Mounting first scope

[Curley Red]

I bought my first scope which is a Nikon P-223 3-9X40 which came with the P-223 mounts for my AR that I just built. I have never owned a scope on any of my other firearms so my question is, is there anything I need to know when mounting my scope? Any tricks or things to be careful of. Or do I just mount it and shot away?

[shmeddie]

I would say just make sure you have the propper eye relief and that the scope is level and not canted to the either side. Also, blue lock tight all your screws so they don't come loose. Remember when you are zeroing, shoot a group of 3-5 rounds then adjust from there or else you will be chasing your single shots all over the place.

[renardsubtil]

Well, no ones responded yet so here's a couple things I learned with my first scope install a few months ago...at home or in your man cave, mount the scope and loosely hand tighten it.

Take a look through the scope and adjust it so that you do not see the black "outer edge" in the glass. You may need to move it further or closer to your face, so you want to hold the rifle like you would as if you were shooting it. Obviously you want to loosen the screws each time you need to move the scope further/closer away from your face so that you don't scratch up the scope body. Some folks will even level the horizontal cross hairs with a simple household set of mini blinds or the window sill to make sure that the canting is right.

Once you are satisfied with the position of the scope, use some locktite blue on the screws and tighten your scope/mount down. A lot of folks will spend a few extra bucks and get a small torque wrench for this as well so that the mount pressure is even.

[WebMoskal]

You can also use feeler gauges between base and scope to get crosshairs leveled and keep leveled while tightening bolts. You can get them for $5-7 from auto parts store. (This was the only way to get it leveled for me, all other methods were failing somewhere between checking level and tightening)

[Curley Red]

Thanks guys, I plan to mount the scope tomorrow night and test it out next week.

[Merc1138]

Get a torque driver in inch/pounds so you can actually torque things down to spec(shouldn't even need the blue loctite if everything is torqued properly).

[negolien]

loctite is important too they WILL back out over time with shooting.