How to Sight In a Red Dot on your Pistol

[Music] what's up everybody today we're down here at the range and we're going to go through the process of sighting in a red dot to our pistol now in this particular case some of the setup items include the fact that we have a bench and a rest here with some sandbags and we are at the 10 yard line now there are varying distances that you can zero your pistol in for most applications 10 yards works just fine but we've seen people do 15 20 or 25 as well the pistol that we'll be using is a glock 17 mos with our viper red dot mounted up on top now just keep in mind that this process will be very similar with all of our different open top red dot sights or on different platforms other than this exact pistol the target we've set up downrange is large enough that we can see our impacts on paper easily from where we're shooting but also offers us a refined aiming point in the center with high contrast so that we have a good spot to aim at now the viper red dot has two locking screws at the rear which lock the adjustments for elevation and windage in order to make the sight in process a little bit easier we have drifted out the rear iron sight from the glock depending on the red dot you're using it may have two locking screws like this it may have one or it may have none at all if it doesn't have any then you shouldn't have to remove the rear iron sight and you can just get going right from there now we're just about to get started shooting here but before we do we want to talk about the fact that we have five rounds loaded up in our magazine right now and we're gonna be shooting five round groups now that means that even if we see the very first shot that comes out of our gun isn't exactly where we're aiming we're still gonna carry on and shoot four more shots this eliminates the chance that maybe we accidentally threw around or didn't have a very good shot or apply perfect fundamentals of marksmanship and that way we can know exactly or hopefully very close to where our red dot is pointed in relation to our barrel and make good accurate adjustments we're also going to make sure to take our time and really think about each shot there's no need to rush through this your xero is only as good as you are in the sighting process now the last thing we'll mention here right off the bat is that some people when they're sighting in a red dot to their pistol will think that they need to line up the red dot with their iron sights on the pistol in order to get on target and that's actually not true because the iron sights on our pistol and the red dot itself that we put on there are two distinctive and very different sighting systems that are not designed to be used together even if your red dot or your pistol or the sights claim they can co-witness with your red dot that doesn't mean that they need to be lined up it just means that in an emergency situation the iron sights can be used through the window of the red dot optic but the wonderful advantages that the red dot affords us is that we don't have to line anything up and it really makes for an accurate and fast setup which is an advantage over iron sights one other thing we'll quick point out here about the sight in process is that we don't have the illumination intensity on our red dot up that high in fact it's quite low in its range and what that really does for us is it gives us a finer aiming point because we don't have all that bloom of the red light all around our center aiming point in the red dot now we've got the locking screws for our adjustments set to the locked position on this when we're gonna be actually shooting and there's no need to gorilla tighten them all you need to do is get them finger tight and it should be good to go so we'll see where we're gonna hit on paper when we shoot this five round group so we've come down to the target here and you can see we're shooting a pretty tight group there's one little fire off to the side here but you know for my own pride's sake i'll just say that's because i was getting used to a firearm i'm not exactly used to but anyway that's a pretty decent group we're obviously going to have to move our adjustments to the right and up and uh once we do that hopefully we can be a little bit closer to this x-ring so the nice thing is when we go to our optic here on the adjustment screws there actually is engraved on the optic and up with a clockwise pointing arrow and then a right with a clockwise pointing arrow so those are the directions we want to go so when we make our adjustments we will turn those screws clockwise if we wanted to go left or down we would then go counterclockwise on each respective adjustment now in the particular case of the viper red dot we check the manual and we can see that each adjustment graduation is equivalent to 1 moa of adjustment and we can see individual hash marks on the body of the optic indicating each of those graduations again being 1moa what we saw on our target was we were approximately four inches low maybe four and a half inches low and about the same to the left so we're gonna go in and make the corresponding adjustments here at 10 yards one moa is roughly equivalent to about a tenth of an inch so we'll make enough adjustments into our elevation and windage to make up for that offset and hopefully hit the target so the adjustments have been made to our elevation and windage we're going to lock these screws down again take another string of five shots and see where we're at so coming down to look at our target once again you can see we might have gotten a little overzealous with our windage adjustment coming to the right here because our elevation actually looks pretty good if not slightly high but it's hard to say uh definitely a little too far to the right so we're mostly going to make an adjustment to the left and we'll see about that elevation once we're here in the x-ring all right so there you have it we made the necessary adjustments and as you can see things are looking good i took my own advice and took even more time on these shots to really try and eke out as much accuracy out of me as possible and anytime you got a handgun and you're punching out the x here that's a good sign so we're gonna call this red dot cite it in get everything locked in and just get to shooting and having fun one thing we have seen on occasion is that people find themselves running out of elevation adjustment before they can actually get sighted in everything seems to be adjusting but then they just don't have enough adjustment there actually are third-party aftermarket accessories that almost act like a 20 moa rail like we see on some of our long range rifles but actually for pistol red dot applications and they're just a one degree shim that you put between the optic and the pistol that will cheat in some extra elevation and it can allow you to get zeroed so at this point in time this red dot is sighted into this pistol and for you the same should be the case if you have any other questions about this process or really any other process related to optics and firearms we're always happy to answer those even in a video like this you can hit us up on social media in the comments below on this video via phone email whatever works best for you until the next video though we'll see you guys next time happy hunting and shooting

Channel: Vortex Optics

Views: 688,316

Keywords: Vortex Optics, Vortex, Optics, Hunting, Shooting, Glassing, Riflescope, Binoculars, Spotting, Scope

Id: ehvsr81xhH0

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020