Funderb
Member
So this while I was back in jax on holiday this weekend, and in between working around the house and watching the jags win, and the seminoles win even better, I decided to embark upon the long delayed mosin-nagant stock sights improvement project.
First let me thank RonE, without his courteous donation of an extra set of iron sights left over from his Snipper Rifle project, this would never have gone forward.
The idea:
The stock sights on a Mosin-Nagant M-91/30 are not bad. They are suitable for shooting target sized objects at target shooting distances. This simply was not enough for me. I wanted to take something functional, and screw it up until it looked different and worked again.
So off I went to the drawing board.
I decided on a peep sight, even though they work much better with short eye relief.
Process:
I took the sight leaf, provided by RonE and closed my eyes as I used a grinder to flatten a portion of the lower rounded side, and remove the old slot aperture. Next, I drilled and tapped two parallel holes from the flattened side to the top of the sight before it tapers to slider width.
Using the sight leaf as an anvil shaper tip, I shaped a 1/4" platelet of aluminum to the contour of the rear portion of the sight, then carefully drawing up a proper shape for a peep aperture and slowly grinding and filing it out. Next it was marked and drilled to fit into place with the tapped portion of the leaf, and fitted to countersunk machine screws of the 4-40 persuasion.
At this point it looks ugly as sin, so it's off to the paint shop, where it is lightly coated with engine paint in flat black and clear satin/flat laquer coat.
Now it looks acceptable.
Here's where I tell you how I modified the front sight, but in all honesty, I was careless for one freakin' second and shattered it, so I just kept the old sight on there.
Then sunday, off to the range,
At 50 yards, after figuring out where the thing was going to shoot, dead center (wow) and a target height high. (I saw that one coming, because the aperture sight is raised by nature of the sight.)
But after finding my proper picture, I managed to cluster little 1" groups around the bulls eye on the target. When I moved out to 100 the guy next to me's target was halfway over mine, and I never got to shoot very accurately at that range. Just shot at the dirt.
By my very scientific method I call guessing, I'd say that the vertical zero on the sight now is at 150-200 yards. That can be remedied when I have more time to work on the thing.
Moral: It was fun, it was easy, my camera is broken so no pictures! my luck, huh? I put this here, so if you feel like making a neat peep sight for your mosin, you will have the general gist of the process of how to do it for cheap. Oh, and cut yourself multiple peep blanks, because I screwed up the first one, and that doesn't seem too uncommon a happening. And yes, those C&R collectors that hate bubba, my mosin can be returned to original fit and finish by simply pining the old sight leaf back in!
Best of luck to all you tinker-ers out there, I'll post some pics when I can!
First let me thank RonE, without his courteous donation of an extra set of iron sights left over from his Snipper Rifle project, this would never have gone forward.
The idea:
The stock sights on a Mosin-Nagant M-91/30 are not bad. They are suitable for shooting target sized objects at target shooting distances. This simply was not enough for me. I wanted to take something functional, and screw it up until it looked different and worked again.
So off I went to the drawing board.
I decided on a peep sight, even though they work much better with short eye relief.
Process:
I took the sight leaf, provided by RonE and closed my eyes as I used a grinder to flatten a portion of the lower rounded side, and remove the old slot aperture. Next, I drilled and tapped two parallel holes from the flattened side to the top of the sight before it tapers to slider width.
Using the sight leaf as an anvil shaper tip, I shaped a 1/4" platelet of aluminum to the contour of the rear portion of the sight, then carefully drawing up a proper shape for a peep aperture and slowly grinding and filing it out. Next it was marked and drilled to fit into place with the tapped portion of the leaf, and fitted to countersunk machine screws of the 4-40 persuasion.
At this point it looks ugly as sin, so it's off to the paint shop, where it is lightly coated with engine paint in flat black and clear satin/flat laquer coat.
Now it looks acceptable.
Here's where I tell you how I modified the front sight, but in all honesty, I was careless for one freakin' second and shattered it, so I just kept the old sight on there.
Then sunday, off to the range,
At 50 yards, after figuring out where the thing was going to shoot, dead center (wow) and a target height high. (I saw that one coming, because the aperture sight is raised by nature of the sight.)
But after finding my proper picture, I managed to cluster little 1" groups around the bulls eye on the target. When I moved out to 100 the guy next to me's target was halfway over mine, and I never got to shoot very accurately at that range. Just shot at the dirt.
By my very scientific method I call guessing, I'd say that the vertical zero on the sight now is at 150-200 yards. That can be remedied when I have more time to work on the thing.
Moral: It was fun, it was easy, my camera is broken so no pictures! my luck, huh? I put this here, so if you feel like making a neat peep sight for your mosin, you will have the general gist of the process of how to do it for cheap. Oh, and cut yourself multiple peep blanks, because I screwed up the first one, and that doesn't seem too uncommon a happening. And yes, those C&R collectors that hate bubba, my mosin can be returned to original fit and finish by simply pining the old sight leaf back in!
Best of luck to all you tinker-ers out there, I'll post some pics when I can!
