Thread: Iron sights

What do people make of the buckhorn style that come on many lever guns? Worth sticking with or replacing with a peep or something else?

I don' know much about irons; shot a few rabbits lately with the square notch and post on my .22. My 9.3X57 has a square notch and bead, and hope to get a deer with that this year and have set it up as Carlsen Highway suggests...bead in the middle of target.

Originally Posted by Dama dama

What do people make of the buckhorn style that come on many lever guns? Worth sticking with or replacing with a peep or something else?

I don' know much about irons; shot a few rabbits lately with the square notch and post on my .22. My 9.3X57 has a square notch and bead, and hope to get a deer with that this year and have set it up as Carlsen Highway suggests...bead in the middle of target.

I suspect that you mean semi-buckhorn. Buckhorn is basically a forward-mounted peep with a small arc removed at the top. It was a failure hence the semi-buckhorn. Peep backsights are better at distances above 30 metres, in my experience, although other people may do better in the field (I consider range-shooting achievements to be irrelevant to this conversation). The only real advantage that a semi-buckhorn backsight may have over a standard square-cut back sight with square notch is that the rounded outer edges are less likely to injure the shooter's hand when carrying a lever-action carbine through the bush and holding it just forward of the receiver.

In the end, though, any solution has to work for you!