The Precision Turret shooting rest has been one of the mainstays in the Caldwell Shooting Supplies catalog for quite a while, now, but whether it’s a totally new product or a great classic, in this case, does not really matter: operating under the American Outdoor Brands umbrella, Caldwell is one of the biggest brands in shooting accessories, and a vast majority of their products are well-designed, well-made evergreens that remain just as solid and useful for years as they were when they first came out of the factory.

At a first glance, the Caldwell Precision Turret Shooting Rest would be easy to dismiss as one of Caldwell’s “simplest” products – maybe too simple, compared to other specialized shooting rests manufactured and sold under the very same brand.

In reality, Caldwell’s Precision Turret is an all-rounder shooting rest, easily adapted to any kind of semi-automatic or manual repeating long gun and to fully replace shooting bags and other rests in all disciplines where shooters compete or train from a bench or from the prone position.

Additionally, the Caldwell Precision Turret shooting rest offers a great level of maneuverability to engage moving targets – a 58-degrees level in both pan and scan, with a ball bearing system for maximum movement fluidity – while retaining a level of stability that some users in the US compared to that of the M122, the legendary military tripod used to stabilize the M60 and Mk46 machine-guns for use from fixed emplacements.

And indeed, the idea behind Caldwell’s Precision Turret shooting rest was, in all likelihood, just that: creating a miniature version of a machinegun tripod, small and lightweight enough to be transported around on a shooting range without much effort and yet solid and sturdy enough to eat the recoil of high-caliber long-range shooting rifles and allow pinpoint shooting, be it in competition or just for zeroing optics.

As we said, the Caldwell Precision Turret shooting rest is built to be simple, with three extendable steel legs screwed on to a central body manufactured out of machined black aluminum alloy. The all-metal construction brings the overall weight of the Precision Turret shooting rest to a hefty but still very manageable 4,8 kilograms (10.6 lbs).

The Precision Turret shooting rests comes in a green Caldwell Shooting Supplies cardboard box; it is sold disassembled, niftly packaged in Styrofoam so that components don’t get banged up during delivery, but a factory-issued hex key makes whatever little assembly is required a true charm, and there isn’t much in terms of controls that customers need to master afterwards to use it to the best of its capabilities.