How to bore sight and zero a bolt gun. Learn the tips and tricks from our expert Jerimiah Alexander.
Transcript:
Hey guys, Jerimiah Alexander, we’re at the range doing some sighting in with our weapons.
Here we’ve got a bolt gun, we’re going to talk about bore sighting this. And then we’re going to talk about getting a zero at 100 yards.
So the first thing is, we make sure we clean and free, make sure we have no source of ammunition. Nothing’s downrange.
And what we’re actually going to do on this particular RPR rifle, there’s a button here, I can push and it will find this bolt out of the way, this buttstock out of the way.
I’m going to remove the bolt out of this guy, push this button here. Okay, I want to keep that nice and clean.
But now what I can do is actually since I just barely mounted this scope on here, I’m gonna look at my 25 yard target. I’m gonna look through my bore, I’m gonna get my bore lined up with what I want to shoot.
Okay, got it. Got it centered in the middle of my target. I’m going to, gingerly come up. All right, I’m gonna dial these.
Now in the case of bore sighting, guys. If you see that you need to come up, you’ll have to dial down.
Same thing with right and left. If I’m looking through my bore, and I see that I need to come to the left, I’ll actually have to dial to the right.
We can talk a little bit more about that later.
But for now, turn your turrets until what you’re seeing through your bore is what you see through your scope.
Let’s finish that up. All right, that looks good.
I’m gonna put my bolt back close my buttstock.
What I’m going to do is shoot a three round group at 25 yards. And you might ask why not 100 yards Well, we will zero eventually at 100 yards. But we have a brand new scope, it’s just easier to get on paper and see where the adjustments need to be.
So I’ll put my ears on and we’ll shoot three rounds and we’ll go down and take a look at it.
Alright guys, so here we are, we’ve done set up on a rifle already.
One thing we haven’t talked about here at the range yet is body position.
So I hate to say this, but it’s the truth. You know, 80% of the errors we see shooting are our own fault, and not the fault of the gun or the bipod or the optic.
So make sure you’re in a sturdy shooting position. Good ammo, everything’s kind of set up tight.
Okay, want to get right behind your rifle here.
Right in your shoulder. I’ve already set my eye relief up for myself.
Okay, firing. Two more.
I’m not aiming where I hit I’m gonna aim at the same point for all three shots.
Firing.
One last one to confirm. Although it looks like the same hole.
Pulled down a little bit, but let’s go downrange and take a peek.
All right, guys, here’s our three round group, we definitely got on paper, we have two shots here in this hole. I pulled this one a little bit obviously.
They’re they’re close enough that we can see we need to come down about an inch and a half to come to center and we need to come over. We’re going to say roughly one inch.
So let’s go back to our rig and talk about what it takes to get that done. inch and a half down and an inch to the right.
Alright guys, so we found after looking at our target a couple things, one that I pulled the shot.
Two that we need to come down an inch and a half and over to the right one inch.
Well, if we had an MOA scope, this is an MRAD scope. But if we had an MOA scope, with quarter minute of angle adjustments, those same quarter minute of angle adjustments four times closer, because that’s a quarter minute of angle at 100 yards. We’re at 25 yards so that same click that same quarter minute click is going to move my impact 1/16 of an inch, so 16 of those would be one inch 16 sixteenths would be one inch. And then we would do eight more for half of an inch. So I would have 24 clicks down. If I was an MOA scope.
With an MRAD scope at 100 yards I have a one 1/10th MRAD adjustment. So at 100 yards that moves my point of impact .36 inches. And just to compare that a quarter is a .25 inches. So but again, we’re at 25 yards. So that same 1/10th adjustment is going to move my point of impact here at 25 yards. It is about .09 But let’s just say point one, 1/10th.
So I would need to come 10 clicks down for the one inch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And then we have a half an inch. So that’s five more clicks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
And one inch, we need to come to the right. So that’ll be 10 clicks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Put our ears back on, send three more rounds, and then we’ll move it out to 100 yards.
Alright, we made those adjustments. Let’s send some rounds downrange.
Again, I’m aiming at the same target at the same center point firing.
Let’s go downrange and see what’s going on.
Alright guys, so you can see our first group here. And we came down that inch and a half and over right that inch, got a nice little smiley face here.
We could see we could probably stand to be a quarter of an inch high and about a half an inch to the right.
So I’m going to make those adjustments on the scope, we’re going to move this target back to 100 yards. And we’re going to do another three round group.
Alright guys, we’ve made those adjustments, we’ve moved our target back to 100 yards, we’re going to send another three round group.
Three round groups are great, because you can tell it gives you a better average right one could be a little off, you could have pulled it a little three gives you a rough estimate, I like to do five but three is sufficient for getting sighted in, and especially for hunting and things like that.
It’s also good, I don’t have a rear bag here. But if you’re gonna have a bag so that your real steady when you’re sighting in, or even put it in a sled that locks it down, just while you’re getting your 100 yard zero, that would be a good thing to do too.
But we’re gonna work with what we got here.
We’re gonna send three rounds at 100 yards to this upper left hand target. And we’re gonna see what adjustments if any, we need to make.
Here we go firing.
Alright, let’s go look.
Alright guys, we’re out here at 100 yards, we’ve made our adjustments, we can see we’re pretty dang close here.
If anything, we could come over to the right about a quarter of an inch, which one 1/10th MRAD adjustments are going to come over a little more, it’s going to be .36 of an inch instead of .25. So pretty darn close here.
The last thing I like to do after I come and check my group as all I’ll send three more just to confirm and then we’re going to change our turret we’re going to slip it to zero and talk a little bit about that.
So let’s go do one more group and get our our turrets set.
Alright guys, we’ve confirmed our 100 yards zero now what we want to do is zero reset our turrets and what that means is we take our turrets off and we place them back on with zero lined up with our front indicator lines here gives us a good starting point for any adjustments that need to be made.
To do so I like to push down on the cap here. Just make sure it doesn’t move and I’m a loosen the three set screws.
Sometimes it’s just one set screw on the top, the process is still the same, you just loosen the set screws and you’ll pull the turret off straight up.
Then I’m going to put it back down with zero facing me. which gives me just a really nice initial point to make any adjustments from and if you use ballistic applicators or applications that helps to have a zero too.
We’ll do this with the windage and elevation.
Today’s a nice day there’s no wind. So I would say just as some extra advice. I feel like our windage is really dead on here with no wind. The wind changes so fast.
Usually you don’t need to dial for that wind and you just need to see where your impact was, and make a really quick adjustment because the wind may have changed by the time you turned your dot your knob and then you’ve got your knob kind of cranked around, you don’t know where it is so pretty safe to leave your windage is zero.
Once you got a good zero, and then you can use the radical, you know, things like that to do holds after that.
Now I’m going to shoot three more just to make sure nothing went weird when I flip my turrets just because I like to make triple sure.
Measure twice, cut once, right.
So let’s do that.
Alright guys, we’ve got our turrets, zero reset. We’re gonna shoot one more three round group just to make sure nothing got turned or bumped during the process and then we can feel real comfortable with 100 yards zero.
So let’s send some downrange and see what we got.
Alright guys, so we slipped our charts to zero. We forgot to make our adjustment to the right and we can see how that’s lined up. So I will go remedy that and I’ll move over about a quarter of an inch to the right.
And we are set guys 100 yards zero you’re good to go make any adjustments from that point.
