Hi Bassman
Do a quality check on your scope.
Take your scope of the rifle and fix to a solid bench so you can move your head up and down and to the sides without touching the rifle stock and by that the scope.
Next set up a target like 30 yards away.
I dont know if your cheap scope has got parallax adjustment?
If yes - then its probably your eye focus which is not adjusted right.
If your parallax focus and Eye piece focus is off it will be like having two crosshairs not laying on top of each other.
If you imagine having two thin glass plates with identical reticle (crosshairs) Then when your eye piece is adjusted right it will be like they will be so close that if you look through the scope and move your eye slightly up and down or from side to side. Your crosshairs stays on the aimpoint.
If your parallax and Eye focus is off - then when you look through the scope and slightly move your eye around - You will see your aimpoint shifts accordingly. Very many shooters does not understand how important it is to set your eye focus right.
But in case you dont know how to. Look through the scope against a white wall or just aim at the blue sky.
Take your eye away and look through the scope and verify if the crosshair is crisp and sharp and you only see one cross hair.
Slowly in small steps adjust the eye piece focus ring until you can take your eye away from the scope while pointing the rifle against the blue sky.
When you can take your eye away for 10 to 15 seconds looking at something else, and move your eye back to the rifle scope and you see the blue sky and a super sharp and crisp cross then your eye focus is set right. Mark the position- or tape it to fix the eye focus ring.
Then now aim at your aimpoint and adjust the parallax until the target your aiming on is fully in focus and looks sharp and crisp.
Now you should be able to test moving your eye behind the scope on a fixed rifle.
When the eyepiece focus ring and the parallax is set right the cross hair should remain on the target center no matter how your move your head and eye up and down and sideways.
On cheap scopes this can be a nightmare to set right.
And remember if you have your glasses on and they are multi focal glass it will be more difficult because you then introduce risk of changing the focal everytime you aim. Try to redo the Look in the sky and focus the eyepiece with hout your glasses and then test shoot afterwards.
Unfortunately there is many loop holes that can do poi shifts - This was my worst mistake. Now I mainly set the eye focal to be shooting always without wearing my glasses.
And it doesn't help when you get older (together with your eyes
And of course this POI change problem is much worse when using discount scopes - unfortunately here it is known that price and performance goes hand in hand
Just another thing to test for you.
I could continue with the mechanical Poi change hunt part 2 - But that is another story.
Example the very known Air Venturi Avenger was a pain in........ for me .
I could at 30 yards shoot a 20 shot magazine through the same hole.
But when setting up a benchrest target with like 10 or 15 targets and started to shoot them one by one there were very few that hit the 10x or even the 10 or 9. Found that moving the rifle on the bipod did these shifts. Ended by me designing a new front rifle stock fixed to the two Air pipes only and keeping the barrel free floating. I 3d Printed the parts and now its acceptable - My FX Crown is also pretty bad when moving it from target to target . But my Redwolf is Rock steady and have no POI problems when I move the aim at the different targets.
I Hope you get your POI shifts under control.
PCPOlsen From Denmark
