Range Day

I managed to get up to the range this afternoon, but I forgot they were on winter hours so I only had an hour to shoot until they closed. So all I had time to do was re-sight in my SKS. I only had time to sight it in at 25 yards, but I plan to go back up there on Friday.

The results were much better today thanks to the thread locker I put on the scope mount set screws; the red dot scope remained rock solid.

I started out with a bore sighter stuck in the end of the barrel and then adjusted the red dot so it was showing the same POI. That done, I took out the bore sighter and loaded the magazine from a fresh 10 round clip. Three shots later I looked into the spotting scope and saw this.

It’s a nice grouping (1″=4MOA@25′), but it was about 8.5″ higher than where I was aiming. Was the bullet rising? I don’t know, but I’ve experienced the same phenomenon before with other calibers and guns.

I dialed down the elevation and adjusted the windage a few times until I was hitting the center of the target. I found out today if I dialed down the scopes brightness to 5 or under, the apparent size of the dot shrunk and I was able to get much better accuracy. It may seem like a no-brainer I guess, but it hadn’t occurred to me until today.

Since I couldn’t go out and change targets, being short on time, I decided to pump a few rapid fire magazines through the paper and see what kind of grouping I could get.

Not bad… The sprinkling of hits around the hole in the paper are from when I went a little crazy with the sighting in. There is also two ragged holes in the target, one on top of the other. The bottom one from the sighting in process, and the top 2″ - 3″ one which have merged.

Not bad I say, considering I had less than an hour of trigger time and was unable to change targets. In addition to the Sarah Brady targets I also have some human silhouette targets I was going to put up at 100 yards. They’ll keep till Friday I suppose.

Here’s an overview of the whole target:

Remember folks, the worst day at the range beats the best day anywhere else!

UPDATE: DoubleTapper reminded me to include a picture of the SKS I used, which I somehow forgot to post originally. Sorry about that, here it is.

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