Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters The Old Way to Bore Sight

I bought a bore sighter some 30 years ago. Used it a lot in stockmaking when the inletting was nearly done. Today, I use it when changing scopes and usually able to get the new rifle/scope combination to shoot within 1" of the prior setting.

Many receivers are not drilled parallel and need shimming. Without the shims, who knows where they will shoot. By using the collomator, one can easily see if the scope runs out of windage when receivers are off, thus saving range time.

One thing I do before changing out a sighted-in scope is bore sight it and take notes on where the crosshairs are. Then adjust the crosshairs on the new scope to same point and they come very, very close to the desired POI. Sometimes bore sighting is dead center and correct but sometime it's not.

Ken,

It can be interesting, interacting with "the public" like that, can't it? You see some things that, if you think about them too much, you will have trouble sleeping at night. Examples:

A scope mounted at a store that was rotated 90 degrees off so the windage adjustment was on the top.

a scope mounted at a store (I am not making this up) that was mounted backwards.

The guy firing .308 cartridges in his 30-06, and saying when caught, "They're 30 caliber, aren't they"? I don't remember the rifle, but somehow the extractor must have held enough for the cartridge to fire. The brass had an interesting blown-out shape.

i too bore site all my rifles the old fashion way. one thing i have found to be true for me though in terms of Rugers is that if i optically center the scope prior to mounting it, i find that it is always within a couple inches of windage at 25 or 50 yards. then it tends to be a few inches high, i have yet to have a ruger with its factory rings not be within the target at 25 to 50 yards if the scope was optically centered prior to mounting. says a lot for the factory mounting system in my book. i wont say it will not happen differently, i'm just saying it has worked for me so far in the dozen rugers i've sited in so far.

I always and only use the old method....(don't have a laser boresighter)...

A few years ago a buddy came to shoot his recently purchased 300 RUM at my place. I have a 100 yard range set up across my front yard shooting through an open gate into a large backstop in my pasture. He was told when he purchased it that it had been sighted with a laser boresighter and the scope was set....should be ready to go.... He fired the first shot from 100 yards and we expected to need to adjust but nothing hit the target. I pulled the bolt and took a look...the scope was WAY high and WAY to the left...about 25 yards in front of us and several feet to the right of our line of sight there was a groove in the concrete across my front sidewalk.

Never trust a smith or gunshop who says it has been laser boresighted...maybe it is, but check it using the old method and fire the first shot from 25 yards...you could save a sidewalk...

I can get 100yards from my deck to the back fence line. I set therifle in a cradle, look thru the tube and pickup an electric fence insulator and get that centered. Then I adjust the scope to that point.Usually I am within 4" of dead center with the first shot at 100 yards.

I resemble that remark.

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I always and only use the old method....(don't have a laser boresighter)...

A few years ago a buddy came to shoot his recently purchased 300 RUM at my place. I have a 100 yard range set up across my front yard shooting through an open gate into a large backstop in my pasture. He was told when he purchased it that it had been sighted with a laser boresighter and the scope was set....should be ready to go.... He fired the first shot from 100 yards and we expected to need to adjust but nothing hit the target. I pulled the bolt and took a look...the scope was WAY high and WAY to the left...about 25 yards in front of us and several feet to the right of our line of sight there was a groove in the concrete across my front sidewalk.

Never trust a smith or gunshop who says it has been laser boresighted...maybe it is, but check it using the old method and fire the first shot from 25 yards...you could save a sidewalk... [/quote]

LMAO...

Last year about this time I handled an auto claim. I seldom do auto anymore but took this one.

A guy volunteered to sight in his brother's new 300 Ultra Mag and borrowed the brother's new Toyota 4X4 PU to go up into the hills and sight the rifle in. He had to be towed back with two bullet holes across the hood. The bullets fragmented so badly they wiped out major electrical components and his injection system.

He called the insurance company's claims manager and filed a complaint after I told him a shooting rest is a helluva lot cheaper than $1,000.00 deductibles in the future.

I learned a trick many years ago for bore sighting if you are tight for room in the house or like me at the time, having your gun room in the basement with windows to high to sight out. Place a small round dot on the wall about five feet from the muzzle. Clamp the rifle in a padded vise and center the dot in the bore. Place another small dot 1.5 inches above the first dot and center the crosshairs on it. In most cases it will bring you pretty close to on at 25 yards. I used this trick many years ago and though I now have a bore sighter, I find that it doesn't get me any closer than the old method.

Like Mr. Howell, I used to work our local range's sight in days. It was a scary thing sometimes. A couple of the more notable incidents were when a fellow absolutely refused to consider shooting a few rounds at 25 yards to get on paper because, one, the store bore sighted it to be on at 100 yards and, two, he didn't intend to shoot anything that close so he wasn't going to sight in that close. He proceeded to shoot a full box of 338's at 100 yards off the bench resting on nothing other than his elbows, despite the availability of a wide assortment of shooting rests. Seems he believed since he wouldn't have any shooting rests in the field he didn't need one to sight in with. A full box of 338's later he had not a round on paper and some severely abraded elbows to show for it. He left mumbling doubts about the shops ability to bore sight a rifle.

The second was a gentleman who was talked into buying one of the portable bench gun vises that were popular twenty years ago. They were about 12 or 15 inches long and clamped on the forend of the rifle and set on the bench. I thought they were designed to be a bench vise to take with you to clean the rifle but I saw many including this fellow use them for a shooting rest. This guy, rather than hunker behind it with the rest on the bench held it up and shot off the bench on his elbows with the device clamped to the rifle. Despite some gentle coaching from myself and a couple others he insisted that the guy at the shop had assured him he should sight in using this device.

Mart

Yes, the only way I ever have.

I use this technique often. (twice today) This gets me close at 25 yards, and then I shoot at 100 yards. One rifle today was sighted in with 1 shot at 25 yards, and 1 shot at 100. My other rifle took 4 or 5 shots total.

A good while back, someone on this or a similar forum told about having been in a gun store when another customer came-in with a rifle that he hadn't been able to sight-in.

The problem, he said, was that although he'd screwed the windage screw as far as it'd go, the rifle was still shooting 'way off to the side.

"Let me see that thing," the store clerk said, and took it into the back room. When he came back, he said that he couldn't find anything wrong with the windage adjustment but had had a dickens of a time unscrewing the turret cap.

"Turret cap?"


The guy who told the story said that he had to go outside to laugh.

I switched to boresighting on as distant an object as possible. With this method rifles put the first shot within 3 inches at 100 yards and often within an inch. I.e. boresight on the top corner of a building, bridge tower, etc. from a quarter mile to three miles or more away. That lengthens the sight radius. If you center the distant pinpoint spot in the bore and keep that concentric with chamber etc. the rifle will shoot uncanny close to where the crosshairs are at 100 yards. My eyeball boresighting is way more accurate than borseighter gizmos friends have.

I also start at 25 yards. Like you, I can usually get a rifle dead-on at 100 yards in about 4 shots. My friends are usually quite amazed at that and pleased that I get their rifles shooting with so few rounds fired. I do, however, sight down the bore first and align the reticle that way before firing the first shot. I have seen more than one rifle that would have missed the paper even at 25 yards had I not visually aligned it first.

Some rifles cannot be aligned by sighting through the bore. A Browning leveraction comes to mind because taking one those apart to sight down the bore and putting it back together correctly is a challenge. With those rifles I just shoot at 25 yards. If the first round is not on paper, move up to 12 yards.

I have seen guys at the club fire box after box of ammo and still not be satisfied with the rifles zero. Sometimes they are open to receiving assistance, and sometimes not. I think it's a matter of pride more than anything.

Troy is that you???

Isn't that the truth. I agree on all accounts.

Good lawd there must be two of us....

Since I got the level level level I tell my pard to go to hell when he comments on my reticles.....

I have bore-sighted hundreds of rifle. When I first got serious about rifles I had a shop where I could put a rifle in a vise, then aim at the tip of my neighbor's roof, and come very close.

In fact I once bore-sighted a .270 of mine just before hunting season. When my father-in-law showed up unexpectedly wanting to hunt, on a day when I had to work, I handed him the rifle and box of 130-grain ammo and told him to shoot it at a box to see if it was close. Of course he didn't--but did shoot a deer and was puzzled about why I'd made the suggestion.

I find collimators (which I've used for 30+ years) very useful for a number of other tasks, including testing adjustments and how much variation from point-of-impact there might be when as variable is turned from minimum to max. Yeah, you can find that out by shooting--and burn up a bunch of ammo.

Plus, neither bores-sighting or a collimator is perfect. I have tested both on a number of sighted-in rifles, and results vary considerably, mostly due to barrel thickness and bedding of the stock's forend.