Zeroing in at 100 meters

If your shot does not land where it is supposed to it to can have many reasons. It could be a new batch of ammunition. Maybe the rifle fell over or something has knocked the scoped. It is important to check your rifle scope and ammunition set up before you climb into the high seat. You want to be sure that your kit works properly. If your test shot does not land, head out to the range and zero your rifle.

Here is a short guide:

Prepare the shot
Set up your optics
Boresight the rifle
Fire one test shot
Fire four or five more shots
Make the neccesary adjustments
Fire another round of control shots
Reassemble the BDC+ and turn it to zero

Preparations before the shot

Once you have checked your equipment and made sure that it is safe to proceed with the test we can turn to the actual zeroing of the rifle. We recommend using a bench rest for support. It is best to rest the rifle and keep it steady on the front part and make minor target corrections with the back. This type of support ensures that you achieve a high degree of accuracy and repeatability which is of course what you want for zeroing.

There are several things you need to pay attention to when zeroing. Firstly, wear your ear protection. Then shoulder the rifle and make sure that you position your body in a good shooting position for 3-point support.

Setting up the optics

Next, it is time to set up the optics. Double check that the eye relief is perfect meaning that you see a clear image without any shadows when looking through the scope. The optics has three adjustment settings. In addition to height, elevation and windage there is also the magnification change, the diopter adjustment and the illuminated dot.

Firstly, set your desired magnification. Then take a look at the reticle. When it does not appear crisp or clear turn the diopter adjustment until it is no longer blurry. Now it is time to set the intensity of the illuminated dot. After this step the optics are ready.

Basic alignment of optics and barrel

Once you aligned and checked the rifle, checked your optics and the bench rest support is comfortable, it is now time to fire the first shot. If this is a new rifle and new optics or if you have remounted the optics you will have no idea where the shot will go. Because of this we recommend to boresight the rifle.

Remove the bolts and look down the barrel at the target. Keep the rifle absolutely steady and move up to the optics. Align the barrel first, then the optics. See if the barrel shows the same picture you can see in the optics. This gives a rough alignment and the shot will hit the target. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hit dead center. You will fine-tune the elevation and windage later. Now it is time for the first shot.

Zeroing in at 100m

After you determined that the first shot is on target evaluate your result without making any adjustment to the set up. If you adjust anything at this stage you would not know if your shot was off due to your rifle set-up or because you are a bad shot.

Next, fire four or five more shots. You should receive a nice grouping of at least three shots.

Now you can start making adjustments. The group is on average 8cm too high and 4cm too far to the right. But the group is nicely together. Now you want to move the group to the center of the target that you are aiming at. This is were unscrewing the BDC+ comes in handy.

Set you BDC+ in a way that the two pins do not block each other. Now turn it 8 clicks downwards. Always remember that anti-clockwise or counterclockwise is down and clockwise is up. Do the same for windage. Clockwise goes to the right. Anti-Clockwise goes to the left.

In this case, you turn it four clicks to the left, because the group was 4 cm to the right. After you finished this round of adjustments and fire off another group clean to the center to see that the shot lands where you want it. One thing is important: If you do not have a BDC+ just remove the cap and adjust the clicks that way. The directions are the same.

The group will hit exactly where it should. You are now shooting straight at the center. This means that your rifle is now zeroed. The only thing left to do is to reassemble the BDC+, turn it to zero and your rifle is ready to take into the field.