Both of these Remington Model Sevens have Talley lightweight one piece ring/base mounts. If you will notice the front mount is oriented differently on the two guns. Which position do you feel is proper?

1) top gun
2) bottom gun

Thank you for your input.

I prefer the front ring as far forward as the scope position and tube section allow.

mathman,

Do you prefer this because it has more "leverage"? Like you I prefer the forward mount.

There's less of the scope out there in front to go twang like a ruler hanging off the edge of a table.

I like them as far apart as you can get them, within the constraints of tube length, eye relief, and what you are mounting the scope to. To take it to extremes, imagine one setup where the rings are right next to each other, near the middle of the scope, and another with the rings at each end. Which would be expected to stand up better to a force against one side of the objective bell?

Ring placement on the tube doesn't matter as long as the rings are gripping the straight tube diameter only and don't bite into the corner radiuses where the tube transitions to the eyepiece housing, objective bell, and turret housing. Position the scope in the rings wherever you have to for eye relief and clearance for bolt handle and barrel. Most important thing is don't overtorque the rings, regardless of where they grip the tube.

CT

I mount them which ever way it needs to be for proper eye relief. Mounting a VX3 4.5-14 on a M70 long action a month or so ago required me to reverse the front base in order to get the scope far enough back for proper eye relief.

I've had some alignment issues with talley lightweights and I'm about to quit using them. On one M70 I had a pretty bad misalignment that went away when I swapped to leupold dual dovetails. You never know whether it's the rings/bases themselves or the receiver that's crooked, but in this case I think the talleys weren't straight. I suspect that's the case with this M70 also, after I got it mounted the windage was pretty far off, I had enough internal adjustment to zero it but didn't like it. I'm going to switch mount and see if that fixes it. I lapped the talleys and bedded the scope using JB weld so I've got a very stress free setup, but I don't like how much windage adjustment it took. Here's a picture taken after lapping but before bedding which shows why I always like to lap talley's. You can see the high points where the anodizing was removed which illustrates just how out of alignment they were before lapping. It's easy to see why folks get ring marks from unlapped rings that are this crooked.



Here it is after bedding:



It's stress free now but when bore sighting it took a LOT of right windage to get it on paper, much more than I like even though I was able to get it zeroed. I don't know if the problem is in the talley's or the scope mounting holes but I tend to blame the talleys since I didn't have that problem before on this rifle. I'm going to switch mounts/rings and see if it goes away.

Crow Hunter,
My experiences with the Talley LWs have been the exact opposite. I have routinely used less windage adj. with them than any other mounts I've ever used. A couple of times, I have only had to use 1 or 2 1/4" clicks.
Since Talley doesn't recommend lapping their rings (voids the warranty), do you think maybe overlapping could be the problem?
I usually just hit them VERY lightly to knock down any slight ridge on the leading edge of the ring.
As to the OP's question, the Talleys are reversible and ring orientation depends on aesthetic preference or as said above, whatever gives you the most secure, comfortable mount.

John

Those are lightly lapped, certainly not enough to change the alignment of the scope enough to have it off as far as it was. You can tell from the photo the the rear ring is oriented slightly counter clockwise and the front one is tilted to the rear a bit. I don't trust them not to mark up the scope and if I hadn't lapped them the front one wouldn't have been bearing equally fore to aft. As it is now there's 100% contact due to the bedding.

I'm not blaming talley right now, it could be a misalignment of the mount holes on the M70. Winchester (and Remington) are kind of notorious for that. That's why I like to lap rings, the rings might be good but it doesn't matter if the bridge of the rifle isn't straight. Whatever the reason, it needs to be fixed and that's what the lapping/bedding does. I'm going to swap out mounts and see if that fixes it. I had another M70 where talleys skewed the scope a bit and dual dovetails mounted straight. You never know until you try it. I will say that the talleys on my Borden Alpine 6.5x47L lined up really well and I didn't lap them at all. However, that's a custom action that came from the maker straight to begin with.

like this, and unlapped.

Depends solely on the length of the scope one intends to put into the rings to accommodate the eye relief sought. Reversing the rings will accommodate different length scopes.

I like them as wide as possible, while allowing for proper eye relief at max power. However, I do not like to have the rear ring up close to the power ring. I prefer .5-.75" space if possible.

Sometimes the scope and action length will dictate the orientation of the front ring/base.

If I have the choice, I prefer the orientation of the top rifle. most of mine, however, are mounted like the bottom orientation.

Top gun

Prefer mine un-gay.