I finally finished sighting in my shotgun that I started in December. I had a free day last week and I figured with trap starting, I was going to have to postpone several more months. I thought that it was worth sharing the results today.

If you remember where things left off, I didn’t understand how to adjust this sight as a result, I shot all of my ammo and the sight stopped working. I think that I solved all of those things before I went to the range this time.

First, the battery was not dead. I didn’t change the battery because it was working when I got home. On my second shot, the sight stopped working. I tightened the cap and the sight came back on. Lesson learned that the cap has the potential to loosen due to recoil.

One thing to note is that a red dot sight is not a precision optic. The more you pay, the better it is, but this particular sight is rated at 5 Minutes of Angle (MOA). I have previously stated that the math is complicated but simplistically, 1 MOA is roughly an inch at 100 yards. In theory, the best this sight can do is a five inch group at 100 yards. That is what you call combat (or field) accuracy.

I was shooting at 50 yards, so my theoretical accuracy should be 2 1/2″ group. My last shots were in the second ring. Exclude the one bullseye, that was my second shot I think this shotgun is about as good as it is going to get.

Now, look at the two holes at the bottom of the target. I switched from the rifled barrel to the smooth barrel and was shooting rifled slugs. That is the graphic illustration of why scopes need to be sighted to the load you are going to shoot. I also tried the field barrel with some different chokes and none of those made the paper even.

I even tried a half assed buckshot patterning. The results of that were inconclusive as only a handful of pellets even hit the target (out of 10 shots). This was barrel and choke agnostic, meaning that they all did poorly. Part of my experiment design was to sight in with slugs and then validate the shot pattern after sight in. I am pretty confident about sabot slugs in the rifled barrel and rifled slugs in the 18″ barrel, but the rest of it I am not. I will have to spend some more time patterning at ranges closer to 50 yards as these tests were inconclusive. Let’s be honest, this is not the best tool for long distances, it was more of a matter of convenience that the target was setup.

End Your Programming Routine: Just like I was talking about yesterday, you can only analyze data when you change one variable at a time. Truthfully, I probably have some refining work to do but at least I feel like I am in the ballpark now. Someday, when this ammo shortage is over I will go back and spend more time to make it better.