New rifle sights...

Sparks

/me is sitting here, looking at a box marked 'Intershoot.com" with a happy smile on his face
Photos to follow later tonight

Now all I have to do is finish building the cheekpiece so I can shoot the frankenrifle again (and that thing is earning its name more and more every year ).

It wasn't me!

Nice one. Enjoy. What did you go for in the end?

Sparks

MEC Free Sight with Centra 'Tiny' iris, and a Centra Duo Glass M22 foresight (the 3.8->5.8 model).

Photos later...

It wasn't me!

Sparks wrote: »

MEC Free Sight with Centra 'Tiny' iris, and a Centra Duo Glass M22 foresight (the 3.8->5.8 model).

Photos later...

Not a fan of the tiny rearsights (My Centra 10-50 has all the visibility without the extra light playing havoc with your eyes) but I have the same foresight and it's excellent.

Sparks

The 10-50 is a lovely piece of kit and deceptively small compared to the photos of it you see on the web. There are a few 10m shooters using them on the international circuit (Sonja Pfeilschifter for example).



But I wanted the low height of the MEC so I could see over the top for pre-aiming during he shot routine; the central bar of the 10-50 and the windage adjustment knob of the Centra Spy would have been right in the line of sight I wanted (and the Aschutz 7020 sights just obliterat the whole thing...)

Incidentally, it turns out I'm utterly unable to resist a closed intershoot package on my desk, so I took the sights out and got some nice photos. Will post them up later once I get a chance to crop&scale them. Also, it seems that even in a fairly conservative office environment, rifle sights are just interesting, not wierd or scary...

Sparks

From 10point9.ie:

The Centra Tiny iris was a bit of a no-brainer. No point buying a small rearsight and then sticking a giant iris behind it, and the one thing I learnt from the large complicated iris I had for the old smallbore sights was that you don’t use most of what’s in them and the more stuff that’s there, the less room you have when getting your head, your shooting frames, the iris and the sights all into position. Smaller’s better in this case. And the Tiny even has a color filter, so there’s nothing lost in terms of functionality.

The Centra Duo Glass foresight was a similarly easy choice. I’m sick of carrying a box of foresight elements and having to swap stuff in and out to change foresight size (which you have to do depending on range and lighting in air rifle). I was once advised that it was just another group of settings to have to remember, but to be honest, I have to worry about the foresight settings anyway, so I might as well make it easy on myself when changing them. This is the M22 model with the 3.8<->5.8 range of size adjustment (I’ve never shot lower than 3.8 standing, and I don’t think you should – for prone, yeah, you can take it down to 3.2 on a wierd day, but when standing, I only rarely go down to 4.0, and usually I’ll train at 5.0 and compete at 4.4-4.6 depending on lighting). M22 is a step up in foresight size – I’ve been shooting on an M18 model for a few years now, but I saw the M22 on a few rifles and thought it gave me a better sight picture. Time will tell, but that’s the only real gamble with this choice.

So what about the MEC rearsight itself?

It’s small. Tiny in fact. That’s the first thing you notice. The second thing you notice when you pick it up is how light it is compared to other rearsights, and it’s only then that you realise just how solid it is. This is all-metal construction. No plastic, nothing flimsy here. It has the feel of a very, very solid piece of precision engineering. I was slightly disappointed that it doesn’t cant at the obvious place, but I can live with that.

It’s not as shiny as it looks. The final finish in most places isn’t grimy or anything, but it definitely looks unpolished. I don’t think that’s a bad thing – the Anschutz Precise stock is very highly polished and to be honest, I’m not sure it adds anything. It might even be a problem – last thing you need close to your eyes when you’re trying to aim in bright light is a shiny reflective surface.

It’s also a few steps up in terms of precision – with a standard 80cm sight base, MEC say you’ll get 18 clicks to take you from a 10.0 at 9 0′clock to a 10.0 at 3 o’clock. That’s pretty darn impressive. My old sights manage about 10-12 clicks for that, and the old ones on the 600 series Feinwerkbaus in DURC can only stretch to maybe 4-6 for that. It’s probably overkill, but it’s still quite impressive.

More photos in the blog post.