How to Mount an Optic Like a Pro

welcome back everybody this is Chad with Iraq veteran 8888 today we have another gunsmithing specific video for you and we're going to be covering scope mounting yes we already have done a video on scope mounting however I got a lot of comments on that video about why didn't you like the Rings why don't you do this why don't you do that well we're going to explain that in this video and if you remember in the previous video we use the precision set of rings on a nice one-piece base and everything and really laughing isn't required along with some of the other steps I'm going to show you in this video here but if you have an old nice rifle like this Ruger m77 here of Erichs which I'm very jealous of 760 about 39 you've got kind of a two-piece arrangement here in specific rings that are required for the type of setup and there's some other intricacies to other ring bases and stuff that are out there on the market that we'll kind of talk about throughout the rest of the video but we're going to show you the proper way that a gunsmith would do a scope mounting job if you took your rifle to a gunsmith and wanted to get a optic properly mounted so we're going to go over all the steps as we go along we've got a few specialized tools here that we picked up in Brownells on the tabletop here and we're just going to dive into it and just take you along for the ride so let's go so why do you want to lap your rings well the main reason is because no no ring base rifle you name it nothing's perfect so when you're dealing with when you're dealing with like especially a two-piece arrangement like this Ruger here and especially like proprietary rings that this requires you get a little bit of movement just because of the tolerances from the factory I mean this isn't a custom rifle this is a factory rifle so you wind up with tolerances in the mounting surfaces and with a two-piece arrangement make the problems exponentially worse if you have a single piece base like some of the Leupold type bases basically it's a single mount that stretches from the rear to the front of the receiver and basically each separate receiver but has plug holes and you pull those screws out drop the base in place and then you drop proprietary loop old-style rings in and sometimes those are windage adjustable as well and we'll get into another little tool to kind of check for that a minute but basically with this arrangement here with the rivet rings you have a key and a key slot and then just kind of like a little wedge style rail here and these ring bases will just get push forward and snugged up and we're just going to kind of hand tight them for the moment using a little magnet tip set here from Brownells guys to push that forward I'm just going to Snug that up before we start the Laughing procedure we're going to use our Brownells torque handle here and we're using 45 inch pounds however your ring bases may vary and the specified torque setting so you just need to consult your instructions for that we're going to take our wiping rod here now this is just a 1 inch stainless steel lapping rod available from Sinclair and we're going to drop that in just kind of eyeball it and I can already see that I'm getting contact up front here on this front ring but I'm not getting any contact on the other side here same thing on same thing on the other side so I mean it's quite apparent that these rings definitely could benefit from laughing I'm just going to use a aluminum oxide lapping compound now there are cheaper lapping compounds out there that are not specialized for gunsmithing type work like this with rings like silicon carbide you think silicon carbide that's the same thing that's on sandpaper and the issue with that is it can actually embed those particles into the ring itself and it can damage the ring and your scope body so it's really a simple matter of just dropping some Liping compound into the Rings here dropping your bar in place just put a little bit of downward pressure on it and moving back and forth and rotating as you go and what this is going to do basically you're just removing a little bit of material from the Rings itself and you're just increasing that contact surface between the ring and your scope and a lot of times you can just pull it off and you can actually look and see the material that's being removed really doesn't take a whole lot to do this but this is kind of a process that 90% of people aren't going to do at home so this is basically what a gunsmith would do to ensure that you have a very solidly mounted optics on your rifle of choice and you can see that material coming off of there but you know for guys like like myself and Eric will not have a lot of guns and we're always you know mounting optics from you guns such as that it's kind of bugs us to have these tools laying around and if you're a home hobbyist or whatever and you're just really into guns and you like having specialty tools that can be used for other tasks as well you know it's definitely beneficial to have these things laying around so we removed a good amount of material from the ring here so we're going to check our lapping and see how it's working along this is just a set of alignment bars basically all this is is a 1-inch piece of steel that's got a tapered point on each end they come in so - okay and what you use these for is to test the alignment of the Rings themselves especially you're just going to install one alignment bar on the rear we're just going to Snug these screws down just a tiny bit here just to keep it in place take our second bar put in place in our Ford ring half here and this is just a preliminary test fit guys to bear with me here all right so with our alignment bars in place you can clearly see that the alignment between the rear and front ring is definitely still off a touch I did test the Rings initially on and they were off a considerable amount more than what you see here and basically what you're trying to accomplish is getting these two center points here to be very very close to one another almost you know basically right across from each other that way you can tell that the front ring and the rear ring are centered and proper so we're going to remove the Rings here and continue lapping on and we'll come back in a moment when we get everything squared away all right so guys so after about 10 minutes total of lapping replacing the compound every few minutes on both of the Rings here we can see that our alignment bars are pretty much spot-on the money all right so we've come to the point where we're going to actually mount the optic and for the optic eric has chosen a loop hold VX - 3 - 9 by 40 this is a 1 in this and a silver matte color this is just a real simple quality optic with a standard duplex tile reticle and he picked up from OpticsPlanet and perfect fit for this rifle nice color coordination there but I'm basically we've got the rifle just chalked up in a vise and we've got our wheeler engineering a leveling set on there this is a really neat set in that it comes with a small magnetic bubble level for your receiver flats or your your rail there and then also has a clamp mounted level up front that you can actually fine-tune you basically just line both these up to fine-tune the front level and then you can use this one to actually drop it on your optic and you can level the optic from there to match the level on the rifle itself now typically what I do is I remove the scope cap on the elevator here and usually the if the adjustment or is actually flat you can drop the level on the adjustment turret and it gives you a little bit more precise measurement there however this one is more of a convex shape so it was kind of curved on top so that's not going to work so what we're going to do is just snug the scope cap down pretty tight and we can just drop the level in place there and we can get it lined up here with our level up front and the beauty of it is no matter how you rotate the rifle to get the bubble where you want it so you can see what you're working with it's going to stay level because it's mounted solidly to the barrel right now I'm just kind of get that kind of roughed in and I've set the eye relief on the optic for Eric specifications here and really from this point on it's pretty self-explanatory basically just drop your ring halves back on the top here and just give your screws just a slight teeny teeny tiny little bit of torque okay just enough to keep it in place so you can actually level the optic out and what we're going to do is just get these kind of in place and then I'm going to Snug them down the touch and then we're going to install the other two screws in each ring lock type those in place pull the other two out and then do the same thing there so this is kind of a tedious process guys just making sure this thing is nice and level and what I like to do is I don't like to Center the bubble level right in the middle between the two lines what I typically do is actually use the edge of the bubble on one of the black lines to me I find it to be a little bit more precise yep and very very lightly Snug down each side I mean I'm talking like an eighth of a turn or less each time until you get it squared away because if you tighten one side down too much what it's going to do is torque the scope over and you're going to lose your level so we're going to kind of snug these down just a tiny bit as we go and then we're going to double check our level and make any sort of adjustments as needed pretty spot-on to me right so with the rear ring snugged up we can just go ahead and pull our other screws out of place and actually just going to add a touch of Loctite to it we're going to Snug these down then we're going to torque all these screws to 25 inch pounds 25 inch pounds is pretty typical for 4 ring screws anywhere between 15 and 25 is plenty enough to do the job and keep everything in place all right so the scope is in place and it is leveled and we are going to torque our ring screws down to 25 inch pounds and basically just like anything else you want to go kind of opposite and across from one another as far as the screws go in a diagonal pattern you don't want to tighten the front screw here and then the front screw here you want to go front and then the rear that way you're providing even pressure on the Rings themselves okay cool alright and then we'll just move to the front here do the same pattern and then we'll go and do the other two screws on each ring very tedious process guys to do it right I mean like I said 90% people are just going to slap the rings on the gun drop the scope in their eyeball it snug it up monkey tight and be done with it but if you want to go through the process and just mount your optic a little bit more precise and more like a professional would do and like I said it can take this to a gunsmith most gunsmith out there this is exactly what they're going to do basically this exact same process and they're going to have the tools necessary to accomplish the task alright now that we've got the optic mounted up and everything everything is level out we're ready to go outside and boresight this puppy now bore sighting is a procedure that confuses a lot of people you know sometimes you might mount scope of whatever you go to the range and you put beats paper up at hundred yards and you go to shoot and nothing happens you're like wait a minute what's going on you go through like a boxer to Emma before you realize that you're hitting four five feet to the right or to the left or high or low you know you have no idea where those bullets are going Borstein is a very fuel expedient method of getting your shots on paper at about 50 to 100 yards so you can find two years ago and there are you know bore sighters that are mounted in the mobile that have a series of o-rings and whatnot for different bore diameters that our laser bore sighters you've got red you've got green all manner things sometimes they can get pretty expensive we're going to show you a very very field expedient method of bore sighting in your rifle without any special tools or anything you're literally just looking down the bore and also one of the things that I forgot to mention earlier is you want to make sure that on a bolt action that your bolt handle is going to clear the ocular bells of the optic it's one thing that's quite embarrassing if you got the wrong height rings or say you have a scope with a very large ocular Bell key you gotta keep going to open your actions like clunk play oh you got a problem so you need a higher set of rings or smaller optic but this clear is just barely just barely clears but it's not contacting it off alright so we stepped outside we've got the rifle set up in a hog saddle here now you can use something beside the hog saddle you can sit down in the bench with a nice front rest and sandbag or since along those lines you just need some sort of steady shooting platform and target about 50 yards away now I've gone ahead and taken the liberty as you remove the scope caps so we can have free access to the adjustment turrets we're going to remove the bolt now this method here requires you to look down the barrel from the chamber in out in order to boresight the gun now obviously this is going to work with something that you can't see through okay but it'll work for bolt-actions ARS anything like that where you can separate the lower halves or whatnot and you can see through the barrel so what we're going to do is just basically look through the barrel and we're going to get kind of an eyeball on the center of that white shoot steel target down there about 50 yards away and then we're going to look through our optic and I can see that it needs to move to the left just a touch so we're going to move that to the left and this isn't an exact science guys it's just kind of eyeballing in here but it's a good way of saving some ammo oh yeah that looks pretty solid right there so as it sits right here this is about what a gunsmith would do if they had a barrel mounted laser bore sighter if they didn't have a place to shoot it that this would be your rifle this would be how your rifle will come back to you so you'd have it basically bore sighting at stake is the range put some round stones downrange but what we have here is some ammo in my pocket so I'm going to put the bolt back in down my PPE and we're going to take a shot and see how close we are and make some final adjustments and literally you know you can zero a rifle especially something along these lines with three to five shots if you do your part so okay single load a couple of rounds in here real quick and just see we're working with all right so I'm take a shot at 50 yards here and we'll see how close we are with our adjustments hahahaha I don't think it gets any better than that let's take the second shot at that bolt right there I mean that round landed right where I was aiming so one shot zero to working with let's see when your stack another round right there on top of that other one there did then close to come down maybe just an inch or so okay try one more round so there's pretty much spot on the money right there guys I'm more shot let's go for the head there can't ask for any better than that so that is basically how to mount an optic semi-professionally if you will like I said this is how a gunsmith would would mount your optic if you took it to a shop and the way that we did this here will give Eric a probably a lifetime of service with this particular setup once we get this thing fine-tuned as far as the zero goes take it out to a little bit longer range and see where we can hold on that duplex for long-range shots that's maybe 150 maybe 200 yards or so and got a winner here guys so stay tuned we've got a ton more content on the way hopefully enjoy this quick look at how to mount an optic 101 stay tuned guys a lot more on the way [Music] you

Channel: Iraqveteran8888

Views: 434,253

Rating: 4.9093938 out of 5

Keywords: iraqveteran8888, iv8888, scope mounting, scope lapping, ring lapping, lap rings, optics mounting, optic mounting, how to lap rings, lapping compound, brownells, leupold, vx-2, optics planet, gunsmithing, mounting a scope, riflescope mounting, rifle scope mounting

Id: 7LPzb9wuA4Y

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2017