How To: Sight in your rifle

A lot goes into making a hunt successful, and most of it happens before you take to the field--like making sure your rifle is properly sighted in. It's not hard to do if you follow a few simple steps: first, and this is the first step when you do anything with a firearm, make sure it's unloaded. Make sure your scope is properly mounted and the mounting screws are tight. Remove the bolt from the rifle and sight through the barrel to make sure you're lined up with a sight-in target placed at 25 yards. Or, using a sighting tool, bore sight your rifle to make sure your first shot is on the paper. To do this, place a sighting tool with an arbor inside the bore of your muzzle and line up the crosshairs of the scope with the crosshairs inside the sighting tool. Be sure you're wearing eye and ear protection. Now that your shot is on the paper, it's time to try several different types of ammunition, or loads, to see which works best out of your particular rifle. After deciding on a load, fire three shots at a paper target to get a good idea where the bullet is impacting. This is called a group. Then make adjustments to your scope until your bullet hits the target where you want it to.