About magnifying scopes and quaility bbs and a bit on shooting like a pro!

[Kos-Mos]

Theses are for ranging.

It means 6" at a given range. First line is 200 yards, means that if you aim at someone, and his feet is on the line, while his head touches the center of the reticle, he is at 200yds. Useless for airsoft, and probably not even accurate since you have a replica.

[Styrak]

Originally Posted by highny

If I zero my sight in at 100' and I want to hit bulleye at 50', I'll need to aim higher. If I want to aim at bulleye at 150', I'll need to aim lower.

Am I correct?

No, the opposite. Look at the drawing.

[highny]

Now here is another question:

If the max range of my gun is 180 feet(bbs fall to the ground), and my effective range is 150 feet. Where should I zero my sight in? Before my effective range? At my effective range? Or when my bbs falls to the ground?

[CDN_Stalker]

Originally Posted by highny

Now here is another question:

If the max range of my gun is 180 feet(bbs fall to the ground), and my effective range is 150 feet. Where should I zero my sight in? Before my effective range? At my effective range? Or when my bbs falls to the ground?

Just zero it for 100ft and leave it at that. Learn the flight path of your rounds, and compensate accordingly. This is the same as real steel too, so don't think you are acting like a paintballer "lobbing" your BBs past what your scope is set for, real bullets arc too and as said above, for shorter distances you aim lower, for farther you aim higher.

[ShelledPants]

Originally Posted by CDN_Stalker

Just zero it for 100ft and leave it at that. Learn the flight path of your rounds, and compensate accordingly. This is the same as real steel too, so don't think you are acting like a paintballer "lobbing" your BBs past what your scope is set for, real bullets arc too and as said above, for shorter distances you aim lower, for farther you aim higher.

I agree, you want to zero for your active engagement range.

For instance, as a CQB player, my average engagement range is often less than 20 feet. In the rare chance I even raise my sight to my eye, I have it zeroed to 20-50 feet depending on the match.

Outdoors, my engagement range is still only around 75 - 100 feet, so I zero to that point, even though I could hit a target at 150 - 200 feet, it's outside of what I have learned to be my reflex engagement range (the, oh shit, no time to guesstimate bullet drop pull the trigger to kill the bad guy -range).

In the few times I've played a sniper role, I would calibrate my rifle's optic to how Stalker above has mentioned, know your maximum engagement range, and drop it off by a few dozen feet to get a good kill zone. You can still engage targets further away and closer if need be, by aiming up or down on target, but your comfort zone is still dead center.

[FOX_111]

Sound like you have too much hopup and you are using crappy light BBs in a weak AEG.

You should have a pretty flat trajectory under 100fts. That translate to seing your BBs pass very fast from the bottom of the scope and never climbing above the center of the crossairs. That does not mean you have to do an hold-under for closer targets. It's just the BB entering the field of view of your scope. Wich is 4X, that is 1X too much to be adequate IMO. I snipe at 3X, just to give you an idea. Hold-under are for when you have zeroed your scope beyond the effective range of the BB. Or for wild fps and BB weights.

[highny]

Here is a little about my gun and me(if you care to know):

-It shoots around 400fps with .2s
-I usually use .2s for that extra distance, I'm pretty good at knowing how the wind effect my bb, as long as it's a light to medium wind, I can hit people just outside my effective range.
-It's an full length m16 with a 6.03 barrel(not sure about the brand).

From my guesstimation, my effective range is around 100feet~120feet(I'm kind of sadden about this, thought I could get pass 150feet maybe even 200.). I like to shoot long range and provide cover fire, usually I'll be on a tower or in the back of the group. That's my play style. So I figured a scope would provide great benefit! Specially seeing how one my the people I play with assault/infiltrate with a elcan.

Back on topic,

I'm going to do some target practice this weekend at the game, really get to know my sight and my range. I'll let you all know how I do and what I think of it after a couple hours and a few hundreds of bb down the barrel.

Still, any advice on optic and what I should look into getting for the future, like 4x is too much and I need to drop to maybe 3x or even 2x.

Thanks for all the help!

[grantmac]

First off, magnified optics on 99% of all airsoft guns do nothing but decrease your field of view and situational awareness. Espcially clone optics which have very poor eye relief and clarity.

Secondly, get some good heavy BBs. Nothing lighter than .3g
You don't strike me as the sort of person who would really care to follow a discussion on ballistic coefficients and sectional desities, so just buy some; good ones.

[Scarecrow]

I honestly didn't pay someone to bring this topic up! lol.

Blackthorne and I have been experimenting with AEG accurization. He and I are familiar with accurizing and zeroing real rifles, so we applied some of that knowledge to AEGs and we've come up with some helpful information that we're going to formalize on our site shortly.

1. Use a gun bench/vice when accurizing. You need to eliminate any movement of the AEG during the process or it will invalidate results and you'll get inconsistencies.

I highly recommend the "Lead Sled" from Caldwell Shooting Supplies

The Lead Sled is great because of the catch tray underneath the receiver - its great for keeping BBs policed up.

2. Shim your inner barrel to the outer barrel. Using gaskets, or in my case, electrical tape, I put the tape around the inner barrel until the inner barrel was firmly seated in the outer barrel, preventing any movement of the barrel.

3. Ensure there is no movement of the mechbox or internal parts other than what is necessary for proper operations of your AEG.

4. Set up a target stand and a BB capture box.

5. Use gun targets.

6. Use a laser boresighter to get onto a straightline to your target - saves time and loss of BBs. Take your flashider off so that the boresighter makes proper contact with the crown of the inner barrel. I repeat, take your flashider off so that the boresighter makes proper contact with the crown of the inner barrel. Boresighting against the flashider is completely useless, it needs to be against the crown of the inner barrel.

(Incidently, inexpensive laser boresighters for airsofters will be available on the BB Bastard website shortly - yes, they fit a 6mm barrel perfectly.)

7. Turn off your hopup for accurizing between 50 and 100 feet.

8. Swab your barrel out, do not use solvents, you'll destroy your hopup rubber - use some rubbing alcohol, swab, then do a dry swab - repeat until the swab is clean. Swab with *very* lightly with a swab with silicon oil on it - I emphasize lightly, meaning one drop - in this case more is NOT better.

9. As Grantmac said, use something heavy, .30g or higher.

BB Bastard just release a BB designed specifically for this sort of accurization work called "Nites". Nites are .36g, CNC machined, and highly polished, and each BB is exact dimensionally, weight distribution and polish. You can recover and reuse them too, they are too hard to damage by firing into a capture box.

I recommend Nites for accurization at 50 to 100 feet target ranges - then work your way back with .30g, .28g or .25g or whatever your "working" round is going to be once you've attained repeatable accuracy.

http://www.airsoftcanada.com/showpos...&postcount=342


10. Load up 8 rounds and fire 3, ensuring you are on paper. If you've used a boresighter you should be on paper.

11. Adjust your sights and gun position until your sights are accurately predicting the rounds impacting the target correctly.

If you have a good barrel, gun and setup and have done this, you should get reasonable repeatable accuracy. Blackthorne and I had 1/4" inch outlyers at 50 feet, with most bbs going through the original hole made by the first BB. Grouping can be astonishingly good if done right. We were using an AEG with stock innards and a TB bore barrel, but little else. I imagine purpose build sniper packages would fare much better.

It is possible to put shack on the target at 100 to 200 feet, aiming for the human body's thorasic region with repeatable results if you take the time to properly tune and accurize your AEG. We've done it and we will be posting the videos soon to show it, but above are listed the steps we followed.

[highny]

Wow! That is really helpful!

What the only thing I don't understand is turning off my hop up. Wouldn't that make my shots go all over the place? Or did you mean turning off just for cleaning?

I did the what you recommended by using .3g bbs by madbull(heard they were decent brand) shooting at a 50feet target. What I'm seeing is the bb hitting the target just under the crosshair. And that's without hop up. I'm sure with little hop, it would keep the bb to my crosshair for that 3inch drop at the end.

Again, thank you very much for the wonderful tips!

Ps: I'm using metal tech's .2 bbs. Hear they were pretty good too. Can't get my hands on bastards, so this is the best I can get.

[Scarecrow]

Jeeze if you're in Calgary, you're in the same city as Plastic Soldier Airsoft - they are the Western master distributor for BB Bastard. Go to their website at www.plasticsoldierairsoft.com or google them - they have a store location and a mobile trailer unit as well.

[Danke]

How about some heavy tracer BBs Scarecrow?

For some of my gear the tracer unit helps when fiddling with hopup rubbers and nubs since it can help to see the path of the BB right around dusk. The glow BBs out there though are so light they're not ideal though.

I've used heat shrink to shim an inner barrel to avoid no sticky goop down the road.

[CDN_Stalker]

Originally Posted by highny

Wow! That is really helpful!

What the only thing I don't understand is turning off my hop up. Wouldn't that make my shots go all over the place? Or did you mean turning off just for cleaning?

Hop up adds an uncontrollable variable to your shots. What I can see it being useful for in this set up is to hold the BB in the same place every time it gets loaded, if the hop up was turned fully off the impact of the nozzle while loading might make it vary from 1/4" to an inch away in the breech. I'd suggest full off, then dial enough in so that BBs don't roll out your barrel if you point to the ground.

But yes, I love the new BBs, can't wait to try them out with my two-four and see how good/bad it is without wondering if BBs might be a variable. And that laser boresight is great, been using mine for two years, works awesome to do all kinds of neat scope adjustment settings.

Oh ya, magnification DOES have it's place with airsoft as a few people know, and has great benefits. So it's more than just 1% use as pointed out above. My M24 scope is always set at 5x and gives me all I need, and I can adjust as needed (rare).

[highny]

Originally Posted by CDN_Stalker

Hop up adds an uncontrollable variable to your shots. What I can see it being useful for in this set up is to hold the BB in the same place every time it gets loaded, if the hop up was turned fully off the impact of the nozzle while loading might make it vary from 1/4" to an inch away in the breech. I'd suggest full off, then dial enough in so that BBs don't roll out your barrel if you point to the ground.

But I was always told that hopup help's with accuracy and range. I still don't really understand playing without using any hop up.


I find scope being useful when trying to shoot through cracks and small holes. I once shot a guy on the shoes thanks to my scope. Otherwise I doubt I have been able to pick that out from the grass.

[Kos-Mos]

If you want a more accurate gun, you want to remove every variable that affect accuracy and tweak each one separately. You cannot adjust the position of your mechbox and innerbarrel while having hop-up and variable BB weight at the same time.

So you basically turn Hop off, then shim the mechbox to be in the perfect spot, then shim the inner to be in the perfect spot then adjust the scope a close range, then make sure everythign works and is consitent.

When all that is done and you can hit a nickel 10 out of 10 at 50', you can start adjusting external variables, such as the hop-up, play with BB weight, zero your scope at longer ranges etc.