Is it ok to ask someone else to sight in your rifle?

BLACKHAWKNJ said:
The version I have seen is that if you have a rifle-or handgun-that seems inaccurate, have a shooter of proven ability shoot it , if they shoot it well, get good accuracy then you know the firearm is OK, you have to work on your shooting skills. Recall reading one of Cooper's books, he fired a revolver belong to a crack shot, he got excellent accuracy but since it wasn't zeroed for him, his group was off from the owner's.
Click to expand...

Truth, especially true with pistolas.
 
Ugly Sauce said:
Unless one of you is very slim, and the other "is not". You will see a shift in elevation. But, probably not enough to matter.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what that means exactly....... but shooting positionally off of bags, or off of a bench using bags/bipod, I doubt we would shoot much differently. Elevation is controlled by the shooter, just like not yanking shots left or right.
 
Walkalong said:
I'm not sure what that means exactly....... but shooting positionally off of bags, or off of a bench using bags/bipod, I doubt we would shoot much differently. Elevation is controlled by the shooter, just like not yanking shots left or right.
Click to expand...

I used to have a friend that was pretty hefty, to be nice, (still is a friend) and I'm on the slim-side. We used to shoot a lot, and found that a rifle/same rifle/same load that would shoot "on" for him, would shoot a bit high for me. A rifle that I zero'd would shoot low for him. This was the case with more than a few different rifles.

What I think that means is that what the rifle recoils against has something to do with it. ? That's not to say you and V would shoot differently, just that that was my experience, which leads me to believe that one size does not fit all, meaning that a rifle zero'd for one person might not be zero'd for all people.
 
I think that getting a rifle on paper and hitting at a desired POI is fine to have someone else do. But the person that will use the rifle should check the POI for their self.
I went to the range today with my 82 year old father. He is going to use my Savage Axis 243 this year instead of his 700 30-06. He liked the idea of carrying a little lighter rifle.
After sitting down and shooting the rifle I sighted in a year ago we walked down to look at the group.
He had a huge smile when he saw the sub moa group. It was about 1/2" left and 3/4" high of the bull. I ask him if he wanted to change the scope. He instantly said no I'm good. I didn't think I could shoot that good anymore :) I asked if the rifles recoil was ok. He answered what recoil....
 
As WisBorn just said, it's reasonable to have someone sight it just to get it on the paper. Final sight-in MUST be done by you.

There's a thousand parameters appertaining to each person's person's ability to accurately shoot a rifle (most of them in our own unique brain wiring; do any two people have the same central neurotransmittion speeds?, same peripheral neurotransmittion speeds?, same muscle contraction speeds, same sight picture as perceived by the back of your brain where sight is decoded and analyzed .... no no no .....). Even identical twins are not the same person times two. Humans are infinitely complex. We are the Creator's toy collection and He likes variety ... an infinite amount of it, actually.
.
 
A guy do so yesterday! :eek:

A 67 year-old rascal (who has never owned a gun scope) took my PTR-91 “classic GI” to the private club.

He verified the 30/200-yard …aperture sight setting…, and made three of Six shots practically Touch each other at 50 yards- again, in the plastic orange bullseye !
 
Last edited:
Old Hobo said:
There's a thousand parameters appertaining to each person's person's ability to accurately shoot a rifle
Click to expand...

I’ve logged hundreds of training hours as a student and have trained hundreds of new shooters myself - in no training course, manual, or certification requirement, and in no form of competition have I ever counted anything near a thousand parameters.

There’s typically about 5-7 fundamentals of marksmanship, depending upon which doctrine you’re following. Some only 4 (“BRAS”). Breath control, sight picture, target picture, trigger control, stance/support. That’s really it.

So many folks try to mystify newbies with claims like this and big words like peripheral neurotransmission speed (no double “t” in transmission, btw), but they’re simply not true. Accurate shooting is really as simple as building a rifle and ammo which CAN shoot small, and then applying simple techniques as a shooter to get out of the way so it WILL shoot small. Absolutely, some people can, will, and do shoot smaller than others, but there’s no sense in pretending putting groups together is some kind of combination of applied calculus and neuroscience…
 
Varminterror said:
Accurate shooting is really as simple as building a rifle and ammo which CAN shoot small, and then applying simple techniques as a shooter to get out of the way so it WILL shoot small. Absolutely, some people can, will, and do shoot smaller than others, but there’s no sense in pretending putting groups together is some kind of combination of applied calculus and neuroscience…
Click to expand...
Yep, it's relatively simple in concept.
 
Varminterror said:
I’ve logged hundreds of training hours as a student and have trained hundreds of new shooters myself - in no training course, manual, or certification requirement, and in no form of competition have I ever counted anything near a thousand parameters.

There’s typically about 5-7 fundamentals of marksmanship, depending upon which doctrine you’re following. Some only 4 (“BRAS”). Breath control, sight picture, target picture, trigger control, stance/support. That’s really it.

So many folks try to mystify newbies with claims like this and big words like peripheral neurotransmission speed (no double “t” in transmission, btw), but they’re simply not true. Accurate shooting is really as simple as building a rifle and ammo which CAN shoot small, and then applying simple techniques as a shooter to get out of the way so it WILL shoot small. Absolutely, some people can, will, and do shoot smaller than others, but there’s no sense in pretending putting groups together is some kind of combination of applied calculus and neuroscience…
Click to expand...
We are not talking a about shooting small here. We are talking about the point of impact changing from shooter to shooter.
 
frogfurr said:
We are not talking a about shooting small here. We are talking about the point of impact changing from shooter to shooter.
Click to expand...

The poster I quoted was not - his quote is visible.

But to that end, POI’s don’t really change because light and steel don’t bend just because the shooter changes - trigger pullers jerk triggers differently. Thanks for comin’!
 
Well you can always have some fat guy at Wally World sight in your new rifle/scope combo. If it doesn't work out you can always explain light and steel bending to him along with trigger jerks.
 
Last edited:
frogfurr said:
Well you can always have some fat guy at Wally World sight in your new rifle/scope combo. If it doesn't work out you can always explain light and steel bending to him along with trigger jerks.
Click to expand...

If the “guy at Wally World” knows how to shoot, what exactly will happen to the light passing from the target around the front sight, through the rear sight, and into his eye which is different than that of anyone else’s eye? What exactly will happen to the wood and steel that will cause the relative positions of the front and rear sights and the bore to change such the bullet leaves the barrel differently than it would for another shooter?

Nothing. And nothing.

Despite the old shooter’s legend, it’s nothing.
 
I think we should separate the task of zeroing from rifle handling mechanics and the vagaries of anatomical differences between individuals.

If someone doesn’t know how to zero their rifle they are likely new to shooting or don’t shoot very often and are looking for minute of pie plate.

I’m showing them how to bore site on a 3” paster at 100 yards, how to check and adjust for parallax (if applicable) and make one adjustment on windage and one adjustment on elevation. 3 shots to zero and Bob’s your uncle.

Learning how to drive the rifle for one hole groups would be a lesson for another day.
 
I don’t know about the details but I recently hunted with two different guns that someone else sighted in and proceeded to kill two deer.

I guess it depends on who is doing the sighting in and whether you trust them or not.
 
I've had family members sight in my rifles many times with no issue. I think that it's important to remember that ultimately it's your rifle and it's your responsibility to ensure that it's properly zeroed. If you miss an animal/target due to it not being zeroed it's your fault, not the person's who you asked to sight it in for you.

Now if you paid someone to do it, like a gunsmith, it would be a different story. I'd expect it to be as sighted in as reasonably possible while keeping in mind that everyone has a slightly different version of "sighted in" due to how our eyes work and how the rifle is held.
 
Last edited:
.308 Norma said:
I guess it might have been a different situation, but I felt kind of honored when a friend (Randy) at work asked me to bring his new Model 70, .416 Rem Mag home and shoot it because he'd run out of adjustment on his scope, and the rifle was still printing about a foot high at 100 yards. He asked me to shoot it at least once with the scope, and if it printed high for me too, to yank the scope off and shoot it with the iron sights.
It was after I got the rifle home and we drove down to the gravel pit to give it a try that I didn't feel quite so "honored." I leaned the rifle over the hood of my truck, squeezed it off at the 100-yard target I'd taped to a cardboard box, and that darned thing kicked me so hard it made me dizzy! :eek: And it hit "about a foot high!"
So, I yanked the scope off it, lowered the rear sight all the way down, and shot it again. Same thing - about a foot high, and I was already scared of the rifle after only 2 shots. So the next thing I tried was walking downrange until I was only about 25 yards from the target, It had been raining that day, and I didn't want to sit down in the mud, so I just sort of squatted down and shot again. It didn't make any difference - when that rifle went off, it sat me down in the mud anyway, and it still hit 3 or 4 inches high! :mad:
I took the rifle back to Randy the next day and told him what I'd found. I also told him that was the hardest kicking $^&^%* rifle I'd ever shot in my life!
Randy ended up shipping it back to Winchester, they replaced the bent barrel, and Randy took a nice leopard and several species of African "planes game" with the rifle later on that year. He never asked me to shoot it again though. ;)
Click to expand...
Reminds me of a story my uncle told me about a guy who bought a 470 nitro. Drank a pint of Jim beam went in his back yard shot the rifle once and quit drinking that day. Never had the pleasure of shooting a big bore. Not yet anyway.
 
I sight in my wife's AR. She'd be mystified by it, has trouble understanding that she has to tweak the diopter after I've done it, but once I remind her, she does well shooting steel plates at 300 yards. It is well worth the effort to get my wife to come shooting with me.
 
I'd allow a shooter to sight MY Rifle or pistol in ,provided I VERIFIED POA POI at a specific yardage :) .

NO fooling with MY DIALING TURRETS :cuss:
 
I've helped friends sight in. When I say sight in I mean what looks to be appropriate for my eye. I always encourage the owner to fine tune it for their eye. If they don't want to do that then it's their call. I explain to them that I'm not the one using the rifle.
 
In the "olden days", before scopes, it was unheard of for anyone to sight-in somebody else's rifle, probably because people took different sight pictures to align the target with two other sights. With the advent of scopes, the crosshair was the only point to line up with the target. Anyone could then sight-in equally well, provided they didn't flinch.

Flinching is another problem that people have when shooting from a bench. It's a combination of factors, one being that they're leaning-into the rifle, so felt recoil is greater than when shooting offhand or sitting on a hunting stool. However, I know a few people who have shot when sitting on the ground or on a stool, with their back against a large TREE. The tree doesn't "give" any, so the shoulder gets really squished and it can be quite painful.
 
Last edited:
frogfurr said:
We are not talking a about shooting small here. We are talking about the point of impact changing from shooter to shooter.
Click to expand...

And it does change. As a surveyor of many years I know this is true. A very long time ago surveyors used to manually measure angles with very expensive optics. The theodolites were calibrated using equipment specifically designed to maintain high precision. An untrained person without that equipment couldn't do it.

Sighting two targets, no two people ever got the same value when measuring angles. Some were close but never the same. They just saw different things using the 32 x optics.

These days robots measure the angles using sensors and lasers. Rifle optics are a lot like the optics surveyors used to use except they are very low end compared to the glass in a theodolite that costs 5K in 1980.

That pretty much lays to rest the theory that trigger jerkers is the difference. There are no triggers on theodolites. Just tangent screws and optics.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

H
  • Locked
Kiss rifle pic thread
2 3
Replies
74
Views
6K
Tinpig
Tinpig
H
  • Locked
Define “Mountain Rifle”
2 3
Replies
58
Views
2K
Farmermail
Farmermail
S
  • Locked
To firmly plant or no...
Replies
24
Views
936
Driftertank
D
F
  • Locked
Info needed on Carbon-15 rifle: any good?
Replies
14
Views
1K
fatelk
F
G
  • Locked
A Modern Take on a Bolt Action Hunting Rifle
2
Replies
35
Views
4K
gotboostvr
gotboostvr
Back
Top