Twangbanger
Grandmaster
- Oct 9, 2010
- 7,107
- 113
I really appreciate your reply. To be honest, much of it is completely new to me so I’m learning a lot each time I start reading.
I now have a decent understanding of why I was hitting high at 50yd with a zero at 25yd. Anxious to get back out and practice.
Triton,
The recoil off the bench may not correlate to what you see one-handed. Although it may not seem like a satisfying answer at this point, Sloughfoot is on the right track. All bullseye shooters go through this. You are receiving a lot of helpful advice above, but likely from people who have never done the type of shooting you are doing.
You + the gun are what matters. You need to shoot a lot freehand, see where your groups are, and make adjustments based on that. If your freehand groups are wide, that's the first thing to fix. Shoot both 25 and 50 yards freehand. If the groups are large but centered, leave it alone. If you move back and forth between the distances and the centering does not change, leave it alone.
I did the same thing when I started. It was very hard to shoot groups open-sighted off a bench, and determine how many clicks to move the sights. In retrospect, I now know that if you can't measure the difference freehanded, leave the sights alone. It's not what you want to hear. As a beginner, what you want to hear is a way to bench-test the gun that will tell you exactly how many clicks to move the sights between distances. I understand. I've been there. I can tell you, the difference is small, and when you get your groups shrunk offhand, you will see that. But if your groups are large at 50 yards, you will figuratively be chasing butterflies to move the sights based on bench results.
Side note, there is no reason a handgun 25 yard zero might not hit higher at 50 yards. It could be the case. It recoils differently from a rifle, and you are not necessarily to the distance yet where extra distance correlates to more bullet drop. Depending on trajectory and line of sight height, you may need to get farther before that relationship begins to exist. My guess is, for a beginning one-hand bullseye shooter, the difference in point of impact between 25 and 50 yards, is probably getting swallowed up in the size of your offhand groups, and you might not be able to reliably discern it within the signal-to-noise ratio of your group size.
Dot sights do tend to shrink groups at 50 yards and make shots easier to "call" and the difference easier to see.
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