Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Talley Rings...Lap or not?

I use a torque wrench and use torque specs supplied by Tally.

This entire post is ludicrous.
LMAO

Someone will corret me if I'm wrong, but I believe the rings are 15-20 inch pounds, and the bases are 25-30 inch pounds!

Don't lap Talley rings, substitute Burris Signature rings for them. I wouldn't own another set of anything Talley. Sorry, they are a poor performing product that leaves a scope tube scratched and deformed, and they are almost impossible to keep tight. My friend and I have a Talley laugh fest when we see some rube with them on a rifle. Rule of thumb is to never use a vertically split ring, or a one piece ring and base.

This entire post is ludicrous.
LMAO

Oh, I don't know about that. I agree with the first four words. I've got Talley aluminum lightweights on a half dozen of my rifles, and I've only lapped one pair, which was really unecessary. The rest I've checked with the Wheeler Engineering kit and the alignment has been fine with no need to lap. The rifles are Kimbers and M70s, by the way. Anyway, the only scope marks I have from any of my Talleys are the ones on the scope with the lapped rings. So I agree, "don't lap your Talleys." LMAO.

I don't have those specs handy. Please tell me what they are.

Thanks!

For the lightweight setups 20-25 in-lb for the base, 17 in-lb for the rings.

Steel: bases 20-25 in-lb; Fixed rings, bottom screw 35 in-lb top screw 17-24 in-lb. Detachable rings: large bottom screw 35 in-lb, small bottom screws 30 in-lb, top screws 17-24 in-lb.

A Guild smith started measuring surface contact on out of the box bases, rings, and ringmounts, including Talleys, on factory receivers; none were ever found to give a proper percentage of surface contact with many giving under 50%. To my knowledge it is near impossible to take a new production rifle, a new set of Talley mounts, and a new scope, and mount them together to end up with the proper aligned 80% surface contact. This is impossible due to tolerance stacking. My hunting partner is one of the Guild smiths and is one of the top machinists in the Nation. He does likes Talleys and I use them as a result. In his shop, I've personally never seen an out of the box combination on a factory rifle result in better than 60% surface contact, and every one of those sets needed to be reworked for proper alignment. Even when the receiver was re-machined to correct QC alignment issues with the factory rifle, the rings still needed work to reach 80%.

Not saying you guys are making stuff up, but based on what I've seen measured in a Guild shop, I'm not seeing it, and this is probably the reason so many are tweaking light scope tubes as their rings are not truly in alignment as the believe. If this is the case where the scopes are mounted askew, make sure you stay under the max recommended screw torque. You may even consider an old trick where you add a piece of electrical tape to act as a grip and buffer to hold with light torque.

Best