Thread: Lesson Learnt - Cheap Rings

Took my newly acquired tikka .308 to the range to sight in today, couldnt find any optilocks in the height i needed so resorted to a cheap set of chinese? i assume rings (from a retail shop). being its not a big magnum thought "should be ok" famous last words. guy at the shop offered to install and boresight so i said what the hell go for it. checked everything was tight when i got home and all seemed well.

Straight off the bat i made an elevation and windage change (quite substantial) to little effect and thought that seems odd. checked everything was tight and soldiered on. got a 1.5 moa ish group of 3 shots pretty well centre. thought to myself this is average. came back to it 15 mins later without touching anything and punched out another 1.5 moa group but it had shifted roughly 2.5 inches left and 2 inches low.

Back home for closer inspection and funnily enough the rings appear to be the issue. everything was tight but clearly the scope has been moving around and some interesting wear patterns on the rings (hard wear on one edge and scope not even contacting ring on the other.) would require a huge amount of "lapping" to even come close to fitting nicely. pretty poor quality.

Makes me wonder how many other people are out there shooting with similar issues considering this is their "go to" ring for majority of their rifle/scope combos they sell. was another bloke at the range this morning with a similar issue, albeit some installer error also.

Anyway, now looking for a solution its a 50mm objective scope, 1 inch tube. have some "lo" optilocks here that dont quite work, need a touch more height. had a bit of a look around and couldnt find anyone with stock of the medium height optilocks to suit 1 inch. Anyone have a set of these kicking around? Otherwise potentially looking at a set of talleys. Would like to avoid putting a pic rail on

Cheers