OAP
What gear do you need?
While all clubs have club owned rifles, very few will have them set up for bench shooting.
The rifle.
Any current target .22 except the BSA. The reason being that they don’t have a dovetail mount on the receiver for the sight sets. Walther, Anschutz and Feinwerkbau all do, so it is simple to remove the rear sight and fit a scope.
The scope.
Either fixed focus around 30-40x or a varipower, minimum magnification 24x. Anything less is next best to useless. If you can’t see it, you can’t hit it and the centre dot is smaller than 1mm. What you buy is up to you, BUT avoid the cheaper Chinese scopes like the plague. They are usually inferior copies of recognised brands and you might get one that is OK, but more than likely not. Before I found one good manufacturer I had two failures. Both lost vertical or horizontal adjustment. What I would recommend is the TacVector products and I have brought in eight of them so far for both the indoor and full bore rifles.
The two models are the Minotaur 12-60x (also available in 12-50x) and the Gen2 Sentinel 10-40×50. The Minotaur has a fine dot and crosshair and the Sentinel a crosshair with 1moa graduations on the vertical and horizontal which make it useful for aiming off for wind correction outdoors. The graduations nicely box the centre of the target giving you another option for sighting.
There are three of those currently in use at our range. I use the Minotaur screwed down to about 35x when the centre dot nicely covers the centre dot and at full power outdoors. You do get what you pay for and they are relatively expensive. The Sentinel would set you back around $450 imported from the factory and about the same from the NZ distributor.
The Minotaur is not available from Aliexpress, but from the factory and would set you back the best part of $700. (My second Minotaur is being replaced under warranty as the focus on full power is not as sharp as I need. The first one is a beaut.)
Just a thought here. If the club you approach does not have a scoped rifle, could you suggest you supply your own scope and take it home each day? Removing and refitting does not affect the aim and several of our shooters use their rifle for both disciplines.
Next week my article will deal with setting up rests, shooting technique and limited tuning for accuracy.
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