Gamerancher wrote:Tubs wrote, "Yeah my rings are cheap cheap Chinese and my scopes are all cheap Bushnell AR's."
By the way you worded the original post, I took it that you were asking if you could zero a scope on a rifle, write down the settings, and then put that scope on another rifle, zero it again and write down those settings.
Then you want to be able to swap it between rifles, adjust to your written down settings and be good to go.
Yeah, sorry, I don't think you'll find it that easy, especially with low budget gear. Good luck to you if you can fluke it but I reckon that is what it will be.
Actually, you can with precisely that "low budget" gear, cheap bulk Chinese rings and rails and Bushnell AR scopes. When I was a kid you bought rings and you had to ensure you always assembled the ring halves the right way around and never mixed them up, they were essentially "hand-made" so the holes through them and the screw holes were only accurate if positioned the same way they were manufactured. The beauty of CNC is that each piece can now be made by the thousand, without ever needing to be referenced to the other part, and they'll always fit. Somebody in Europe can make a rail and rings and charge you $600 for them, and the Chinese can reverse engineer them, feed the drawings into their CNC equipment and turn out product with exactly the same precision, and sell them to you for $40. That's assuming the Euro company didn't simply buy them from the Chinese company in the first place and whack on their own ridiculous price tag.
Picatinny is a standard specification, and while there is no requirement to stick to that standard, anybody copying them is likely to measure them precisely and turn out a product to the same precision. My Rugers have OEM Ruger rails, EGW rails, Weaver mounts and $10 Chinese rails. Weaver stuff annoys me as it doesn't seem to have a standard specification, and is not compatible with picatinny. The picatinny stuff does let you mount and dismount scopes without losing zero, at least a hunting zero - if you're shooting competition this becomes irrelevant as I think all competition includes sighting shots before shooting for score anyway. But yes, I wouldn't recommend firing at live targets without confirming your zero. As long as your scope tracks precisely then there is no reason at all that you can't simply dial in a pre-recorded "seven clicks down and four right" if that's the difference between its zeros on two different rifles. If your rifle has iron sights you don't even need to record zeros, just aim your sights at a target at 50m and zero your scope to the same target, or an offset from it.
Now, if you're using the "low-budget" stuff this does seem counter-productive to some extent. I would think you are better off just putting a $300 scope and rings on each rifle and not get involved in swapping. But if you have three rifles and decided you'd enjoy using a $2500 scope in $500 rings, you may well not want to put one on each rifle, swapping becomes more viable.