Scope rings and bases

[O C hunter]

like i said if you have never used a scope align tool you would not know they are off the reason they sell and have these tools is to be sure you in align and no twist. come on Bad you have never heard of Lapping?

[badsection]

I have heard of it. It's how my dog drinks water, LOL!  Lapping is not done with aluminum Talley's. I do lap the steel Warne's when I use them on a rail. I do not "shim" .  If you run out of adjustment like the O P did, it is a mount problem, not a scope problem.  If you look up the part # he used, Leupold says to shim, if needed. They know their product isn't correct for the guns it says it is designed for!   

[zonie]

Years ago it was common and an accepted practice to shim rings,  why may you ask  ?  Because the tolerances ( hand fitted )  were not near the replicated tolerances of decent rifles made today on cnc machines.  Even today with buffing, machine tool wear, operator experience things can be off slightly.  Where I have a real problem with base manufacturers and this stems from  my experience with Vanguards using Rem 700 bases,  but no doubt carries over to other rifles also.   Some scopes today are shorter bell to bell length,  this creates problems in and of itself .  Base manufacturers have told me personally base heights lets use a rem 700 example that will fit several different rifle brands are close enough in height's to be compatible with these different brands ,  wrong answer again , they do it because it's easy imo.  If these bases in general are compatible then why are we running out of elevation between some different rifle brands  and scopes elevation adjustments are not even close to being centered ?  There are bases that are correct so this is not an across the board issue,  but when you cross reference multiple rife brands & models and they come up the only one part number or will also fit these models.  even if the base height was only off a few thousanth's it's enough to throw things off  when trying to sight in a rifle scope or get pissed and just go buy a Picatinny 20 moa base and call it good.  Scope  have their own issues,  base or ring problems with out of spec base height's and different ring saddle heigth's, and that coupled with a scope with less moa elevation adjustment built in is a problem.   We live in a throw away world today so parts aren't always checked, tested for quality  control as they once were. 

[224KING]

Are we talking about shimming rings or bases?

[zonie]

My bad     shimming bases,  basically raising or lowering the scope to adjust / center the scopes reticle so there is the correct amount of internal or external adjustment.   Generally it's for elevation adjustments, but can be used also to center reticle windage wise also on some windage adjustable bases this wouldn't be considered shimming per say, but it's still compensating by a mechanical means to center the reticle.   It is possible to shim rings but generally not done,  some types of rings it's also possible to machine, surface grind or file rings to reduce height either forward ring  or rear ring to do the same thing to center or to add or subtact a certain amount of material off to place/move  the reticle in whatever direction for more adjustment.  It's also note worthy to turn  each ring 180 degrees and see if the rings centers were bored in a perfectly straight line without deviation of measurements front and back, and if that shows discrepancies  of each ring then do the same on the other ring and possibly  moving rings front to back and back to front and noting if you gain or lose elevation on grid paper.     The trick is getting the correct angles to mate the rings up and still keeping alignment.   Then you have ring/bases that are one piece or a receiver the base is milled as the base,   i.e Ruger  and others.    This is where Picatinny mounts with built in 0 degrees  to higher degrees of MOA,  plus fore & aft adjustability is so much better imo,    they're already pretty much pre-aligned anglewise for the rings to mate correctly  but still should be checked.