morning we removed
the optic and noted that again, nothing had
changed with regards to its operation.
Environmental Test 3: Freeze it.
Since we had a nice little container of
water handy already, we dropped the
sight back in, tossed the lid on and put
the container in the freezer for a 12 hour
period. Removing it the next day, we were
somewhat concerned that the freezing
water would have expanded in some of
the smaller openings in the chassis, and
allowed water in past the o-ring seals. It
didn’t help that the way the ice formed
across the front lens of the sight looked
suspiciously like broken glass! But, after
cracking as much ice as possible off the
sight, we could still see the LED emitter glowing red and all the controls still
worked as intended. We tossed the still
semi-frozen sight in the car and headed to
the range.
Destructive Test 1: Drop it.
The first test we’ve seen many people do
to test optic durability is simply throw it
in some sand. That always struck us as
a bit easy, so we opted to cut straight to
the chase and just drop the thing from no
less than six feet onto cement, on all three
sides. With the added weight of the mount
attached, the sight made some sickening noises as it bounced off the concrete
floor of our local range, but appeared only
slightly scuffed. However, to confirm that
the shock of hitting the ground didn’t jar
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anything loose within the sight, we reattached the optic to our Colt Canada IUR
and fired a five round grouping. This confirmed for us that the zero had not changed
at all and the sight’s various controls again
remained intact and in perfect operating
condition.
Destructive Test 2: Dragging it.
In Calibre’s super-secret laboratory, using patented super-scientific methods, we deduced that
the Shield sight is impervious to being dropped, as it was only slightly scratched after being
dropped (above). The same could not be said for its condition after dragging it at 30 kph (below).
For the next test, we decided to stop dithering about and cut straight to the chase.
We tied a piece of rope to the optic through
one of the handy holes drilled in the
shroud that we can only assume was excised for this exact purpose (or, you know,
maybe for retaining a protective cover but
that seems farfetched) and affixed the other
end to Editor Pickard’s 4Runner (which
will hereafter be known as “the Enterprise”). We started on gravel for 50 metres
and then proceeded onto broken and
poorly maintained asphalt for another 200
metres, at a speed of roughly 30 kilometres
per hour, before pulling off to examine
the sight. Bouncing wildly behind the
Enterprise, the sight definitely took a good
amount of abuse, as did the mount. We immediately noticed some dings in the mount
that we knew would throw off its consistency, and one particular hit on the rear
corner of the sight slightly deformed the
windage adjustment hole and drove some
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aluminium into the adjustment screw. We
threw the optic back on the rifle, noticed
the mount’s QD-release lever required a
lot more effort to close, and put ten rounds
downrange. All ten hit 6 MOA to the right
of our previous point of impact, with no
vertical shift, and most importantly no
inconsistency. Due to the lack of vertical movement in the POI and the point of
aim/point of impact remaining consistent
over an additional ten rounds, as well as
the visible damage to the mount, we were
comfortable chalking the 6 MOA shift in
POI up to the mount rather than the sight
and moved to continue the test. Also, after
the test, we checked the windage screw’s
function (not wanted to adjust the sight’s
zero mid-test) and noticed a bit more drag
on it, but it still rotated and worked.
Destructive Test 3: Crush it.
Since the sight survived being dragged
behind Pickard’s Enterprise, we thought
it prudent to see if it could survive being
driven over by the same, so we placed the
sight behind the rear tire on the hardpacked dirt and gravel parking lot. In order
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Destructive Test 4: Hit it.
There is over 1,000 pounds pressing down on the Shield in this picture, but still the LED stays on!
to ensure the sight took the brunt of the
truck’s weight, we placed it on its side, as
we felt that would put the truck’s weight
on the sight’s weakest parts. Then, the
truck was placed in reverse, driven atop
the sight, and parked there for a few minutes for photos before continuing rearward
off the sight. Notably, the 4Runner’s curb
weight is just shy of 4,000 pounds, and
easily exceeds that with the myriad of boat
and motorcycle parts stowed in the rear of
this particular truck. Given its 48% rearward weight bias and the added weight of
the detritus in the load bed over the back
axle, it’s safe to say each back tire is carrying over 1,000 pounds. So, we rolled 1,000
pounds over the CQS, and it appeared no
worse for wear. Impressively, not even the
polymer Shield mount securing the red dot
sight to the ADM mount showed any dam-
That light dust coating? That’s a tire track. And the ADM mount came out worse than the sight.
age, which is amazing when you consider
that the QD lever on the ADM mount had
1,000 pounds pushing it away from the
sight at one point in this exercise. In fact,
just about the worst damage we saw was
a slight bend in the ADM mount and a
crushed spring inside the base near its QD
lever, both of which we again expected to
alter the point of impact. And again, we
believe that to have been the case, as the
mounting lever tightened up even more (to
the point we were forced to back off the
adjustment screw one step) and the rifle’s
point of impact moved another 5” to the
right. But once more, due to the complete
lack of vertical movement in the POI and
the consistency of the point of aim/point of
impact over another twenty rounds worth
of testing, we were confident the sight’s
integrity was not compromised.
Truth be told, by now we were now
entering territory that we weren’t sure the
sight would come back from. Obviously
the drop test had been a bit of a ho-hum
exercise that we fully expected the sight
to pass, but watching the little red dot be
buoyed five feet in the air by a pothole
only to crash down onto the pavement at
30+ kilometres per hour (at one point the
sight was bouncing off bumps so furiously
it was gaining on us) we weren’t quite so
sure it would survive. And watching it
get crushed into gravel and pop out from
under the tire had us wondering if it’d pop
a lens. But as we threw it into the air and
swung a good old fashioned wooden baseball bat at it, we really wondered if this
would be the sight’s final hurrah. It wasn’t,
because we’d throw it up in the air another
four or five times before we’d finally connect with the damned thing, but hey… at
least we can say we did a few more drop
tests! When we finally did make contact,
the sight sprang off the bat in what would
have been a foul ball, and was promptly
driven into the gravel by a tether we’d
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tied it to in order to ensure we didn’t lose
it. When we retrieved the sight we saw
it’d been struck on the top corner, and we
found the divot in the bat to match. Once
again, function remained unchanged, and
this time the mount seemed to have taken
no further damage. Upon affixing the sight
to our rifle again, we found no change
in point of impact over the previous test,
which we also took as evidence that our
assessment of the previous POI shifts were
the result of damage to the ADM mount
rather than the optic as any loose internals
within the sight itself would have moved
again when struck by the bat.
Destructive Test 5: Hammer it.
Our fifth and final destructive test was the
one that we actually expected to kill the
sight. Armed with a 6x6 chunk of wood,
a 2” common stainless steel nail, and a
hammer we started the nail in the wood
(because we didn’t have enough hands to
hold the nail, the sight, and the hammer)
and then placed the sight on the head of
the nail. We then hammered on the sight
You can see the wood ingrained in the finish where the CQS took the baseball bat to its top corner,
directly above the two windows, and can infer how hard it was hit from the semi-circular shape of
the wood shadow... that’s from the dent it left in the baseball bat (above)! There’s nothing quite like
taking a hammer to a sight that was brand new and fresh out of the box mere hours ago (below).
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we would have pounded on the nail below
it. And amazingly enough, even though
we moved the nail around on the bottom
side of the sight to try and find a weak
spot, and hit the sight with the hammer in
correspondingly different spots to try and
drive the nail straight, the sight remained
in perfect working order. There were some
new scuffs on the bottom side, to be sure,
but the hammer side fared surprisingly
well with barely any scuffs and when we
installed the sight we again noticed no shift
in the rifle’s point of impact.
Conclusion
We drove the entire nail in with the sight,
but could go no further thanks to the battery
cover. But that didn’t stop us from trying!
V ER S
A MA
TE
X WA
LP
R F OW
RO
until the nail was driven into the wood,
including a couple hammer strikes where
the sight had bottomed out on the wood,
so really we were just hitting the sight
with a hammer. We didn’t go soft on it
either; we pounded on this thing just like
So, after three environmental tests and five
relatively strenuous destructive tests, we’re
pretty confident in saying that the Shield
CQS sight meets our standard of reliability. Furthermore, we’re quite confident that
were we to subject the venerable Aimpoint
Micro T-1 that’s become this sight’s de
facto competition to the same tests, we
would expect it to fare no better if only
because the elevation and windage turrets,
as well as the dot adjustment dial, all seem
like potential weak points to get crushed,
bent, or otherwise broken compared to the
Shield’s slick and uninterrupted aluminium
body and flush adjustments.
Which brings us to the CQS’ price. Here
in Canada, the CQS carries an MSRP of
$550 from the distributor, although retailers may sell for less. In addition, various
mounting kits can be found for the CQS,
allowing it to be bolted to everything from
bare picatinny rails to almost every optic
on the market including Elcans, Trijicons,
Browes, Ziess ZO’s and standard rifle
scopes as well. Now, we freely admit that
$550 puts the Shield into the realm of
relatively expensive optics, and it’s a bit
daunting to spend that amount of money
on a sight you may have never heard of.
But given the sight pictured here will be
going on to live atop a competition and
course-work shotgun, even after being run
over, dragged, and literally hammered on,
we think it’s safe to say that they’re definitely worth the price. But hey, you don’t
need to take our word for it; just ask those
guys in the S.A.S.
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