Posted on 12/08/2008 9:26:18 PM PST by Neil E. Wright
1. Shiny new, high-powered deer rifle..............$ 1,200.00
2. Quality, high-powered scope........................$ 550.00
3. Bore sighting device.....................................$ 140.00
4. Hospital Visit......................$ 4,893.00
5. Forgetting to remove the bore sighting device prior to actually shooting? Disastrous
Set up target about 50 to 75 yards out. Brace rifle against something so it wont move. Aim at center of target and shoot, do this 2 or three times. Go look at where you hit the target and adjust sights/scope...windage/elevation accordingly then try it again. Repeat until you hit the center of target with consistency. You dont need any fancy gizmos just a little time.
Know what you are doing.
Kind of messed up that pretty new gun as well as messed up the owner.
If you have some sort of action that doesn't allow for boresighting in the manner NVDave described, put your target up at 10 yards, or as close as the range will allow and use a big target. Center your crosshairs on the bull and fire one shot. It probably didn't come close, but there are two ways you can get it very close to zeroed without firing another shot.
If you have some sort of rest, use bungee cords or have a friend hold it tightly in place with the scope still centered on the bull, (you can do this after you have shot). Then simply adjust the crosshairs until they are centered on the hole your bullet left in the target. You may want to set them a little high depending on your range. You are now roughly zeroed. If this is done right it can be very precise and can result in a near perfect zero with only one shot. You'll want to fire a group to check it and fine tune it anyway though.
If you don't have any way to keep your rifle steady, then you want to figure out the horizontal and vertical distance between the bull and the bullet hole and figure out the number of clicks necessary for your correction. With a good scope and accurate calculations, this will get you close to zeroed. With a cheap scope, you'll have to repeat this several times. Cheap scopes hardly ever have accurate click adjustments. The adjustments are usually larger than advertised, so if a cheap scope claims to have 1/4" clicks at 100 yards, they're usually 1/2". You won't know until you start making adjustments and seeing what happens, but if you see that your adjustments are overcorrecting, just reduce the number of clicks accordingly.
I just bust out laughing at work! Thanks for the laugh.
The actual person whose rifle barrel exploded was unharmed and posted the aftermath pictures the same day on a shooter's board.
Looks like something the National Endowment For The Arts would pay someone $500,000 for.
Guns can be fun in the right hands.
Correct you are. If I am not mistaken this is the second post to FR. The first time this circulated was several years ago. No matter, the guy was fortunate.
I was involved in an incident of a 175mm round prematurely detonating in the tube of a gun (not a howitzer) in Vietnam. The crew survived, but with ear problems and minor cuts from shrapnel. The lot of fuses that had been put in the round had a manufacturing defect. I wish I had some pictures, it looked similar to this, just with a barrel that was 31 feet long. (I was a mechanic and had a new tube installed and the gun was firing again within 48 hours. Support maintenance flew out to inspect the cradle and recoil system, but there was nothing wrong with it)
I bet their kids were born dizzy.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the man actually holding the boresight device fragment in his hand in the first picture was the actual shooter.
Somewhat similar for a 57mm recoiless rifle :-).
Tried but true method.
The last time I bought a scoped rifle - the gun shop guys did the basic zero with their collimator. Fast and had me on paper when I went to the range.
Thankfully, that guy is ok.
For the life of me, I cannot see any reason to bore sight a bolt rifle or AR any way OTHER than the way you described. It’s the distilled essense of KISS, it’s fast, it works, it needs no gizmos, and can even be done in the field.
As soon as I saw the pictures I thought of Eaker.
Figured I had to be too late by now to ping him.
Holy crap....
Did the fuse detonate as a result of the acceleration shock, ie, was the round on its way out of the tube when it went off?
Was this a M107 SPG?
Not with that rifle anyway.
Nah. A friend of mine blew up an Argentine Mauser. He decided the powder he'd been dumping out of the IMI blanks he was pulling the wooden bullets out of looked a lot like BLC-2, so he decided to whip up a couple of 'light' loads...
He got off very lucky. The rifle was toast (the hunter safety crew up here use it as an example of what NOT to do when reloading). He got a couple of small pieces of brass in the forehead and some concussion bruising to his hand when the foregrip splintered.
Shoot once, adjust the scope to put the crosshairs on the hole. Lather, rinse, repeat. You should be pretty much on within three shots.
You forgot to mention you have to reverse the adjustments on the scope. Boresighting brings the crosshairs to the impact. Sighting in by firing brings the impact to the crosshairs.
It gets even more confusing when using a dental mirror on a closed receiver like a Garand.
The better boresights use a modified cartridge.
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