I had to laugh at this line. A laser bore sighter it a great idea and would have saved me some money and embarrassment.
I was working up a load with my Mini-14 back when Chrony first came out with their chronographs and I had an early one that had cardboard cutouts that you had to shoot through. No problem, just not much room to shoot through.
Of course, I got interrupted in my load development and it was like a month or more before I got a chance to go back and finish with my next step in that load work up and I had changed to another scope. YEP!!! forgot that I had not sighted the new scope in. Barely nicked the top of the electronic sensor, but it hit hard enough to crack and ruin the read out screen which sat right in the front of that model of Crony. On top of that, I had a laser bore sighter at home.
Chrony gives you around $25 off the price of a new one if you mail in your old one. I got a much newer model that had a remote read out screen and it was sensitive enough to read a bullet a bit higher off the sensors. Still too sensitive to extra bright skies or very cloudy skies. But I do like having a Chronograph. I just normally shoot a few rounds with one of my handguns to see if it is reading okay before I run any test loads through it.