Thread: iron sights and bad eyesight

Originally Posted by vulcannz

Use the force.

I actually think there might be more to that than people realise. Had a mate, losing his sight, could take people off a dart board.

I tend to open all my rear sights with a chainsaw file and if the rifle has a flat leaf sight with the push through elevation tang like most lever actions in a dovetail, I will reverse the sight on the barrel which moves the V along the barrel another six or so inches from the eye. It all helps and you use the rear sight more like a ghost ring.

I'm old and shoot open sights all the time - I go hunting with them.
I can't use apertures, I have an eyesight issue that blurs out the centre of the aperture - so I use Vee sights mounted forward on the barrel.
A few years back I got an artificial lense inserted as the old one milked up - and I can see forever, but have to wear glasses for close up ............. and I still use open sights.
Over the years my eyes have deteriorated, there is scarring from an old accident that is reducing the quality of the picture that is formed at the back of the eye. How badly that affects me, I don't know - I don't know what other people can see, but I do know it's more than I can.

For a few hundred years people had no option but to shoot open sighted.

I remember reading about Walter Bell the elephant hunter - people said he was a good shot.
He was a good shot because he carried his rifles and practiced constantly - he would lift his rifle and sight on a rock, twig, leaf, and he would do that 100 times a day - day after day and that developed muscle memory and a confidence in what he was doing.

Walter was a good shot with open sights because he made himself one.

Walter also got in as close as he could and then closed the gap some more. Shooting at elephants tended to measure the distance in feet rather than yards

Walter was a 'profit' hunter ................

I like the one where he shot a small herd of zebra - they'd got out there a bit by the time he reloaded and fulfilled his need for skins and meat. Did that with a little 6.5mm Dutch rimmed, as he did most of his 'plains' hunting.

Walter sounds prissy. I always have known him as Karamojo.

Probably need to blame his parents for that - and I wonder if he ever called himself that ............ or did he just go by the name of Walt, like that Disney bloke did ?

Lots of mysteries in this world, wonder if we'll ever get to the end of them ?

Had to edit ............. Walter is a double syllable name, and because of that - should be highly valued .......... perhaps
W a l t e r - sounds like your testicles are thoroughly laxed out on the chair between your legs - flattened out like a dead groundhog.
Walt - crisp and to the point. Walt is alert and ready for whatever the world presents ................ "Fuck me, a dead groundhog."
Karamoja - three syllables, a lot to wrap your head around.
"Mr Karamoja ?"
"Wot ?"
"I forgot .............. "

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.

I believe those 'express' sights were used more for 'up and bang' (dangerous game) rifles - the wide vee didn't hide/obstruct the sight picture and the front bead sat above the vertical platinum line inlet into the rear sight. I've had them on a number of guns I've owned - including the gun I'm shooting now - an E. M. Reilly sporting snider. That gun also has the platinum line inlet into the 100, 200 and 300 yard leaves.

I also have a flintlock with Amercan style 'opens' from the period - an ugly 'U' with 'raised ears' either side to hide the target. I took a file to those and got rid of those 'ears', then I filed a wide 'Vee' and put a fibre optic up front I could actually see.
I got a fibre optic on the snider as well - it glows in the dark of the bush.

With those wide 'Vees' - your eye just gets drawn to the centre naturally, just like with an aperture ............. if you can use them.

My bead sits level with the top of the rear Vee if I'm down the range and thinking about it. If I'm in the bush and not 'thinking about it' - I dunno where it sits.

Try a larger rear aperture 'ghost ring'.

I remember a story I read where Bell (using the English Boarding School version) shot off dodgy .318 ammunition by shooting at flying birds over an African lake - witnesses thought he was using a shotgun

There was another story (From JA Hunter) where WDM Bell was seen shooting fish in the air that were jumping from a lake.

For those interested, Bell recommended the exercise as the secret to excelletn shooting of dry firing practice. He also recommended for those people (as he was as a young man) overexcited at the sight of game, to count up to ten before trying a shot. He shot a lot of elephants (1,011) but as SF90 points out above, he shot vast amounts of other animals like atelopes and buffalo in order to keep the African people wh travelled with him in food and hides for making shoes and so on. Every day he was shooting meat animals with a 6.5 Mannlicher.

As for sights once more, the sights I describe are famous today as ""Express sights" but i nthe 19th century (when eberything was iron sights nearly) they were more common. There are many different styles and I have worked with most of them. The sights you see nowadays on Pedersoli or Uberti / Rossi lever guns with the big wings called buckhorn sights, and are used to deal with shooting at different ranges with blackpowder cartridges. They are disparaged these days, but actually work well if you know what they are for, and for short ranges they can be used like an aperture sight too if you want to. For the old cartridges with the slow bullets making parabola arcs and using lots of holdover, they make sense.

In a general way the best open sights I have ever used are the wide shallow V with a bead as I already posted above, or just the standard open sights the old Winchester 30-30 used to come with in the 1970's and 80's.

(Out of interest, the simplest rear sight I have used was the widest "V"" you could make - which is no V at all, a simple straight bar at the rear without any notch or V in it. THe idea is you balance the bead on top of the rear bar, where you judge the middle to be, and shoot like that. Just like an aperture sight, your eye will automatically centre the bead remarkably accurateyl. So much so that when I first tried it as an experiment, I shot a one inch group at 100 metres with a Brno .243 I had, and gobsmacked myself.)

I remember hitting matchbox consistently with 22lr withno rear sight by doing similar thing.cant recall what was at rear,may have been the dovetail for rings,but it worked.