Precision Rifle Scope Mounting & Leveling

hey guys Sam Miller from panel precision today I'm going to show you how I mount a scope on my long-range precision rifles okay so what we're going to do is we're going to mount this Bushnell elite tactical XR s2 on my competition gun in the new 260 this will be the first scope this year that I'm going to do a review on so I'm gonna run it real hard on my competition rifle and see how it shakes out okay so the first thing we need is to gather all of our tools and all of our parts and pieces to make this work now the XRS 2 is a four and a half to 30 by 50 scope as 34 millimeter tube so I went with the Rings that I have the most experience with and that's night force ultra lights and I know from a lot of experience that the 1-inch one is going to get me a right where I want to be with the scope height so I'm gonna have enough clearance for the objective lens the bell there between the barrel and it'll get me as low as I can possibly get on the rifle some other things you need to think about are a level we're obviously going to put some kind of a level on the scope to look at it my first choice is a ring cap level made by defensive edge however I can't use it on the scope because the this quick throw lever that they put on here sits right up at top you know at 12 o'clock position at 20 power which is exactly where I'm probably going to be most of the time where I need that level the most so even if I take this extension off there's a boss sticking up and it's just not going to give me the visibility I need on my level so my second choice is going to be this accuracy first on a scope level and this just clamps right on to the tube the scope now some of the other things we're going to need we're going to need some kind of a level to level the gun off to level the scope off so that we can set our scope level other things we're gonna need are a t15 Torx wrench and that's for the ring cap screws we're going to need something for our cross bolt so that's a half-inch so we'll probably be using a socket for that the accuracy first-level uses a 760 fourths hex key can you believe that okay well the other things I really like it's a it's pretty cheap and I've used it a lot now is this wheeler manufacturing this the fat wrench firearm accur izing torque system and all it is is a it's just a Torx screwdriver basically so you can adjust the amount of torque that you put on all these screws I've used that for a long time now I don't know exactly how accurate it is but it's accurate enough and it's repeatable so I recommend that if you don't want to break the bank buying a niche pound torque wrench okay some of the levels you can use are just a cheapo torpedo level like this this is pretty effective this is a extreme hardcore gear they're now called precision hardcore gear but this is the level that they sell and it's just a really heavy block with a level in the middle of it and then my personal favorite is just this chunk of tool steel that Bob Carlock put together for me it's really handy it's a perfectly flat piece of tool steel and it has a bubble level hot glue to the end of it this is what I'm gonna use to set this rifle up I'll show you how you can use these other levels but this is the one that I use the most okay first thing you have to do is figure out how all this stuff is going to fit so you need to think about rig spacing as it relates to where the scope is going to sit on the rifle because we have to have the correct amount of eye relief to make this all work I already rehearse this so I know right where I'm going but I'll just throw something in here real quick for you think about this surgeon action has a built-in Picatinny rail it's built right into the receiver and it ends right at the front of the receiver so it's only the length of this receiver so it's coming up a little bit short shorter than ideal I think for a first focal plane scope so a first focal plane scope has a really short front tube and a relatively long back tube so what I'm ending up having to do is get that right up against the turret housing to get myself enough eye relief it works though anyway get it all figured out figure out where you know roughly where you gonna have it for eye relief and then I try to get the Rings spaced out as evenly as I can and try to span as much of that rail as I can so I have it to the max right now I can't really change anything without moving this ring forward and there's really no reason to do that because I want as much of that rail as I can grab you know as much space between that rail so that the scope is supported across a as much length as I can get it anyway so once we get that figured out you know that's that's where I have to be so if I don't have enough eye relief I'm kind of hosed I'm gonna have to come up with a different system then the next thing I'm gonna do is figure out where I'm gonna put this I haven't decided if I want to use it back here or if I want to try it up forward like this depends on how your eyes are a guess but I might actually stick it up forward like this in front of everything and see how it works out okay now that we've identified where our rings have to be what I'm going to do and normally what I would do is I would push the whole thing forward so I'd pushed the the bottoms of these rings towards the front or the the back edge of the next rail slot or the boss what I'm going to do with this one is I'm gonna push it back so it settles in behind there and the reason for that is I don't want it overhanging the rail so now I'm going to torque this with the fat wrench to 65-inch pounds and then I'm going to push this one forward so that is resting up against the next rail and I'm gonna torque it 65 inch pounds [Music] okay the next question is probably do you lap rings and if so how do you do it I don't laughs rings so we're not even gonna mess with that what we're gonna do now is we're gonna put our scope in place we're gonna let sit there and we're gonna try to figure out let's put it right about there start for our eye relief it'll rough level that just eyeball it I'm gonna put my ring caps on I just want to barely finger tighten these but I want to be able to do is move the scope around a little bit but not have it fall off okay so you just want the scope bill to move just a little bit in those rings you don't want to scratch it up and gouge it and everything but you want it to be tight enough that it doesn't move by itself the next thing I'm going to do now is I'm going to go go prone on the ground and I'm gonna look through the scope and see if the eye relief is gonna work for me I recommend that you do this at whatever power you're gonna be shooting the gun mostly at when you're shooting prone when you shoot it at lower power and you have it mounted up you know shooting off hand or any sitting position or whatever you have a little more leeway on how you can mount the gun when you're laying prone on the ground you don't want to have to try to pull the gun into you or stretch your neck out or stretch your neck back to try to get the right eye relief so I set these up so that it's right on the money where I want it when I'm shooting prone so anyway I'll go do that real quick and we'll be right back okay so we have our eye relief set as well as I can get it I would've liked a little more forward eye relief but I think I'll be okay the next step is since we've moved the rifle we're gonna have to real 'evil the gun itself so I have my my favorite tool here this is just that piece of tool steel with a bubble level on it then I'm gonna lay that right on the rail and I'm just going to torque the gun until I get it where I want it and you could do this a couple different ways you can put this in a vise you can put this in one of those gun vices those tipton gun vices I usually just use the bipod in a rare bag alright I like that right there so now what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna move this level up to the bottom of the turret housing so the opposite sighted this where there is no turret in the way it's just a flat boss and the bottom of the scope body and the reason I do that is that you know all the guts of the scope are based off the the squareness of that turret housing so our lead screw our reticle all that stuff is squared up to this tube to the scope body basically so I'm going to do is I'm going to put that right on the flat of that can you see how that level sticks out and I'm just gonna rotate it by grabbing a hold of the windage turret until we're level then I'm just going to keep that in place I'm just gonna run a couple of these screws down a little bit opposite of each other and I'm gonna double check it and that'll keep the scope from moving on this way so I'll show you in a second why I think it's a better way to to level it off on the bottom of the turret housing that it is on top of this turret okay let's take a look at why I recommend going off the bottom of the housing like that I'm just gonna I had to move the gun so I'm going to confirm that my my receiver the top of my receiver it's level so now I'm gonna come back up and check my turret housing at the bottom and we can see that's level now I'm gonna come out to my turret on top and just lay the level there you can see how it's biased off towards the right now now if I turn the turret cap let's just go 90 degrees there now it's pretty level so let's go another 90 degrees now it's biased off towards the left and I'll bet you if we go another 90 so it's pointing to the right there on that arrow we're pretty close to center again the problem is is how the turret attaches to the guts inside the top of it isn't always going to be perfectly level this isn't just the scope in fact the first place I ever saw it was on a knight force in excess it was really bad I mean it was terrible it was way off one way or the other so the I learned this from Bob car lock a defensive edge this is how they set all their scopes up on the rifles that they build and I've done this with about a half-dozen scopes now and it works very well so I recommend going off the bottom of the turret housing here because it is a perfectly flat surface and I think that's what all of the guts inside the scope are going off of so your reticle is going to be square to it your leadscrew for your turret is going to be squared to it for the erector everything is squared to the bottom of that terror housing so it just seems like a logical place to put this level okay let's recap this a little bit remember we took the cross bolts and the bottoms of the caps here I pulled the front one towards the rear and I pushed the back one towards the front before I torque those down then I'll lay the scope in then I put the ring caps on and lightly loose or lightly tighten those and then I set my eye relief on the ground now we've gone through and we've leveled the whole thing off I finger tighten a few screws just to keep it in place so I'm going to confirm that everything is still level looks good so I'm going to take my phat wrench here and I'm going to set it to 25 inch pounds because that's what Nightforce recommends for the screws and if you're wondering I don't put Loctite on these and I put them in dry no oil whatsoever what we're gonna do is we're just going to go and do a cross pattern here so that we don't rotate the scope at all by tightening one side down faster than the other but try to do all this without getting in front of the camera so just go by and just do like an X pattern here then I'm gonna look for a click [Music] I have never run Loctite on any of these screws and I've never had one loosen ever for that matter with the rails that you have to bolt down on top of the receivers I don't unlock tighten those either I've never had one loose [Music] remember this is a t15 Torx alright so we have that torque down so now we're going to double check looks good okay this is the most important step of this entire process and that's setting up our our level our scope level so that is a perfectly plumb with our turret our lead screw and our reticle so what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that this turret housing is squared up and level with the small level and then I'm going to set this level to exactly match it so that's good then we're gonna rotate this without moving the gun obviously and then it's easiest to do this from the same view that you're gonna be looking at the level and the trick is figuring out how to tighten the screw without moving it because it's going to want to rotate that level takes a little trial and error usually alright then it looks pretty good so I'll set the camera up so you guys get a good look at that okay so you can see that the the level out in front that you can see on the left-hand side of the elevation turret that is accuracy first scope level you can see the egg it's a little ceramic egg inside the the tube itself is perfectly straight up and down our reticle is perfectly straight up and down our turret housing is perfectly leveled now so everything is lined up you can see I wanted to use the ring cap level and that's the one right here they have sitting on top of the scope but because of this quick throw lever I wouldn't be able to see it the thing I like about that ring cap level is that it's ambidextrous so if Jake wants to shoot the gun he's a lefty so he'll be able to reference off the bubble easy the problem with accuracy first is you have to pick one or the other the good news is they did finally start offering them for left-handed shooters but since this gun is primarily for me to shoot I don't mind having it on the left hand side in fact when you're on the gun and you have your eye in the scope and you're actually looking at the target you can shift the focus to your your weak side eye or my left eye and that in that case and actually see that level without moving your head at all away from the scope so it's not such a bad thing to use this accuracy first level alright so in the end this is a pretty robust system I went back and made sure all my ring cap screws or torque 25-inch pounds I'll show you what it can do with this system can actually unbolt this remove the whole thing as a unit and then put it right back in the same spot and from my experience of testing scopes and whatnot I'll be able to take this on and off put it back and forth and it won't lose more than a click of zero if at all 65-inch pounds on those cross vaults we're all good to go so it looks like we have a peeping tom out here I actually had to kick that cat out of the shop she was so obnoxious I was trying to make this video in anyway this is how I do this on the bench is how I mount of scope it's pretty simple I like to keep things simple the next step will be to do a tall target on this scope tall target test and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set a piece of cardboard up and I'm gonna run it up to Oh 10 15 Mel's this is a mil scope I'm gonna run the line up and what I'll do is I'll take a level and I'll just mark a line on that piece of cardboard or whatever I'm using and I'll make sure number one that when I look at that line my reticle is perfectly plumb to it while my level is perfectly level so lined up in the middle the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure as I dial the scope that all the impacts run right up that line that's why we do all this is so that we can make sure that when we're taking a shot and we're correcting for it across Canyon or something that we are actually giving it all the correction that needs to offset gravity now if you're offset to the right of the left you're number one you're not going to give it as much correction as you would normally give because some of its coming off to the right and number two you're actually going to be dialing off to the right so you're gonna be you know hitting to the right or the left of the target depending on which way you're off but anyway this is pretty easy to do it's easier to see if you hang a plumb line and look at the plumb line and think about gravity once you do that this stuff just comes right to you and you see why you have to do this but anyway I like to confirm on a plumb line but I haven't had to adjust anything a long time actually the thing I'm going to do before I do all that plumb line stuff and shoot it up the line is I'm going to zero this scope so a real easy way to get on paper that I found is to take the bolt out prop this up on a target you can do it at 50 yards but I like to just do it at a hundred and I put a big orange sticky target paster thing on the target on a you know just a nice new piece of paper and a nice new piece of cardboard around it and I put that orange sticker right in the middle of it and then I put the gun on the ground just like it is now bipod rear bag and I lay down and I look through the bore you gotta take the bolt out look through the bore and line up the bore with that orange dot once that orange dots lined up in the bore without moving the gun look through the scope you'll see where the crosshairs are in relation to the center or wherever you put that orange dot now when you see it if it's off to the left you're going to have to dial to the left because they're actually going to move the reticle reticle is going to move to the right when you dial the scope to the left so you're probably going to move the scope of the gun a little bit when you do that but you want to move in the same direction that it's off and then you're going to Rivera fie it you're going to look through the bore until you get it pretty close to Center on that dot and then just fire a shot and you're gonna be pretty close I guarantee you'll be on target if you do it that way now remember we have a 20-minute rail here built into this receiver so right off the bat I'm gonna dial the scope all the way up and then I'm gonna dial it all the way down I'm gonna see how much travel the scope has I'm gonna come to zero and then I'm gonna dial down enough to offset that twenty minutes of angle and that's going to put me pretty close to my elevation at least other than that I'll bet you I can have the scope zeroed inside of three shots all right guys that's it on my scope mounting procedure look for the review on this Bushnell x RS - looks like a pretty nice scope I'm looking forward to trying it out we'll be using this for the remainder of this reloading series on this rifle so you'll see it a lot but anyway don't overthink this whole scope mounting thing is not that complicated thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Applause]

Channel: Panhandle Precision

Views: 314,353

Rating: 4.8931255 out of 5

Keywords: long range, hunting, precision rifle, scope mounting, bushnell, elite, optics, accuracy 1st, scope level

Id: A-lpJgLtxyg

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2018