How To Mount a Red-Dot Optic to a Pistol

Hey guys, Derek Poo here. I want to talk to you guys for a few minutes about the proper way of mounting a red dot optic to your pistol. It's a question that's coming in a lot more and now that more manufacturers out there are making guns that are optic ready. So I wanted to go over the process, some of the things you're going to need to get it done. Obviously, if your gun comes ready to go, you might want to look at the manual first, right? A lot of times sometimes in the manual, they'll put the actual specs, torque specs and those sort of things of how to mount, how they want you to mount it. But in the event that you've sent your slide out to have it milled or there are no directions in your manual. Here's the generally the way that I do it. I have a can here. That was a tour gun that is optics ready. You're gonna need a few items to actually get this done first. Um Go to your wife ask very nicely if you can borrow some fingernail polish remover this Acetone. We need the Acetone we'll use that to like decrease the gun before we start, we've like cleaned the gun and then we want to make sure that there's no residual oil or anything like that in the threads or on the mounting surface. So we're going to use that. You're also going to need some sort of driver. I like to use a T handle because we're going to need to put some torque on this and measure the torque the T handle makes it pretty easy to add torque without over toking and get you a lot of control. You can use a quarter inch screwdriver that allows a different uh size bits to put in it. But this is the one I like to use, right? And I just mentioned that you're gonna need some way of applying torque, right? And knowing what amount of torque you're actually putting on the screws. Um, this is a little quarter inch driver insert that I can just put into my T handle and determine what kind of torque I'm putting on these screws For your screws. I mentioned you're going to need some sort of locking thread locker for me. I like to use the Viber Type VC three. It's advertising specifically designed for use on firearms and rifles. So this is the one I've been going to. And then finally, you're going to need a couple oil based paint marker pens and we're going to use those for indexing as well. As a little additional adhesion for the mounting screws. So to start off, we want to clean our gun and then once we got the gun all clean, we're going to take that Acetone and we're going to just wipe down the surfaces right, to make sure that anything that we might have left behind on the slide, we're going to, you know, make sure that we get it off. The Acetone will dry pretty quick. So we'll just hit, hit the parts that we're using with the Acetone. Right. Once we've gotten that set, We're gonna have to prep our screws. Now, these, I did them ahead of time. I grabbed the Viber tight, coated the threads a little bit and these have been sitting for the recommended 15 minutes um allowing it to set up, letting it set up, allows it to get a little bit stickier. Um and it'll get a good bite right out of the gate for you, right. So it looks like the tune is all dried up for us. So we're gonna start our mounting. We're gonna insert the plate that came with the can. There's different plates that will come with certain guns to make certain optics work. So this is the plate that works with the Can's red dot So I'm gonna drop the red dot down on top of the plate, make sure everything's all lined up nice and flat. And I'm gonna grab my first set of screws and what I do is with the Vibert, I'm just going to get the screws started on both sides. Grab my little quarter inch drive. I'm gonna get the, make sure that it's going in nice and straight, grab the other one and get it started and, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just run the screws down until they're just barely touching. I can feel them, they made contact with the optic once I know that they're both pretty equal touching the face of the optic, then I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna grab my torque driver. This is a quarter inch driver that you just attach to the handle that I'm using. And on this, I don't know if you can actually see it or not. The way this one works. If you're familiar with torque wrenches, normally you'll pull and you'll get a click when you get to the desired torque value that you're looking for on this one. It doesn't work that way. There's a little line down here and as I turn and it's applying pressure, that line is going to move. What I'm going to look for here is on this size of a screw. I like to go about 10 inch pounds of torque. The 10" pounds over the years is what I've been using and it seems to be working. I haven't had optics come loose or anything like that. So £10 seems to be sufficient. So I put my torch driver in there and I'm gonna start turning it, Keeping a good eye on the line right there. I'm actually hitting the 10. Let me turn it around to the camera and maybe we can, she can actually see what's going on here. There's the line as I turn, turn, turn, see the line matches up to the 10. I sort of sit there, hold it to the 10 for a second to know I'm getting 10 inch pounds and then release. So now I have both screws mounted with 10 inch pounds of torque on them. Now, we're gonna come over to our markers. And what I like to do with the marker is I shake it up and get the, get it ready to use it. Get the, the paint mixed inside were like a spray can and I'm gonna grab it. And what I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to take the marker and I'm going to follow it around the screw as best I can gonna lay down a nice blue paint ring on there. I say I, I do this because it sort of gives you two benefits. One, it's gonna give you additional adhesion. This paint is gonna sort of soak in around the edge of the screw and sort of marry it to the top of the optic. If you've ever painted a house or something, you've painted over something and then you try to remove whatever it was you painted over a screw of a light cover and then you try to remove it, that paint makes it a little bit harder to get the screw out. So this is just giving us a little extra insurance that these screws aren't going to back out on this. So I painted up as, uh, so the last step in the process is I'm gonna take a different color market. This one's a yellow and when this blue paint dries, I'm gonna actually put index marks on it because this hasn't dried. And we're not gonna sit here and let the camera roll for five minutes while that dries. I'm gonna show you another gun that I've already done. As you can see, I use the paint around the screw itself and then I use the yellow paint to actually give me index marks. Those index marks allow me over time as I go to the range, I go to training and I start shooting every once in a while I can glance down and see, has that yellow line moved at all? It's my index mark move and is my optic, uh, gotten looser. So that's the basic way of getting a red red dot optic mounted to a pistol. Um, I hope it helps. Um, if you have any questions, send them in. Um, and hope to see you out on the range. Thanks.