Step one is to set the foresight at zero and go onto the range at 200 or 300 yards and find an elevation zero. Then until you have more data set your sights at six minutes up from this number at 500 yards and nine and three quarter minutes up at 600 yards.
Step two is to wait until you are going to shoot at 900 yards, set your foresight at 25 minutes and come down a quarter minute from your 300 yard zero. You will then find your 900 yard elevation and can come up six and a quarter minutes when you go to 1000 yards.
As Oliver Twist found out, something is better than nothing and this evidently seems to work well for a lot of shooters. It does no more than can be achieved by having two foresights a ‘high’ one for short range and a ‘low’ one for long range and it does not take advantage of those five-minute (or better) adjustments that the manufacturer has built into the foresight.
Different height foresights – the high one gives 35 more MOA elevation than the low one, right.
What I am about to describe is important. Please make sure you understand it and act on it! To do it successfully you will need a rifle which is already zeroed or have access to a friend’s rifle which is zeroed.
Now remove your ‘up and down’ foresight from the rifle and assume your position. Get your friend to raise your rearsight until it comes directly in line with your eye. Get up and down again to check this until you are confident that when you are in a relaxed and comfortable position the rear-sight is in the optimum position for your shooting eye. Whatever setting is on the rear-sight is the optimum and, ideally, we don’t want to move more than three minutes from this setting.
Now measure the height of your friend’s foresight from the bore-line and also that of his rear-sight. Subtract the first figure from the second and refit your foresight so that it is as close as you can get to this value lower than your rear-sight. What you are trying to do is to get the sights in the same relative position to each other as your friend’s are. This will maximise your chances of getting onto the target when you go to the range for your zeroing session. When you do that you want to minimise the amount you move your rear-sight so you must move your foresight. If your group centre is more than 2½ minutes from the centre
37
DEALING WITH THE WIND
PART THREE
of the target, move the foresight down if the shots are going low and up, if they are going high. You now have two settings to record - your foresight setting and your rear-sight setting.
Assuming you have zeroed at 300 yards, you can then raise your elevation by the 6 minutes required at 500 yards by lowering your foresight by 5 minutes and raising your rear-sight by one minute. Similarly when you go from 500 to 600 yards and want to increase your elevation by 3¾ minutes you move your foresight down five minutes, which raises your elevation by five minutes and lower your rear-sight by 1¼ minutes to get the total raise of 3¾ .
Take a look at the table which is the Elevation table for my short range rifle (Barnard). Note that between 200 and 800 yards there is no more than 1½ minutes variation either side of a mean setting of 16½ minutes. This way, your rear-sight settings (and your head position) should all be within a three-minute bracket of your average setting, irrespective of the distance at which you are shooting.
Can you read the vernier in the picture below? The answer is actually minus three. Because this figure is a negative value, we need to read the vernier backwards. You should by now appreciate that this is not easy and it is probably a whole lot harder in the pouring rain when you are stressed out. I hope that you now understand why it is important that you avoid, at all costs, a situation where you end up with a negative value on your sight.
Next time we’ll zero the windage. Chris White
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102