Zeroing an AR Platform Rifle

[Music] Tyrod on the rain stats please bear with gunfire here in the background and today we're talking about how to cite in how to zero an AR platform rifle specifically an a1 and an a2 later we'll work with the a3 and maybe a couple of different carbines but today in the interest of brevity we're just gonna stick to the a1 in the a2 however before we get to that there's some things I need to clarify recently I did a presentation comparing mini-14 and AR platform and that generated a lot of questions and commentary and from those questions in commentary it became obvious that there were several things that I had failed to make clear so let me see if I can clarify some of them now one of the questions that I was asked repeatedly was various versions of why the hell are you comparing a mini-14 in an AR platform again I thought I'd made that clear obviously I hadn't so let me see if I can clarify it now the reason we did that is because I was inundated with emails from many dozens of people asking for such a comparison that's why we did another question was why did I compare this particular mini-14 to this particular AR again I thought I'd made that clear obviously I hadn't and the answer is because this is the only mini-14 that I own and because this mini-14 was manufactured circa the late 1980s and it is my perception that the 1980s was the high point of the mini fourteens popularity I wanted to compare it to an AR that would have been its contemporary this a 1 put more simply I have an old many 14 so to make the comparison fair I compared it to an old AR platform now another thing is that in that presentation I used the a1 and I had failed to make it clear that the rifle I was using was an a1 the presentation was 55 0 50 minutes long and I don't know how many times I said a one but I do know in the first ten minutes I said a one seven times and that was not enough there were still a lot of people that failed to understand that the rifle I was using was an 81 also there was a point in the presentation where I said that there are many different types of AR platforms but in the arena of full-size rifles most of them will be either an A one and A two or an A three and I left it to the audience to infer that with different nomenclatures there would be differences in the rifles and that was a failure on my part many people did not understand that there are significant differences between a 1 a 2 and a 3 and I'd failed to make it clear that this one was an a 1 so let me clarify there are many differences between the a1 and a2 one of those differences is the sights the way the sights are adjusted and the way the rifles are zero and that the rifle I was using in that presentation was an a1 there were many comments that were many different versions of nopal that's not right the sights don't work like that the way they really work is followed by a pretty good explanation of the way the sights work on the a2 because I'd failed to make it clear that the sights are different on the a1 and the a2 and that this rifle is in a1 there was a point where I said that you 0 the a1 at 25 yards and someone corrected me and said no it's really 25 meters this is the guidebook for Marines this particular one was issued to me and Marine Corps basic training where I had an m16 yes it was the very end of the a1 era and this book very clearly reads that the bullets will cross the line of sight at 25 yards on the next page reads the theme 16 a1 can be sighted in at 25 yards now yes there are ranges in the Marine Corps measured in meters but when I was in there was still a lot of ranges measured in yards now this is the US Marine Corps essential subjects book and this is several years newer than that guidebook and this one discusses the a2 and it discusses meters now here's a point where I had to say a couple of things and I don't like to go into this but it's necessary I was in the military for 20 years I've been in both the Marine Corps and the army I have used a one and A two platforms extensively and I both speak and read English fluently now all that having been said I hope we clarified some of the things from the previous presentation so let's get to today's topic which is zeroing your a1 and your a2 and this comes with two very big caveats one I can only explain the way I learned it in the way I do it different people will have different techniques and - let me make this as clear as I can there are many differences between the a1 and the a2 one of those differences is the sights how they're adjusted and how the rifles are zero so all that having been said let's start with the a1 to 0 and a1 rifle is really a pretty simple process flush your sights put on your mechanical 0 make sure your long-range sight is up shoot and make adjustments at 25 yards until your point of aim point of impact that will put you on at 300 shoot at 300 to confirm that perhaps do some fine-tuning if necessary and you're done now what does all of that mean okay first let's explain how the sites on the a1 rifle work you adjust for elevation on the front sight post windage on the rear side aperture the front sight assembly is marked with the word up and an arrow indicating that if you turn it clockwise that will be up the rear sight has a wheel on the right side of the carrying handle marked with an arrow and the letter R indicating that if you turn it in the direction of the arrow clockwise it will go to the right but remember these indicate the movement of the strike of the round not the movement of the site itself if you move your front sight clockwise in congruence with the arrow that says up you will see that the site is in fact going down because remember as you lower the front sight you will raise the point of impact and up means point of impact not what direction the site itself is moving however on the rear sight it does move the same direction as the strike of the round so if you're hitting to the left you want to go to the right you've turned this in the r direction right you will see that the rear sight is in fact moving to the right now the way you move the sights is that with the point of a loaded round or with a nail you press a detent and then turn it one click and you can see the clicks mark then you press the detent again and move it one more click on the rear sight the same thing there's a detent that you press and move it one click now when I talk about flushing the sights that's when we have to refer to this portion of this third-grade drawing you can see the front sight post in the front sight assembly the front sight post has a base on it to flush that hopefully not down the toilet you have to get the base of the front sight even with the base of the front sight assembly and so you'll see that there's a little bit of a lip right there you have to adjust that until there isn't anything catching the front sight post base is equal to the base of the front sight assembly it's flush now in the rear sight you just go to the left all the way until it can't go to the left anymore now your sights are flush then you'll put on mechanical 0 that's going up 15 clicks on the front and right seventeen clicks on the rear sight so 15 17 now this is the confusing part when I tell people to go up 15 clicks remember the rifle is marked up well they'll start cranking it up they'll discover that the sight is in fact going down they'll think they've made a mistake turn it the opposite and practically screw the sight out of the rifle remember follow the directions on the rifle and you're going up follow the up arrow so once you've got 1517 on here and you've got your mechanical 0 you have to put up your long-range aperture now on an a1 the short-range and long-range aperture are the same size the difference is that the long-range aperture adds a few clicks of elevation to compensate for the drop of the round at long ranges so if they're the same size how do you tell the difference in the short and long range the long is marked with the letter L so once you've got your mechanical zero of 1517 in your long-range sight up that's going to get you pretty close at 25 yards you'll shoot at 25 yards make adjustments until your point of aim point of impact at 25 and that'll put you on at 300 how does that work that's where we go to this portion of the third grade drawing your line of sight is straight the barrel is not parallel with the line of sight it's angled up just a little bit and so that arc of the round is going up and it will meet with the line of sight at 25 yards then is that well it reaches the apex of its arc and starts back down it will cross the line of sight again at 300 yards so if you're on at 25 you're on at 300 and most a ones are going to be pretty close so when you shoot at 300 you'll confirm that and you might need some fine-tuning so I'll get my sights all set up and we'll start out shooting at 25 yards let's see how we do when shooting a 25 yard zero you can shoot from a benchrest and if so you'd want the targets at the right level I'm going to shoot from the prone so I want the targets lower in a military setting a lot of times you shoot at 25 yards at a silhouette shaped target and some of these will have a grid on the target but I've found that a lot of people have difficulty finding the right aiming point on a silhouette shaped target so I like to shoot it round targets because it's easy to find the center of a circle so I'll shoot from 25 yards at the round target on the upper left let's see what the group looks like so looking at the impacts on our target it looks like we might be okay for windage but we're definitely low so we need to go up therefore will move our front sight in the direction of the up arrow clockwise which will make our front sight go down but make our round come up but how far do we have to move it well this moves in a series of clicks so how many clicks of elevation do I need to add the answer is five how did I come up with that let me see if I can explain that the way the sights adjust on an a.1 rifle is by clicks you press that detent move it one click each click is a minute of angle now I could stand out here for the next couple of hours and give you a really inadequate explanation of what a minute of angle means but as it relates to this rifle each click is one inch at 100 yards ergo if I were shooting at a target that was 100 yards away and I will four inches off center each click will move the strike of that round one inch so I'd need to move four clicks but at 200 yards one click is two inches at 300 yards one click is three inches so if I were shooting at a 200 yard target and I was still the same four inches off each click is going to move it two inches at 200 yards so I'd only have to move two clicks to move our four inches so if I were shooting at a 300 yard target and the strike of the round was off by a foot one click at 300 is three inches so three six nine twelve I'd have to move it four clicks to move that 12 inches so with that in mind we're shooting 25 yards so if one click is one inch at 100 at fifty yards one click will be half an inch you shoot one quarter the distance of 125 yards then one click will be one quarter inch now the target I'm using this isn't dead the targets I'm using have scoring rings on them each one of those scoring rings is a quarter inch wide I was five scoring rings low of center therefore I need to move five quarter inches click is going to be 1/4 inch at 25 yards I need to go up 5 clicks which I have done so now let's go back to that target and see what kind of difference it made in terms of point of impact and now our elevation looks pretty good but it looks like I'm hitting just a little bit to the right so I'm going to go one click to the left and then shoot it a different target that doesn't have a lot of bullet holes in it and see if I can hit Center and that looks pretty good now we'll go to the 300 and do some fine-tuning if we need to I've got my shootin C target set up and I'll shoot this from 300 yards and we'll see how I do [Music] well not a bad group with one flyer and as we can see zeroing at 25 does get to at least pretty close at 300 but now we have to adjust and remember we adjust by minutes of angles so if one click is one inch at 100 one click will be three inches at 300 so it looks like we have to go down about three clicks and right about two so we'll make some adjustments paced up our shot holes and we'll try this again well this group isn't nearly as good but it does look like we're doing pretty well for elevation however even though I only went two clicks to the right it looks like we went too far now that could be a shift in the breeze it could be me it could be a lot of things but I'm going to take those two clicks back off and shoot one more group well a group is much better and it's centered so now the rifle is zeroed so with your a10 what at 25 makes some fine adjustments at 300 and you're on however although the 5 5 6 NATO is a fairly flat shooting round if we're on 300 are we gonna be significantly high at one or two hundred let's see if we can demonstrate that ideally I'd shoot it a hundred and fifty yards however this range doesn't allow me to do that I can only shoot it one two and three hundred so I'm going to shoot it one hundred so with a rifle zeroed at 300 I'll aim Center on this target and let's see how high we are at 100 well here's our group with one flyer and yes that is really annoying when that happens but as you can see when zeroed at 300 at a hundred we're kind of high so how do we compensate for that well remember when we zeroed it was with the long-range aperture in place let's put up the short-range aperture then shoot from 100 yards and see how we do [Applause] now you can see that I shifted just a little bit to the right and that's just me but you can also see that that group came down quite a bit so that at a hundred were pretty well on well that was tedious now to recap 2-0 you're a one flush your site's put on your mechanical zero of 1517 make sure your long-range sight is up zero at at twenty-five then shoot it at 300 and you'll be pretty close make whatever adjustments you need at 300 and then put your short-range sight back up and you'll be on anywhere from 50 to 200 so with that now let's go on to the a2 and that should take a lot less time to cover because the a2 is exactly the same except of course for the fact that it's completely different let me show you what I mean in zeroing the a2 like the a1 use 0 at 25 and then you're pretty close at 300 however in this case is 25 and 300 meters not yards the sights on the a2 are similar to the a1 but they differ in some really crucial ways requiring the use of another third grade diagram to explain now in zeroing you adjust for elevation on the front sight post there is a knob that adjusts elevation on the rear sight but that's for shooting at different distances it's not part of zeroing the rear sight has two apertures short and long range however unlike the a1 the long-range aperture on the a2 does not add any elevation the only real difference is the a2 has a very large short-range aperture and a smaller long-range aperture for more precise shooting at long range the really large short range aperture has advantages such as it can help you get a quick sight picture it can help you get a sight picture on a moving target it's really good in that time period between sunset and ent when you're losing light and it can be an advantage when you're trying to shoot the pro mask on now in our diagram you can see that the short-range aperture marked a zero to two has a little notch on the top of it well for zeroing we're gonna fold that down and now that notch is going to be right above those lines on the back of the rear sight assembly and you'll use your windage knob to adjust that and make sure that notch is lined up with that centerline and now your rear sight is centered you've flushed your front sight just like you did on the a1 and then you add four clicks of elevation you go up four clicks now as far as the elevation knob if you crank it all the way down you should be falling at 300 and you can see where it lines up on the left side of the carrying handle and you'll see this eight-thirds symbol you're on at 300 make one complete rotation of the knob back to the eight thirds and now you're on at 800 so it will crank this all the way down to 300 and here's a really crucial point as part of zeroing you will click that one click up from 300 and that's where you want it when you 0 so add 4 clicks long-range side up and centered one clicked up from 300 and you're ready zero at 25 meters so let's put that on this rifle and shoot at 25 well our groups not very good but it shows that we're fairly well centered for windage and maybe a little bit low as far as elevation now with the a1 remember that each click at 25 yards was a quarter inch with the a2 each click at 25 meters is 3/8 of an inch or about 8 millimeters so for right now I'm going to leave the windage the same and I'm going to go up by one click so we saw at 25 meters mechanical zero on the a2 got us pretty close now I'll make an adjustment shoot at 25 main to just Mutsu 25 until we're right on and then we'll go to the 300 meter 9 which is 325 yards and remember we're one klick up from 300 on our elevation knob we've got to adjust that back to 300 well shoot at 300 meters we'll be pretty close make fine-tuning adjustments and we'll be on now that brings up a problem when we were on at 300 with the a1 we saw that at mid-range distances from one to 200 I'm going to shoot high to varying degrees and to compensate for that we just click back to the short-range site and that'll put you on at anywhere from 50 to 200 except the a2 does not allow for that there's no elevation difference between the long range and short range aperture the short range is just a bigger aperture than the long range so what if we want to shoot at distances of 1 to 200 well you can just aim a little bit low or you can zero your rifle differently and here's where I leave the textbook aside and explain to you how i 0 my a2 platform rifle what I'm going to do is put the mechanical 0 on shoot at 25 adjust so I know I'm pretty close then I'm going to go to 100 yards the range I'm using is measured in yards so I'm gonna use yards and I'm going to put up a fairly big target now I might be off but if the targets fairly large I'll at least hit the target somewhere and then I'm going to make adjustments on my front sight post for elevation until I am zeroed at 100 yards now when I say that the immediate question is the elevation knob is graduated from three to eight hundred if I zero what 100 will it render that knob moot and the answer is in some yes but in some ways no and we'll come back to that so let's go to the 100 yard line and see where I hit so I've got the shoot and see target set up and I will shoot this from 100 yards now based on the 25 meters 0 I know I'm not going to be really on but I should be able to at least hit the target Oh see how we do well here's our group and as I expected I'm hitting high so I'll paste up these shot holes go down six clicks go right one click and shoot this again from a hundred and now we look pretty good for windage but we're a little low so I'm gonna add back two of those clicks face up these shot holes shoot one more room and we're on so now that we're on at 100 what good does this do us at 300 I'm going to paste up these shot holes and move this target to the 300 yard line and shoot it again and we'll see how low we are well you can see we've got a fairly good group this one that I didn't paste as a staple whole now the group is low that's what we'd expect when we went from one to three hundred yards but why is the group to the left well it could be just me but we are getting quite a bit of wind blowing this direction so I'm not gonna worry too much about the windage what I am going to do is go up two clicks on my elevation knob and then go back to the 310 and it looks like we're pretty well on now this shot over here that's a flier that's just me it looks like we might still be a little low and I might go up one more click and shoot the target again but if I do I won't make you sit through watching it so the way the sights on this 82 are set now is that the eight/three marketing actually has me zeroed at 100 and then I have to add several clicks on the elevation knob to get me zeroed at 300 but that puts the elevation knob in a place that is not in conjunction with any markings that are on it so when I have to add those clicks to be on at 300 how do I know that I have it in the right place and the answer is you mark it with some bright colored nail polish and if you choose to shoot it even farther distances like 400 or 500 yards you can add additional marks you could have three marks on there one four three one four four one four five now I know I said that we were going to leave the manual behind but would you believe that in a slightly different application this manual suggests marking your sights with nail polish go figure so the bottom line to all of this is that everything I've shown you has been a combination of the way I learned it and/or the way I do it to zero these rifles other people may do it in different ways so if you've sat through this entire presentation thank you for your attention and thank you for watching the how to zero your a1 and a2 platform video [Music] you

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 289,042

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Keywords: paul harrell, paul harrell ar, paul harrell ar15, ar15, zeroing ar, zeroing ar15

Id: xHtEoRUakKk

Length: 33min 17sec (1997 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019