Target Sports

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: ZERO THE HERO

Created on 15th May 2009

CHRIS WHITE tackles a thorny issue for many shooters, especially, dare he say it, smallbore ones

IN THIS third instalment on the thorny subject of zeroing, we come to what is perhaps the trickiest of all to grasp: zeroing the windage. For many TR shooters this is a real hot potato. Most experienced Target Rifle shooters understand the concept and the need for it but, while I do not want my many smallbore friends to lynch me, I have to say that, with all due respect, the majority of smallbore shooters do not fully understand this subject. Indeed most smallbore rifles have sights without a definable zero.

Of course if all one's shooting is indoors at 25yd it doesn't matter where the true zero is, because the wind arm will only be moved a small amount to centre one's group to take account of slight variations in position. But this all falls out of bed when the smallbore shooter ventures out into the elements and shoots at 50m or 100yd, where the little .22 bullet is seriously affected by the wind.

My smallbore rifle has a fullbore-style rearsight on it. This has two important functions. First it eliminates the prospect of me turning the knobs the wrong way, and second it has an identifiable wind zero which can be rapidly returned to. In an NSRA meeting a couple of years ago a guy shooting near me watched me returning my windage to zero after every card. He then patiently explained to me how he zeroed his rifle on the sighter and that that was what the sighter diagram was for. Wrong! What he was actually doing was setting his sight into the mean wind condition prevailing at the time he shot the sighters. Fine if that condition remains, but what if the wind direction reverses and what happens when he goes back indoors to windless conditions? This guy not only failed to understand the proper concept of having a zero but also the grammatical meaning of the word!

‘Zero' means just that. If we are shooting in completely windless conditions the wind arm on our rearsight should read zero, nought. No wind blowing, no wind correction on the rifle.

Without getting too far ahead of ourselves this means that when we encounter nil wind conditions we know where to set the sight, and when we have learnt to ‘read' the wind the setting we put on our sight is a true reflection of the wind value. If, for example, in nil wind conditions we needed to set our sights at one minute left, it would mean that when we set left wind on the gun we would need a setting which was a minute more than the true wind and when we needed right wind on the gun we would need a setting which was a minute less than the true wind. Maybe you need to ponder that for a while but if it sounds Greek to you at the moment we will get to it eventually.

If you read ‘how to shoot' books, particularly American ones, you will read that the way to set your wind zero is to go to 100yd on the calmest day you can find, shoot at a target and adjust your sights until the group centre is in the middle of the target, in a lateral sense, and then set the wind-plate to zero. The theory is that even a moderate wind will have little effect on the bullet at that distance; therefore any errors in the zero will be minimal. Those of our readers who have been to Bisley will know there is a ‘zero range' for their use there (roughly 24yd from firing point to targets, adjacent to the NSC clay shooting range behind the row of club houses) which affords this facility. Similarly some MOD ranges have a 30m range which can be used for the same purpose.

There are problems shooting large calibre rifles at very short distances which create quite significant errors. We won't go into that at this stage, but all experienced shooters will tell you that they often find that the zero they derived from the zero range needed modification in the light of shooting experience. Irrespective of these, the size of the bullet hole is close to a minute and a quarter at these distances, thus making a fine judgement very difficult. One hundred yards is better but the catch is that many of us do not get to shoot at 100yd; often the shortest distance we regularly have access to is 300yd.

Zeroing at distance

How then do we find our wind zero at 300yd? If we are fortunate enough to shoot in a flat calm then we do exactly what we would do at 100yd. Again our ‘how to shoot' books would tell us to shoot in a flat calm.
In reality this rarely happens and we are stuck with compromise and an iterative approach to finding the zero.

In practice what most TR shooters do is shoot under the calmest or steadiest conditions they can and adjust their windage until the lateral centre of their group is in the middle of the bull and then ask the most reliable shot around them what their average wind setting was. Set the scale to this figure and wait until their next shoot, go out again and adopt the same approach.

It is enormously helpful if both you and your informant are both keeping a corrected wind plot. (Target Sports March 2005 describes how to construct a wind plot and describes a practical example of how this ‘buddy' method, coupled with a bit of savvy, was used to find a wind zero on a .303 No 4 Cadet rifle at 400yd in far from calm conditions.)

Ultimately shooters find that their sight setting coincides with their informant's and they will stick with this until they have conclusive evidence that they are wrong. (Sometimes they will stick with it even when they have conclusive evidence that it is wrong!) Generally this method works pretty well and one ends up with a zero which is within half a minute of where it should be. Experienced shooters who can read the wind will generally have a pretty good idea of whether or not their sight setting coincides with the true wind. This may not appear to be very helpful but, as the man said, "Life is not always a bowl of cherries!"

There is an alternative method to that which I have described here but it is well outside the scope of this series and will need to wait until we go beyond the basics and deal with more advanced matters.

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: ZERO THE HERO

Related Links

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: WINDS OF CHANGE

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: SIGHTS SET ON PERFECTION

TARGET RIFLE BASICS PART TWO: SEARCHING FOR THE ONE

TARGET RIFLE BASICS PART ONE: SEARCHING FOR THE ONE

TARGET RIFLE BASICS PART THREE: TELL THEM WHAT YOU HAVE TOLD THEM

TARGET RIFLE BASICS PART TWO: TELL THEM WHAT YOU HAVE TOLD THEM

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: UNRESOLVED ISSUES

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: TELL THEM WHAT YOU HAVE TOLD THEM

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD?

TARGET RIFLE BASICS: POSTIVELY NEGATIVE

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TARGET RIFLE BASICS: ZERO THE HERO

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