ajustments

nipperoon

Hi
i have a air rifle with adjustment on the butt plate (up/down and out) and check piece (up/down), but i cant find out how to get the best fit, so to speak. all help most appricated.

Sparks

Mount the rifle (put it in your shoulder) and drop your head to the cheekpiece. Do this with your eyes shut. Then open them. What's the very first thing you see, the very instant you open your eyes? It'll probably be a part of the rifle, rather than the center of the sights. Move the cheekpiece until when you open your eyes in that instant, you are looking directly through the sights.

The buttplate, you normally drop down as far as it will go if you shoot standing, and move it up or down small amounts if you can't get the rifle to easily point at the target (move it up if you're pointing too low; down if you're pointing too high).

Get it so you can point it roughly at the target comfortably and look through the sights (you might need to re-tweak the cheekpiece after moving the buttplate, or you might not if you didn't move the buttplate much). Then go shoot for a week with those settings before you try to change them again - you need to see how they hold up in actual shooting before you can go moving them about much. My current rule of thumb is that if I make any large tweak, I don't trust it unless I shoot a match with it (which is about 75 shots on average), and I don't tweak it again until I trust it or I know it doesn't work (which usually takes longer than it does to trust it).

nipperoon

thanks for that

what about extending the butt plate out

Sparks

It's another way to help with pointing the rifle at the target - pull it out to point down, in to point up. But it moves the sights away from or towards your eye as well, so it usually means you need to tweak stuff along with it. I generally set the buttplate according to the size of the shooter's arms (so that when you're holding it on the target, your trigger hand reaches the pistol grip without having to stretch, and so that that arm is nice and relaxed - if you let go of the pistol grip while on the target, the rifle shouldn't move at all); and when set to there, I wouldn't move it at all except maybe by 3-4 mm if moving to a new range that needed it.

nipperoon

thanks for all your help