Thread: iron sights and bad eyesight

WDM Bell grew up in 19th century boarding schools and was later a military man - he would have been called "Bell" by his friends and associates and Captain or Mr Bell by everyone else except his wife.

Bell as a young man used an wide rear v sight with a front bead. Today they are called express sights. They are excellent sights, as precise as anything else I have discovered and I used them for many years either fabricating them or adapting factory sights with a file. They have a reputation as being only good for close up, but this is not true at all. For general work with a rifle at open sights distances with most cartridges they are perfect.

You have to know how to use them though, they are not used the same as a front post sight - open sights with a bead are designed to be used with the bead held low down in the sight, with just the full circle of the bead showing. Then with both eyes open you shoot through the bead like its a red dot sight, and the rifle should be sighted in thusly.

For open country for shots 200 metres and over I prefer an aperture with a post front sight. Like a .303 with a peep sight. This is where you shooting at targets in the open and you have time to make the shot. For shooting in the high tussock country in Otago, an rear aperture with a front post is preferable, and it should be said that the use of iron sights is much easier in open country despite the distances being longer, because you can see the targets more clearly. Bush stalking with open sights is harder shooting even though its only metres away.

I learned that I did not care for a wide aperture for fast shooting at short ranges, what they call a ghost ring; despite the fact the eye centers the front sight in an aperture, if the ghost ring is too large then under pressure I would simply disregard the rear sight completely, and then I would sometimes have some spectacular misses. The bead and a wide v rear sight stopped all of that.

With my eyes now I can still shoot open sights on a rifle with a 24 inch barrel, but I sadly cannot any longer shoot my beloved Winchester lever action carbines, the .30-30 or the .44-40 and they have gone to other people.