Thread: New Tikka .308 zeroing issues

Originally Posted by rossi.45

allowing the rifle to free recoil without holding the forend just seems so wrong to me . . it can work but a natural hold and follow thru i see as good repeatable techneque.

what i find interesting in this problem is the results are fine at 100 but go to hell at 200, so we know the rifle and shooter are both working fine at short range.
as to 200 being a long way and being difficult i find that a non issue, its not hard, there is something else at play here.

awhile ago i took a guy out to sight in his new tikka .308 with the intention of going out to 500nyards . . now this guy is a crap field shooter, absolutely hopeless, but he wanted to try LR.
we used the legs of jeans cut off and filled with sand and shot off the bonnet off the ute. The forend was supported by the left hand on a sandbag and a sandbag under the trigger hand . . i got him lined up with good body position and we had at it.
at 100, 200, 300, 400 he was grouping roughly 1.5 MOA . . then he had a great idea, he would change the way he held the rifle and body position . . the groups more than doubled in size and went hard left.
the obvious was techneque but also i beleive he was tired by the end . . the .308 is not a kicker but to someone new to the game, the concentration and recoil add up. Also he had to be home at a certain time so pushed things along, all n all a bad combination.

so my 2c is go with sandbags, good body position, good follow thru and take your time . . leave the bipod at home, do some warmup shooting with a .22 first . . do not rush, enjoy every part of the what your doing, if your not enjoying it your doing something wrong and you need to look at the why.

then again it could be the scope . . a saying from a BenchRest shooter " there are more barrells replaced because of faulty scopes "

good luck

an update on the young rascal i took out . . got a phone call from him last night, he was happy as a Sandman.

he put a DPT suppressor on his rifle . . noise & recoil reduction he said was a great help.
sometimes us older shooters dont take into account how much that effects novice shooters and they wont tell you how uncomfortable they are.
made a sand bag to rest across
i sold him my 1200 Leica RF so he had that to range with
he has spent some time working out Strelok
took his time to get good body position, follow thru
he shot reasonable groups allowing the barrel to cool at 100, 200, 300, 400 yards
knocked a Rabbit over at 350 yards later in the evening . . he's ready to move past his usual 200 yards.