Zeroing a Handgun Red Dot Sight

everybody Aaron Cowan sage dynamics in this video we're gonna talk about zeroing optics on handguns recently I put out a video you can find it previous videos that have been shown on why you shouldn't slave your red dot to your iron sights and call that a zero call that a red dot zero and some people Rose raised some some good questions and refer to a previous video I put out in 2016 on zeroing and basically the same topic as this video ziering a handgun optic and for the first time well not the first time one of the rare occasion and the fact that I was not specific enough in that previous video on zeroing optics I talked about slaving the red dot to the irons as a starting point and I talked about fine tuning from there but I didn't go into specific detail on what that fine tuning actually entailed so some people got the impression that if they if they slaved their red dot to their iron sights they'd have to make some small Corrections from there and that would be a zero and that could be the case however that's not the technique that I want to put out there so I'm updating the video so we don't have any confusion at least people who are coming to me for zeroing advice on on red dot handguns I've been shooting red dot handguns almost exclusively for over five years now I've got thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds done I've zeroed 25 of or more the guns personally and I've assisted hundreds of students in correcting their zeros or actually zero in from scratch on their own gun so it's got a pretty large sample size and what an actual zero is going to look like now for the purpose of this video we're gonna be talking about the 25-yard zero which is a zero I recommend you can get by with a 10 or a 15 zero that I have used in the past but I found that the 25-yard does the work that I wanted to do at the distances I wanted to work at and my mechanical offset those closer distances isn't really significant enough to warrant a closer point of zero so the purpose is video we're going to talk about a 25-yard Zoo and we're gonna work our way through the process and the very first thing I am going to do is I am gonna slave the dot to the iron sight purpose this video I'm using an agency 17 Lake gun with irons forward but I will be slaving my red dot to that front sight post while acquiring an ideal sight alignment that's a starting point it's not a necessity it's not necessarily a step that you have to do during the zeroing process but I found in my experience is it does help you get closer to your zero so you're gonna be able to establish your zero with less rounds fired doesn't mean you have to do it that way but it does cut down on the amount of ammunition you're gonna have to shoot but as you'll see going throughout the zero process it's not somewhat something you somewhere you necessarily want to leave your dot so slaving the dot to that front sight post is the very first step now I'm going to be zeroing at the distance of 25 yards however there are some targets out there John Dufresne he's another instructor for sage dynamics also has his own company kinetic consulting he has a zero target that allows you to shoot at ten yards for a 25-yard zero and it is a graduated target so on the target you'll see these little squares and those identify clicks so if you know your three squares to the right that's three squares so on and so forth I'm sure you're probably familiar with the target similar to that but if you're not going to use this type of zero you're going to zero the way that I do I generally use a one inch circle or a b8 type target in order to zero my firearm so that's what I'm gonna be shooting on I'll put it on a silhouette my goal is going to be to shoot a five round group as tightly as possible in the center of that red circle the dot size depending on what dot size you're ultimately going with can dictate how well you're able to do that now what I found in my experience is like on the RMR the 6.5 MOA or dots around that size they tend to completely cover the center of that target so that red circle is going to be completely covered by your reticle which is actually isn't a bad thing it gives you a very easy way to maintain a sight picture and you're not kind of fighting with if you're new to red dots you're not fighting with that natural trimmer bouncing around in the the the point of aim your desired point of impact I will bench the gun and I use a simple bench which means I'm just going to be able to I'm going to use a sandbag or something similar to give myself a resting support for the firearm but I don't want to lock it in or vise any more than that because what I found in my experience is the more stable you make the gun outside of natural shooting the more the zero can be affected when you actually take the zero from your your isolated zero and you actually shoot it independently I've seen zeroes be the off to three inches because the gun was so artificially vais down for zeroing that when the shooter actually shot it naturally organically their zero was affected so for this purpose I'm gonna bench it but it's more of a relaxed arrest as you'll see as you see in the video it's not something that's this exaggerated or dramatically unnatural or a dramatically unnatural shooting position so I'm gonna start that off and my point of aim for every group I'm gonna fire is going to be the center of that be eight and that's where I'm gonna start but the very first step is slaving the dot to the front sight post you may say well well how does that actually help me well it's going to get the gun close to elevation and really really close to windage as far as blinding the dot up with the bore axis it's not going to be true to elevation but it is gonna get you really really close on your windage I'll be shooting this on the 25-yard target for every five round I'm gonna do I like five versus three rounds because it gives me a larger sample size hit ratio so if I need to kind of try any late where my actual point of impact is if my group is kind of wide it gives me something gives me a little bit more data to work with now optics vary some optics have different adjustments the optic I'm using for the zeroing process and especially this video and most the optics that I use is the surge con alarm R which has which has 1 MOA adjustments now quick math in your head 1 M away 25 yards that's going to give me a basically a quarter inch of movement for every click that I do this is important to mention because I found it on some optics I've got it into a frustrating place based on my shooting to where it's just slightly to the right or just slightly to the left and if I adjust to the left to correct for it now I'm just slightly to the left by just to the right to correct for so you may find in your adjustments that you can't get it as perfectly centered as you want although there's a lot of factors that go into that so if I have a really really good barrel and I have a really really good stable shooting position you may actually be able to identify that but shooting skill is definitely a factor into how specific you want to be with your shooting so once I've bisected my dots slaved my dot to my front sight post and some people use a lollipop I bisect and I work from there that is not the stopping point that is the starting point that is not where I'm going to leave my zero and I think when we fire this first five round group you'll see why now once that dot is bisected I'm going to establish my room I rested shooting position and I'm going to not use the irons again I'm going to use the dot itself I'm not going to Co witness I'm not gonna leave the dot of bisected on the front sight post guys that defeats the purpose of the dot to begin with I don't want all that clutter so I'm going to use the dot relaxed roughly centered in the optic window and I'm going to fire my first five round group [Applause] as you can see that group is somewhat low windage is pretty good I'm gonna have to fine-tune it I'm not gonna fine-tune it yet I need to give it closer to where I actually want to be the adjustments they need to be made I need to roughly come up I'll mess with the windage once I'm pretty secure with the elevation at this point again the iron sights are no longer a factor in what I'm doing some people may bring up like whoa okay what is the point of aim point of impact of the iron sights which is a very good point to bring up if we want to talk about Coweta Singh which is not something we're gonna do on the handgun but it does it is helpful to know as a shooter if you're going to use suppressor height backup sights what their actual point of aiming point of impact is some guns factory or 15-yard point of aim important in fact with factory sights summer 25 it helps to know whe what your manufacturer is actually quoting your gun at once used to put suppressor hight sights on a gun that's going to change because it elevates the sights over the bore axis so me personally any time I throw sights on a gun I'm gonna shoot just irons only to see where my actual point of aim point of impact is I'll start at 15 to see if it's somewhere in there and that's usually you know it's that's definitely possibility sometimes it's in between 15 20 22 25 but it's somewhere in that that relationship neighborhood between 15 yards and 25 yards so I'll make my adjustments I'm conservative in my adjustments because grand scheme of things handgun ammunition isn't very important and I want my zero to be zeroed so I'm gonna make conservative adjustments if I look at the target and I feel like okay I need to come up seven clicks I'm gonna come up seven clicks only I'm not going to add any to that which is what I mean conservative means specific if I think seven go up seven that's the adjustment I'm gonna make and then I'm gonna fire my next five round group that definitely got me closer to where I want to be but and for some people that might be good enough like yeah you're hitting under where you want to shoot now I want the rounds to go exactly where I'm aiming so I'm gonna go ahead and make another conservative adjustment maybe just one click maybe two clicks in this case I made two and I'm gonna shoot another five round group that's better but not quite where I want it to be so final five round group hopefully the final five round group because of my conservative adjustments now you'll notice that that I still haven't messed with the windage at this point I would make if necessary corrections to the windage if I got my shot group up to a point where it's hitting just left or just right but the elevation is good then I'm gonna walk my windage in some people try to do both at the same time and I can I can kind of understand why you would want to you know cut down an ammunition spin for me it's a very specific process and again hanging an ammunition in the grand scheme of things isn't that expensive so especially for something as unique as shooting an optic on a handgun unlike a rifle rifle is a little bit more stable I think we can all agree on that I'm gonna do the two things independently of each other if I can unless it's a very small deviation so I'm gonna fire this next five round group with my final adjustments and that is a zero gun or is it a question that has to be raised is if it's a carry gun it needs to be zeroed with the ammunition you're gonna carry if you're one of those people that and not everybody's like this but there are some shooters out there that do this they're all they're a flavor of the month guy the newest greatest self-defense ammo comes out there's zero zero data on it whatsoever but they buy the ammo new in the chamber okay check your zero if you're gonna do that you kind of enlist yourself and or actually volunteer yourself to constantly changing your zero because you're constantly changing your carry ammunition if you found around this tried-and-true I'm a gold dot fan no but I also have you know HST they shoot very similar but they're not the same so if I was gonna switch out animals I would check my zero doesn't mean I have to make any changes but it's something I'm definitely the check for range ammunition if it's a gun that's never going to be carried then zero it on one of a range ammunition or at least what grain you you commonly carry you shoot a lot of steel you're not going to see a significant deviation between 115 to 124 but you may see a significant deviation between 147 Gold dot in the 115 range ammo you're shooting at the range so don't zero it on the 115 zeroed on the carry arrow you may be able to find a range ammunition that performs comparable to your carry ammo my experience prime 124 grain prime or ruega 124 grams shoot very very similar to my 124 grain Gold Dot so that's that's a target amylum I'm comfortable using as far as okay that's how the gun would shoot once the zero is established from that that resting position now I'm going to shoot the gun standing at d0 distance the reason I'm doing this is to see if there's a significant deviation from the rested position to the standing position you probably won't be able to shoot as tight of a group if you shoot you know all bowl on your zero you're probably gonna shoot ten rings standing twenty five if you've got a decent amount of practice to it and you really bear down on those fundamentals but you should at least be able to hit nine or eight ring consistently roughly elevation roughly windage with the zero position that you got from the bench shooting if you're not able to bench the gun when you zero this is going to be a very aggravating process and that's why I recommend finding somewhere where you can actually and most indoor ranges are gonna have a rifle lane that has a sitting bench you can use that to zero your pistol outdoor ranges most outdoor ranges predominantly go with sitting positions at least public-access ones so you shouldn't have any problem finding a way to zero the gun from a sitting position as far as shooting rests go if you don't have one they're pretty inexpensive you can actually make them yourself you can buy buy a bag of lead shot or a bag of rice and wrap it in some kind of fabric and boom there you go for your zeroing process sand works also his you know sandbags but that's basically working our way through the ziering process and it's better to be conservative than it is to be liberal and your adjustments otherwise you're just going to frustrate yourself some people ask well how tight should the group be well how tight were my groups in this video one and a half two inch groups from a bench rest position there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to on a quality firearm with quality I mean it should be able to shoot one and a half two inch groups you should be able to shoot one inch groups realistically and keep in mind that one inch is actually one inch it's not one ragged hole you actually sometimes got to take somebody and show them with a ruler that the bullets don't necessarily have to touch in order for the group to be a one-inch group or a one and a half inch group or a two inch group depending on what you're comfortable with and what the gun is capable of most OEM factory barrels on quality ammunition are going to be able to shoot one and a half to two inch groups that should not be a significant hurdle to overcome for the gun that you've chosen if your gun shoots three or four inch groups my advice would be to sell it get something else I can't really see why somebody would argue their way into defending a gun that shot that poorly if it does and there's aftermarket barrels available that may be something you're willing to pursue but in my experience most people the OEM barrel out shoots the shooter so aftermarket barrels are for replacement of worn-out barrels or if you need to add accessories like a suppressor or a compensator but most OEM barrel especially the newer generations of OEM barrels available from leglock FN and Smith & Wesson performed very very well and an aftermarket would be again an option for a suppressor or a compensator only the barrel itself is gonna be super accurate but you can't fix bad mechanics with it with what equipment so this has been the ziering process and I wanted to update this video because there was some confusion in the other video because it wasn't specific enough slaving the red dot to the irons is just the first step in the zeroing process and then we work our way slowly and deliberately through the process itself this gun I this this particular gun that I zeroed in the the video is a range and a student gun only and need to be zero because I recently changed some change the battery on it so I shoot it on 124 km range ammo but again if it was a carry gun I zero to my carry ammo it's a little bit more of an expense you may have to shoot 30 or 40 rounds or maybe less than that of your chosen brand flavor of carry ammunition but it's definitely worth it because that's the gun that you're gonna carry so if you have any other questions on zeroing procedures or any maintenance procedures really in regards to MRDs on handguns feel free to drop them in the comments section below and I hope this clears up any confusion vs the old video which I'm probably gonna delete once this one posts I'm Erica with sage dynamics trained accordingly

Channel: SageDynamics

Views: 337,211

Keywords: Handgun red dot zeroing, how to zero a red dot

Id: EINDUy_ZrBc

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019