Thread: iron sights and bad eyesight

Originally Posted by Tentman

How much have you shot with open sights - most people "over think" them and try and get thier eye to focus on three things (which is physically impossible even when you're young). If you just go shoot stuff, something like a 400mm gong at 50 to 100M youll be surprised how easy it is to get consistent hits by completely ignoring the rear sight, just put the bead on the plate and shoot. Your eye will automatically alighn the rear sight and the target will be a bit fuzzy but so is s hairy old goat! Just go shoot it.

Agree entirely with these comments

I used to think I couldn't shoot open sights due to old eyes and changing eyesight.
But the growing hoard of vintage rifles has forced me to live with the barrel mounted open sights or upgrade to tang peep sights and they can be surprisingly effective when you learn how to not over think it.

My early restorations and rustorations I was always wanting to find vintage telescopic sights for and these can be very effective with changing eyesight.
But then you have some seriously valuable original vintage rifle and you just can't commit the crime of drilling and tapping the barrel or receiver, so you have to learn to live with the original sights or upgrade to a tang peep sight if it is already tapped for one.

Can work just fine in most cases and sometimes the results even at 100m are frankly astonishing.
So despite the fact that my eyesight is constantly changing as I age I'm not concerned that I won't be able to shoot these rifles anymore.
I am not at the stage where I might need to were 1x reading glasses too shoot groups for testing with them.
But in the field in the heat of the moment when the sights are used without any particular thought they will be just fine