How to Mount a Rifle Scope | Long-Range Rifle Shooting with Ryan Cleckner

[Music] many shooters rely on their gunsmith or even the factory to have the scope mounted on the rifle now although it may be mounted properly to the rifle there's no guarantee it's actually gonna fit you now I like to equate this to buying a top-of-the-line sports car and then never adjusting the mirrors or the seats for their factory positions you're not gonna get the performance you want no matter how nice the equipment is hi I'm Ryan collector with the National Shooting Sports Foundation and my experience as a sniper team leader in 1st Ranger Battalion and as a sniper instructor has allowed me to see plenty of instances where the scope is mounted correct into the rifle but not to the shooter and we end up having problems because of it now these techniques we're going to talk about to make sure the scope fits you are gonna be able to apply to the target shooting in the hunting worlds equally as well the first thing we need to do is make sure that the firearm is unloaded before we do anything we look in the chamber make sure it's clear make sure there's no magazine inserted and this rifle is now safe to work with now the first step we're going to do is gonna be a little different we're going to start with the rings on the rifle we're not gonna put them on the scope yet now I have a Picatinny rail on this rifle here but yours may be different you may have a weaver rail or your rings may go directly to the receiver the idea here though is when the rings get mounted on if there's any play whatsoever we need to make sure it have all the slack taken out and have the Rings pushed all the way forward before we type them down that way we're not gonna have issues of when the rifle recoils the Rings are going to slide or slip forward once the Rings are mounted in place now we can put the scope in take your scope and set them in the lower half of the Rings now you can work with this scope and do all of these adjustments we're going to talk about without the top of the Rings on however if you're worried about your scope falling out you might want to take the tops of the Rings and just very lightly put them on this way the scope could still easily move back and forth on the rifle but you don't have to worry about it falling out of the Rings and potentially damaging your very expensive scope here so just a couple turns is all it's going to take to get these tops on we're not going to worry about snugging them down yet now these adjustments are going to be making on the scope the first two things we're going to worry about are the height scope and how far the scope is out from our face so we're gonna be able to adjust in and out and up and down on the scope now we're up and downs going to be a little limited the objective lens of the scope up here on the front depending on its size is going to limit how low we can get the scope and that's the key you don't want the scope up too high you always want to get the scope as low as you can so getting lower rings may not always be an option if your objective lens doesn't allow it so if you're as low as you can possibly go and the right the rifle or the scope would allow you to go any further you need to start building up the cheek rest back here to bring your head up so you can get level now when you bring up the cheek rest there's many things you can use you can either have an adjustable stock on your rifle you can add padding yourself there's a great aftermarket kits or you can get cheek pieces like these I highly recommend these these are very handy not only they give you a little bit of padding for your cheek they give you that little extra height that you need and some extra storage for tools like we just used so whenever you're out at the range and you're worried if something came loose you have it right here with you so the first thing we're gonna do is put her head on the rifle with our eyes closed I know you're used to mounting the rifle with your eyes open and therefore moving your head too we can see through the scope but that's the problem we're gonna fix here now you also need to take into consideration how you're gonna be shooting this rifle mostly if it's gonna be in a standing or seated positions you need to be in those positions to check the fit but if you're gonna be firing a lot in the prone you need to actually get down on the ground and get in the prone and make sure they fit the differences between those positions will make actually quite a bit for your positioning on the scope now I can understand your question on well what if you want to shoot all those positions well that's fine I'm just asking that you get in each and every one of those positions to make sure we have a happy meeting when the adjustments so the scope at least works well for you in all positions and doesn't fight you in one or the other when you first take the rifle the idea is to get on it comfortably you want to get directly behind the rifle and not have to strain your neck your shoulders while you're on you need to take the rifle put it in your shoulder and rest your head down where it's comfortable the idea here is not to have to push your head too far forward or pull it back too much but just let the full weight of your head down on the stock once your head is down the first thing you're going to do just open your eyes if you can see through the scope you're good but if you're like me you're looking right into the bottom edge of the scope that's a problem what that's gonna make me do when I'm at the range is have to lift my head up and muscle the gun around to try and shoot a good group that's always going to be a problem because I'm not comfortable and relaxed well and with my rifle setup I can't get that scope any lower so I need to start building my head position up I for years have used that foam I'd talked about I take a styrofoam maybe from those old camping sleeping pads I cut them up in strips and I put them on the buttstock of the rifle and I taped them down the problem is this a little unsightly and it comes off after a while so I finally got tired of having to rebuild them and I just made my own out of a piece of wood I took a 1x2 it took out my pocketknife I shaved the wood off and I kept sitting it on there until it got the position I wanted when I was done I taped it up I put a couple of nails through it and I drilled two holes in my stock now that might panic some of you so if you don't want to do that this may not fit for everybody you may want to get an adjustable stock or some other method but for me it worked and I take this and I can put this on each time in the same two holes now here's a note to be careful of if you're building something up on your stock always be sure that the action can clear if you're not careful you might end up building something up getting a perfect fit with your scope on your rifle and then not even be able to use your rifle so always be sure that the action clears whatever you're adding on and like my setup here is it's removable so that way when I go to clean my rifle I can actually take the bolt out and not have to worry about what's behind it so for me this piece of wood and the cheek rest when I put both of these on I can put the full weight of my head down on the rifle open my eyes and I can see perfectly through the scope now you might be wondering how you can see perfectly through a scope I mean if you see through it you see through it but there's actually an alignment that's going on with that scope that you need to be aware of and that black ring that fuzzy shadow that you see that we call scope shadow that's actually helpful not when you're shooting but it helps to make sure that your scopes aligned properly see we all know that with iron sights that sight alignment is important and then sight picture on the target well the same is true with a scope and some people just don't know they just look at the reticle place it on the target and then shoot well that scope shadow that's in this scope lets me know when I'm not looking perfectly centered through that scope so it's very helpful but when you're first getting this set up it might be a little frustrating so if you have an adjustable power scope like this is always be sure to turn it to low power first that way your tolerances are gonna be as wide as possible and you'll be able to get set up but just remember that you're on low power and once you think you have a good setting always turn it to high power to check and that's gonna bring that scope shadow in quite a bit to make sure you're dead in the center now once we have the height figured out now you can worry about the front to back all you need to do is look through the scope like normal and then move the scope forward and back until the scope shadow is all the way gone don't move your head that's the idea we're trying to fix here put your head on the scope on the rifle move the scope forward and back until it's just where it needs to be and you see no scope shadow now this is actually handy if you have a friend helping you because you can just be laying on the ground and they can move the scope for you to make sure it's clear now once it's good front to back and it's good up and down we can go ahead and tighten the scope down but we need to level it first now there's plenty of aftermarket tools to level scopes out there some snap on to the this bottom base here they have levels on them and lines to line up the reticle their systems for using on the wall and I'm sure they all work fine for me I like a simpler system which is either one making sure the rifles completely level and then putting a level on top of my flat scope cap if you have one and making sure it's level but again be sure at the rifles level first because a level scope on a crooked rifle doesn't do anybody any good but my favorite method is when I have a scope like this Leopold here with the flat bottom on it I have a flat bottom to the scope and a flat rail so I can take any piece of metal that has two flat edges on it that are parallel to each other and I can reach down underneath the scope I can line the VESA metal flat on the rail and tilt it so the other side touches the bottom of the scope base and actually just tilts and levels of scope on its own if the scope is tilted one way or the other at all you'll see light through it easily and know that it's not level once it's level you can pull that tool out take your wrench and start tightening the scope rings now don't get carried away when you tighten these down again we're just gonna go finger tight and we want to keep a little bit of a gap on one side of the Rings if you notice the Rings won't go perfectly flush on both sides you're gonna have them tilted one way or the other so we want to keep them right in the middle and try and keep an even gap between both sides once you do that and you get them just finger tighten down you can go and snug them down all the way now if you don't have a torque wrench handy and you're just out at the range and you happen to have your tool with you the rule of thumb I like to go by is I take the short end of the allen wrench for leverage and that's all I grab on to then I tighten those little screws down as tight as I can get with that short little piece of leverage and then I tighten them in an X fashion almost like I'm changing a tire once they get everything tightened down I actually go back and take them all back out again but I just do it one at a time I will take my time to take one screw out all the way leaving the other screws just fine and I put a small drop of blue which is the non permanent lock tight on this and then put it back in and I'll do that for each and every one of the screws once they're in there to make sure the scope stays put the last thing you want is to do all this work and be out on the hunting trip with an important shot and have the scope come loose because it's just not gonna work for you once this is all set up this already is better than you may have had because the rightfulness scope fit you better however there's still one more adjustment that some people overlook they don't realize that the reticle inside this scope can actually focused your eye specifically now see parallax is a popular topic now with scopes and you have parallax adjustments on many scopes here and the idea being is we take the image of the target which is on a certain focal plane inside the scope and the image of the reticle and by adjusting the parallax we get them on that same focal plane so that if our eye moves the image moves together where if you don't adjust the parallax the image images don't move together and we end up having troubles well it doesn't do any good to bring that target image on to the reticle image if you don't know that your eye is set up for the reticle image already on this scope we're gonna be able to adjust that by moving this ocular housing this scope has a locking ring right here they're going to turn away from the housing we might need to turn the two together to get them apart and you're going to take that locking ring and turn it all the way out so that we have all the adjustment allowable in this ocular housing now this is also a handy spot to have a friend help you out what you do is get behind the rifle and get looking through the scope just like we just talked about to make sure that you're relaxed you can see right through the center of the scope but you're gonna close your eyes and then you're gonna open them and look only at the reticle and I want the immediate first sense impression you see when you see that reticle even a second later your eyes are gonna adjust and focus on that reticle so to help this out it actually is handy to do it inside look at a plain white wall look at the sky outside if you need to but we don't want your eye distracted by anything like a target frame or trees or anything that you might try and focus on instead after you get that first sense impression you're gonna close your eyes again you're gonna take the housing and then turn it a couple turns one direction you're gonna open your eyes and look at that reticle again and all we need to know is if it's better or worse than it was the last time close your eyes a couple more turns and again by going through the entire adjustment range of this ocular housing you're gonna be able to find that middle section where it was the clearest for you get back to that and then you can fine-tune with small turns and get in the middle of the range where the reticle is clear to your eye this way every time you take this rifle and you put your head down on the stock not only gonna be able to see through the scope but you're gonna be able to see that reticle nice and clear so then when we adjust our parallax and we have targets of different distances and we want to move that range in and out we're actually bringing that target image into a zone that we know is actually set up for your eye right there with the reticle and you're gonna have a lot better success with that well now that your scopes mounted properly it's adjusted forward and back the up and down works and the scope after you're done is adjusted for your reticle you need to go out to the range and try it out and see how it works for you I think you're gonna be pretty pleased with the results if you need to find a place to shoot feel free to check out our website at where to shoot org and remember firearm safety starts with you [Music] you

Channel: National Shooting Sports Foundation | NSSF

Views: 2,774,744

Rating: 4.937459 out of 5

Keywords: #longrangeshooting, #LongRange, rifle technique, nssf, tips, rifle shooting, how to shoot, instructional video, #NSSF, #LetsGoShooting, rifle, scope setup, Shooting instruction, #precisionrifle, rifle scope installation, scope, target shooting

Id: COoXVpGfXQE

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2011