Old CW4
BANNED
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2006
- Messages
- 870
Many times I've had customers come into my shop and buy two or more 20 round boxes of 308, 30-06, 7mm mag, 300 Win mag, etc., so they could go sight their rifles. Wow! It takes two rounds to zero a rifle to a gnat's behind. Here's how.
Assuming a propertly mounted scope and preliminary bore sighting, go to your shooting location. Take a large cardboard box and some black plastic tape with you.
Pace off 100 yards and position the box with a large side facing your shooting position. With the tape, make a small 'X' in the approximate center of the box. At your shooting position, set up your rifle on a table, pickup tail gate, or even a suitable large rock or mound of dirt. Sand bag the rifle or have it in a shooting rest so it won't move.
Carefully, carefully sight the X on the box and squeeze (repeat, squeeze) off one round. Most of us know when we've fired correctly, right breathing, no trigger jerk, and so on. Hopefully, that's what you've done. Go to the box. If your shot is centered in the X you can quit and go home. If not, and it usually is not, place a small square of the black tape over the bullet hole.
Go back to your shooting position. Take off the screw covers from the scope's adjustment screws. Make your rifle as stable as possible with sand bags or whatever. Then carefully, carefully put your scope cross hairs precisely on the original X.
This last step is tricky. You must have the rifle stable and then adjust your scope crosshairs precisely to the tape square over the bullet hole without moving the rifle. What you're actually doing is bore sighting your rifle with bullets. You aimed at a marked point and fired but the bullet didn't hit there but somewhere else. Okay, you resume your original point of aim, then move the scope cross hairs only so they're over the actual bullet strike.
You're now zeroed. To confirm it, fire a second shot at the original X and you should be right there.
Another method is to take a tape measure with you. Aim carefully at a marked point on a target or box and take one careful shot. Go to the target and USE the tape measure. If your shot is four inches high and six inches to the left for example, and assuming your scope has the usual one-quarter inch clicks at 100 yards on its adjustments, then move the elevation screw 16 clicks down and the windage screw 24 clicks to the right. Your next shot should be right on or darned close.
BTW, I refuse to get into arguements concerning zeroing at 50, 100, 200 yards, and so on A 30-06 firing a 150-160 grain bullet and zeroed at 100 yds will be dead on at that range. Then about three inches high at 200, and back on dead center at 300. If you know this, why fudge with zeroing at various ranges? That same 30-06 will be about 16 inches low at 400 and close to six to seven feet low at 500. At 1000 yards, it will be about 80 feet low..... Really. Gravity does catch up with us fast. A 7mm magnum will, by comparison, be about four feet low at 500 yards. Why? Because it's higher velocity pushes the bullet out farther as gravity pulls it down.
It is true, BTW, that if you fire a bullet from a horizontally held rifle and drop one from the rifle chamber's height at the same instant, both bullets will hit the ground at the same time---caused by old lady Gravity pulling them down equally regardless if one bullet is movinmg fast horizontally or not....
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Scope Mounting: Have the correct scope rings for your model rifle and scope. Use the proper sized screwdriver or screwdriver bit and screw the bottom half of the ring set to the rifle. Please don't get carried away with this. You don't have to make the screws 'squeak' or deform their slots. If it makes you feel better, use some 'Locktite.' I have never had scope mount screws come loose with a firm tightening and no Locktite.
Set the scope in the lower mounts and use just a couple of screws on each upper portion to just snug the upper rings over the scope. Note: Most scope ring sets have four screws to mate each half so I just use a couple, one on each side, at this point.
You must now set your eye relief. Be generous with this since you do not want a broken pair of glasses or radically reshaped eyebrow when you fire your cannon. Beat in mind that firing your rifle on the range is one thing and suddenly twisting to take a snap shot at a deer, elk, or moose is something else, so give yourself as much 'fudging' room as possible with eye relief.
Now the tricky part and the part I absolutely hate, getting the vertical cross hairs vertical. As you look through the scope, use your creator given sense of le4ft/right, up-down to get the vertical cross hair to what you and you alone consider to be vertical. Snug the two screws on each ring a bit at a time and alternate, kind of like you should do lug bolts when you change a car tire. The goal is to snug down the screws until they're tight and still have the cross hairs vertical. You cannot imagine, maybe you can, the foul words that have pervaded my shop as I've fussed with this so many times. Anyway, I finally get the damned thing vertical and put in the remaining screws. I carefully snug them down and, at least eight times out of ten, damn it to hell, the cross hairs go off vertical and cant one way or the other! They say 'with patience and perseverance you can have sex with a fly' so I take a deep breath and start over. My customer will want it right and so do I, so I fuss and cuss until it is right and everything is tight. Please come back to me if you know a simple, quick way to do this because I haven't yet found it. Please!
Okay, scope is mounted, now to bore sight. I do NOT use laser or other gizmos, I like the old fashioned way. I remove or open the bolt or lever. With the bolt ouj of the way, no problem to look through the bore. If a lever or a semi auto with non removable bolt, I have an assortment of mirror shards mostly from broken lady's compact mirrors which are a cheap buy at the local drug store. I break the mirrors with a hammer or sometimes a couple of pairs of pliers. I also have some small dental mirrors which will go into many rifle actions. Anyway, I clamp the rifle in my gun vise and aim it out my shop window at a neighbor's front window which is precisely 107 yards away. I either look through or have a piece of mirror positioned in the receiver area so I can look through it and out the bore. I precisely center on some prominent feature of the window, then move the scope crosshairs to the exact same point and there I am. Does this work? Hell, yes! I have had legions of customers tell me how accurately their rifles shoot with my bore sighting. I've also taught many of them who were interested how to DIY.
There are no mysteries to scope mounting and bore sighting. The physics are simple and so are the processes. Getting everything to line up and stay there is the PITA.....!
Assuming a propertly mounted scope and preliminary bore sighting, go to your shooting location. Take a large cardboard box and some black plastic tape with you.
Pace off 100 yards and position the box with a large side facing your shooting position. With the tape, make a small 'X' in the approximate center of the box. At your shooting position, set up your rifle on a table, pickup tail gate, or even a suitable large rock or mound of dirt. Sand bag the rifle or have it in a shooting rest so it won't move.
Carefully, carefully sight the X on the box and squeeze (repeat, squeeze) off one round. Most of us know when we've fired correctly, right breathing, no trigger jerk, and so on. Hopefully, that's what you've done. Go to the box. If your shot is centered in the X you can quit and go home. If not, and it usually is not, place a small square of the black tape over the bullet hole.
Go back to your shooting position. Take off the screw covers from the scope's adjustment screws. Make your rifle as stable as possible with sand bags or whatever. Then carefully, carefully put your scope cross hairs precisely on the original X.
This last step is tricky. You must have the rifle stable and then adjust your scope crosshairs precisely to the tape square over the bullet hole without moving the rifle. What you're actually doing is bore sighting your rifle with bullets. You aimed at a marked point and fired but the bullet didn't hit there but somewhere else. Okay, you resume your original point of aim, then move the scope cross hairs only so they're over the actual bullet strike.
You're now zeroed. To confirm it, fire a second shot at the original X and you should be right there.
Another method is to take a tape measure with you. Aim carefully at a marked point on a target or box and take one careful shot. Go to the target and USE the tape measure. If your shot is four inches high and six inches to the left for example, and assuming your scope has the usual one-quarter inch clicks at 100 yards on its adjustments, then move the elevation screw 16 clicks down and the windage screw 24 clicks to the right. Your next shot should be right on or darned close.
BTW, I refuse to get into arguements concerning zeroing at 50, 100, 200 yards, and so on A 30-06 firing a 150-160 grain bullet and zeroed at 100 yds will be dead on at that range. Then about three inches high at 200, and back on dead center at 300. If you know this, why fudge with zeroing at various ranges? That same 30-06 will be about 16 inches low at 400 and close to six to seven feet low at 500. At 1000 yards, it will be about 80 feet low..... Really. Gravity does catch up with us fast. A 7mm magnum will, by comparison, be about four feet low at 500 yards. Why? Because it's higher velocity pushes the bullet out farther as gravity pulls it down.
It is true, BTW, that if you fire a bullet from a horizontally held rifle and drop one from the rifle chamber's height at the same instant, both bullets will hit the ground at the same time---caused by old lady Gravity pulling them down equally regardless if one bullet is movinmg fast horizontally or not....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scope Mounting: Have the correct scope rings for your model rifle and scope. Use the proper sized screwdriver or screwdriver bit and screw the bottom half of the ring set to the rifle. Please don't get carried away with this. You don't have to make the screws 'squeak' or deform their slots. If it makes you feel better, use some 'Locktite.' I have never had scope mount screws come loose with a firm tightening and no Locktite.
Set the scope in the lower mounts and use just a couple of screws on each upper portion to just snug the upper rings over the scope. Note: Most scope ring sets have four screws to mate each half so I just use a couple, one on each side, at this point.
You must now set your eye relief. Be generous with this since you do not want a broken pair of glasses or radically reshaped eyebrow when you fire your cannon. Beat in mind that firing your rifle on the range is one thing and suddenly twisting to take a snap shot at a deer, elk, or moose is something else, so give yourself as much 'fudging' room as possible with eye relief.
Now the tricky part and the part I absolutely hate, getting the vertical cross hairs vertical. As you look through the scope, use your creator given sense of le4ft/right, up-down to get the vertical cross hair to what you and you alone consider to be vertical. Snug the two screws on each ring a bit at a time and alternate, kind of like you should do lug bolts when you change a car tire. The goal is to snug down the screws until they're tight and still have the cross hairs vertical. You cannot imagine, maybe you can, the foul words that have pervaded my shop as I've fussed with this so many times. Anyway, I finally get the damned thing vertical and put in the remaining screws. I carefully snug them down and, at least eight times out of ten, damn it to hell, the cross hairs go off vertical and cant one way or the other! They say 'with patience and perseverance you can have sex with a fly' so I take a deep breath and start over. My customer will want it right and so do I, so I fuss and cuss until it is right and everything is tight. Please come back to me if you know a simple, quick way to do this because I haven't yet found it. Please!
Okay, scope is mounted, now to bore sight. I do NOT use laser or other gizmos, I like the old fashioned way. I remove or open the bolt or lever. With the bolt ouj of the way, no problem to look through the bore. If a lever or a semi auto with non removable bolt, I have an assortment of mirror shards mostly from broken lady's compact mirrors which are a cheap buy at the local drug store. I break the mirrors with a hammer or sometimes a couple of pairs of pliers. I also have some small dental mirrors which will go into many rifle actions. Anyway, I clamp the rifle in my gun vise and aim it out my shop window at a neighbor's front window which is precisely 107 yards away. I either look through or have a piece of mirror positioned in the receiver area so I can look through it and out the bore. I precisely center on some prominent feature of the window, then move the scope crosshairs to the exact same point and there I am. Does this work? Hell, yes! I have had legions of customers tell me how accurately their rifles shoot with my bore sighting. I've also taught many of them who were interested how to DIY.
There are no mysteries to scope mounting and bore sighting. The physics are simple and so are the processes. Getting everything to line up and stay there is the PITA.....!
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