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Mount Up
First mount your scope loosely to be sure that the system works with your rifle—and to make rough positioning adjustments quickly.
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>> At first, mount your scope loosely. Just finger-tighten everything so that you can check the fit and set the overall positioning of the scope relative to your eye--particularly if you are using epoxy or bedding material to permanently mount a sight on a heavy-recoil gun. Then, after you have everything in the right position and marked, go back to the beginning and put things together tight. There's nothing worse than epoxy-bonding a scope mount to a rifle receiver and then finding out that you have to take it off because you can't get your scope properly positioned.
>> Set the sight for your natural shooting position. Lay the sight loosely in position in its rings and bring your gun up to firing position several times with your sighting-eye closed. Then open it and check to see how the sight looks. Move the sight backward and forward until it's in the proper position, then tighten it. If you can't position the scope properly because of the mounting setup, get a different one. When the shot of a lifetime suddenly presents itself, you'll lose it if you have to move your head around to find the right sight picture in the scope. Plus, if your head isn't in a natural shooting position on the stock, you're much more likely to get an embarrassing cut on your forehead when the scope drives your shooting glasses into your face.
>> Wear your hunting clothes when positioning the sight on the gun. The position of your scope's eyepiece relative to your eye will be a lot different when you're wearing a light summer shirt compared to your heavy winter parka. You'll find that there can easily be as much as 2 inches of difference forward-to-rear in proper scope positioning between your full winter garb and a summer outfit. Even a padded packstrap over your shoulder can alter your head and eye position relative to the scope.
>> Finally, bore-sight or center the mount adjustments as part of the mount-assembly process before going to the range to sight-in. Bore-sighting and locking down mount adjustments before shooting can save a great deal of time and effort should anything prove to be awry with the overall alignment.
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Don't use the scope tube to align rings. Use a solid metal bar or wooden dowel instead. This is one thing that every instruction set tells you, but almost everybody ignores anyway, because it seems like you can do it carefully enough not to damage the scope tube. Wrong. The internal alignment of lenses and reticle adjustments on any optical sight are very precisely gauged, and the slightest lateral twist, strain or stress on the external tube will cause internal problems. It might not be obvious immediately, but later, when the windage-adjustment clicks don't all seem to move the crosshairs the same amount, or the parallax-adjustment range marks don't seem to be exactly true to the target's actual distance, or the zoom-ring binds between 5X and 6X on a 3-9X scope, or the reticle seems to jump three times as far with the very last slight adjustment you make to finish zeroing--guess what caused the problem? |
If the mount system has windage or elevation adjustments (such as the large windage-adjustment screws on the rear bases of many common systems), use them as part of this process. Use a collimator if you have one available. In doing so I've discovered more than a few times that a particular sight/gun/mount combination simply could not be aligned for zeroing within the sight's adjustment range without having to start over from scratch or wasting a lot of ammo.
If you carefully follow the instructions that come with the mount system and sight you select, and keep these additional tips and techniques in mind, you'll wind up with a solid, functioning system and save yourself having to spend a lifetime learning the art of scope remounting.
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