Zeroing before a DSC1 assessment

The kit list has eight points and this is the third: ensure the rifle is zeroed prior to your arrival. It is the point candidates most often treat as advice rather than as a requirement, and it is the one that costs whole mornings.

What the shooting test opens with

Before any assessed shot, you confirm the zero on a zero target. The first group has to sit inside the circle. Only then do the assessed pairs begin, fired from the standing, kneeling or sitting, and prone positions, with shooting sticks permitted as an aid for the standing and sitting shots.

So the confirmation is not a warm-up. It is a gate, and it is the first thing that happens.

What the gunsmith is for

A gunsmith is available on site to assist with serious rifle or optic issues. That is worth having and worth understanding precisely: a loose mount, a scope damaged in transit, a rifle that has genuinely gone wrong overnight.

He is not there to zero a rifle that arrived unzeroed. A rifle that needs zeroing from scratch on the morning of an assessment consumes range time, ammunition and the calm you were going to shoot with, and none of the three is replaceable on the day.

Zeroing properly, a week out

• Shoot from a solid rest, not from the position you will be assessed in. You are adjusting the rifle, not practising, and the two want different things.
• Let the barrel cool between groups. A hot barrel walks, and chasing a walking group with the turrets is how a rifle ends up worse than it started.
• Use the ammunition you will bring. A different bullet weight or a different lot can move the point of impact enough to matter, and confirming the zero with one load then shooting the test with another undoes the work.
• Write down the settings once you are satisfied. If something is knocked in transit you want to know what it was.
• Then leave it alone. The commonest cause of a rifle arriving out is a final tinker two days before.

Travelling without undoing it

Most damage happens between the car and the hotel room, not on the range.

• Carry the rifle in a hard case if you have one, with the scope supported rather than resting on its turrets.
• Check the mount screws before you leave, and check them again on arrival. A slow loosening is the most common transit fault and the easiest to catch.
• Do not remove and refit the scope for travel. It is the single change most likely to move the zero.
• Bring enough ammunition to confirm, and to correct if something has moved. Fifty rounds is the recommendation and it is not a generous one: the confirmation, the assessed shots and a margin add up quickly.

A rifle you can actually shoot for a day

One thing worth repeating, because a rifle can be perfectly zeroed and still cost you the test. Use a rifle with a small calibre. A heavy magnum is legal and adequate for any British deer, and across a day of assessment shooting under stress it will punish you for nothing gained. The flinch you have trained out of yourself at home comes back on an assessment morning, and it comes back worse behind a big cartridge.

Bring the rifle you stalk with, set up the way you stalk with it, zeroed a week ago and untouched since. That is the whole of it.