Dave DeLaurant
Member
A few months back I finished assembling a Martini Cadet project that had been some twenty years in the making.
I was excited to finally shoot the thing, but I immediately ran into trouble with the QC of one of my gunsmiths: his front sight D/T mounting hole was more than a degree to the left of TDC. I was using a barrel-mounted peep that sits pretty high, requiring a fairly tall front sight that magnified the error to the point that I simply didn't have enough windage adjustment to zero the rifle.
My original front was a simple one-piece job, no windage correction possible.
My first attempt to correct this was to use a sight with a particularly wide base that I reshaped with an offset to the right. That didn't give enough correction, so I tried again using a dovetail blank and a conical front sight post made from a machine screw. I used a cobalt tipped centering bit to drill the hole for the post with a slant to the right that roughly offset the angle of the original error, and presto, I'm finally in the black. Now I just need to trim the width of the blank a bit and cold blue.
The corrective front sight looks good enough at a glance to pass muster. While I was at the range today another shooter asked for a closer look and didn't notice anything funny about the sights -- in fact he said he really like the sight picture.
Now, you might well ask why I didn't just go to a different smith and have the barrel dovetailed to remove the wonky D/T job. Firstly, finding a competent smith around here was my original problem. Second, shut up -- I didn't think of it until later.
I was excited to finally shoot the thing, but I immediately ran into trouble with the QC of one of my gunsmiths: his front sight D/T mounting hole was more than a degree to the left of TDC. I was using a barrel-mounted peep that sits pretty high, requiring a fairly tall front sight that magnified the error to the point that I simply didn't have enough windage adjustment to zero the rifle.
My original front was a simple one-piece job, no windage correction possible.
My first attempt to correct this was to use a sight with a particularly wide base that I reshaped with an offset to the right. That didn't give enough correction, so I tried again using a dovetail blank and a conical front sight post made from a machine screw. I used a cobalt tipped centering bit to drill the hole for the post with a slant to the right that roughly offset the angle of the original error, and presto, I'm finally in the black. Now I just need to trim the width of the blank a bit and cold blue.
The corrective front sight looks good enough at a glance to pass muster. While I was at the range today another shooter asked for a closer look and didn't notice anything funny about the sights -- in fact he said he really like the sight picture.
Now, you might well ask why I didn't just go to a different smith and have the barrel dovetailed to remove the wonky D/T job. Firstly, finding a competent smith around here was my original problem. Second, shut up -- I didn't think of it until later.
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