Video: Sighting-In Procedure

Transcript for Sighting-in Your Rifle

What's up, everyone? I'm out here at the range today. I've got a new scope, new rifle set up, and it's time to sight-in. Now, I know that can be a pain for a lot of people, but my method is super simple, super efficient, and we'll get it done with just these three shots.

So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bore sight this rifle. I've got a target out at 25 yards. I'm going to pull the bolt out, and then I'm going to look through the barrel and center the bull's-eye in the center of the barrel. Then, with the rifle supported, without moving it, I'm going to look through the scope and adjust the crosshairs to the center of the bull's-eye.

When I'm bore sighting, the first thing I do is I line my eye with what looks like the center of the stock, the center of what would be the barrel. I generally keep my eye below, so I can't actually see through the barrel. And then I slowly raise my head up to where that circle becomes like a perfect concentric circle with the action and the end of the barrel.

The camera looks through the sight of the rifle.

They look definitely lined up there, so I know my eye's looking straight through. And now, I move the rifle and adjust it to the center of the bull's-eye.

Once I do that, then I'm going to just back away, leave the rifle set, and we'll adjust the scope.

So, when I do this, I make sure I don't bump the rifle, and you can always readjust it if you do. I try to get where my eye might be, and this is just to get it close. Now, while looking through, I move my scope to the spot where I'm putting the crosshair on the bull’s-eye. So, I'm matching the center of the barrel to the center of the scope.

So, now as I'm looking, I can tell that I'm a little bit left. I was a little low. And now I'll move my left and right, my windage. That looks good. So, now we're going to go live, going to load up.

Speaker inserts a cartridge into the chamber and pushes down on the bolt handle. Speaker then fires a shot at a target.

Well, I bore sighted it too well. So, my first shot actually happened to be pretty close to where I wanted it. I'm looking through the scope now, and I see that it's on the left edge of the bull. But I'm still not exactly where I want it.

So, I'm going to want to move that over. So, what I'll do is, I'll put the crosshair where I was aiming, center of the bull's-eye. And then I move my crosshair to match the hole of the bullet that I shot. So, what that does is that then aligns everything, so where the bullet's flying with the scope.

So, instead of looking at where I hit and adjusting it over, I'm going to be looking through the scope while I'm adjusting, while it's locked off and steady, and I'm going to move the crosshair from where I was aiming to the point of impact.

Alright, I just moved the target out to 100 yards. I'm going to take my second shot and see where we impact.

Speaker loads the rifle and fires another shot at the target.

Alright. So, as long as you feel like you made a good shot, you can make that adjustment. That shot felt good. It's a lot higher than I was expecting. We're going to go with it. We're going to adjust it. It's four inches high right now, so I'm going to drop it down to about 1.8 inches.

So, now I can just make my adjustments. It's 100 yards, so I know that I've got—one click is a quarter inch. I'm going to bring it down about eight clicks.

Speaker adjusts the scope.

One more, two more for good measure. And then I'm going to go four clicks right.

There we go. Give it a little tap for good luck. Now I'm going to take my final shot, and hopefully it should be nestled in there, just around two inches high at 100 yards.

Speaker fires another shot at the target.

There it is. Alright. That third shot was money, exactly where I wanted it. I wanted to be right around 1.8 inches high at 100 yards. It looks like it's right in there, maybe a quarter inch left, but I think that's pretty good. What I would do now is I would just shoot a group, just to get that group.

But essentially what we did: We took a new gun, put a scope on it, bore sighted at 25 yards, took a shot (using tracking through the scope), readjusted to get that right on at 25, then we pushed that target out to 100, took a shot. It was high, so then we adjusted from there. And our third shot was right in where we want it to be. Three shots down, and that rifle sighted-in.

Speaker holds up an ammunition carrier with additional bullets.

All the rest of these are for fun time. We can push this target out to 200 yards. We can make some, maybe, minute adjustments once we've got more comfort with this rifle. We send some more rounds down range, get some groups. But it's an easy way not to be chasing bullets on paper just to get to that point where you want it—that initial sight-in.