Bore Sight a Rifle

1. Select a safe object approximately 100 yards away that the rifle can be pointed at. A birds nest in a bare tree, or a light brick in a brick wall, something like that.

2. Place the rifle in a reasonably steady rest, right side up. At the range you can use sandbags or a shooting rest. At home you can use an MTM rifle cleaning rest, or a cardboard box with a couple of bricks in the bottom to keep it in place and a "V" shaped notch cut in each end to hold the rifle.

3. Open the action if it is a single shot rifle, or remove the bolt from the rifle if it is a bolt action. Take out the screw that the lever pivots on to remove the bolt from a Marlin lever action. You must be able to see down the barrel from the breech end to bore sight your rifle. Some rifles, mostly autoloaders and pumps, cannot be bore sighted by this method.

4. Look through the barrel of the rifle from the breech end and move the fixture holding the rifle (the cardboard box or whatever) until the object selected in step #1 is centered in the field of view.

5. Then, without moving the rifle, adjust your scope so that the crosshair is aligned on the same object. Your rifle is now bore sighted at approximately 100 yards.

This does not mean that your rifle is sighted in for 100 yards, but when you go to the range to sight in your rifle, you should at least hit the paper at the preliminary distance of 25 yards. After you refine the adjustment of the scope to hit the center of the target at 25 yards, move to a 100-yard target and finish sighting in your rifle. With most high intensity cartridges used for big game hunting, the point of impact should be about 3" high at 100 yards.