What's the deal with open sights?

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BBroadside

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Whenever I see pictures of those rare guns that still come with open sights, I am struck by how far down the barrel the rear is. I'm thinking in particular of a few bolt-actions plus the slide-action Remington. I know peep rears have to be close to your eye, but I don't know why (or if) open rears have to be far from your eye.
 
Because most of us shooters who still know how to use open sights are also far sighted and can't see the darn things if they're too far back.
I used to cut new dovetails and move sights way forward for my muzzleloading buddies back in the seventies when their eyes went south.
 
You were not helping your buddies. The closer the rear sight is to your eyes and the greater the distance between the sights the better. You don't look at the rear sight. It is supposed to be out of focus. Your eye can only focus on 1 thing at a time. Usually the front sight.

The reason they place them where they do on modern rifles is so scopes can be mounted without removing the rear sight.
 
Because every wannabe sniper and tactical suburban ninja wants to mount an optic ... so the manufacturer sets up the receiver to accept an optic and puts the vestigal sights out of the way.
 
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Mine has the sight halfway down, giving a distance of 12.5 inches, IIRC. See here with the sight notch un-occupied and the scope bell right over it. Interestingly enough, the folded new rear sight gives about 3 millimeters of clearance for the current scope bell. :)

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Even so, it seems to work OK so far. Not great, but I blame the loose nut behind the buttplate for that. :D

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I am one of the oddballs out there that consider the irons to be my primary sights and optics to be secondary. I also prefer receiver mounted sights over barrel mounted. Whenever possible I will remove the forward mounted sights and use a Lyman, Refield, or Williams receiver sight instead.

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On my AR's I normally start with a carrying handle upper and cut it down leaving the original sights in place but still allowing me to low mount optics when I want to use them. I also normally use a QD mount so I can access the irons quickly.

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It's even worse than that. As you observed the iron sights are useless but additionally the stock is set up for use of those crappy sights, not the scope they will be replaced with.
 
I still think it's odd that hardly any non-military rifles come with micrometer receiver sights any more. I know it's not that hard to put them on after market, but with rifle makers really give a lot of options for none of them to be peep sights. How many varmint / heavy-barrel variants of the Remington 700 are there? Different shorty Rugers? Different camo pattern stocks?
 
The rear sight on an open sight has to be that far away because you actually look at it part of the time, shifting your focus between the rear sight, front sight and target. (I remember when I could still do that.) With a peep sight you look through the rear sight, not at it, so it has to be mounted closer.

It has nothing to do with ease of mounting a scope, open rear sights were used in the mid barrel position long before scopes were invented.
 
Rear sights are put on the barrel for one simple reason: Precise barrel clocking in the reciever is no longer critical.

Additionally, it is not as critical if the barrel axis doesn't precisely align with the reciever axis.

If you put a rear sight on the reciever and the barrel is misclocked slightly, or if the barrel is slightly crooked in the reciever, it will be very obvious as an excessive amount of windage (or possibly elevation if the reciever was poorly machined) will be required to zero, if it is even possible to achieve a zero with the rear sight adjustment available.

A longer sight radius is superior for precise shooting, but few seem to care enough to demand receiver sights. Barrel mounted sights are perfectly adequate for minute of game at relatively close range.

Personally I would take reciever sights anyday unless maybe we were talking about a dangerous game gun.
 
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bigfatdave said:
Because every wannabe sniper and tactical suburban ninja wants to mount an optic ... so the manufacturer sets up the receiver to accept an optic and puts the vestigal sights out of the way.
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I don't understand your hostility, but optics are the only way to shoot a firearm these days. Iron sights are strictly for back up.
 
I don't understand your hostility, but optics are the only way to shoot a firearm these days.
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I hope you're joking. Optics are overpriced overkill for the vast majority of shooting until you get out past 100 yards. You can't buy a steady hold, and you can't bolt on trigger control.
 
...optics are the only way to shoot a firearm these days. Iron sights are strictly for back up.
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That news is really going to disappoint all the High Power shooters at Camp Perry this year.

They apparently don't know that you can't shoot 600 - 1000 yards with irons.
/Bryan
 
Welding Rod beat me to it. He's right on.

Most of your old fashioned bolt guns had rear sights mounted to the barrel. That's so the shop that makes the gun doesn't have to take the time to make sure the receiver is straight. Sight down the barrel only and take the receiver out of the equation.

I think it was americans that first started to put the rear sight all the way back on the receiver.
 
jmr40 said:
You were not helping your buddies. The closer the rear sight is to your eyes and the greater the distance between the sights the better. You don't look at the rear sight. It is supposed to be out of focus. Your eye can only focus on 1 thing at a time. Usually the front sight.

The reason they place them where they do on modern rifles is so scopes can be mounted without removing the rear sight.
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I don't agree with this at all.
 
The part about not helping the buddies. The very first step in sighting a gun is to locate the rear sight. You can't do that if you can't see it. If moving the rear sight further away from your eye helps you, then do it.
 
It doesn't matter what you say or were told, that's how everyone MUST do it...unless you are using a gun you are so familiar with you don't really even need the sights. In order to prove your eyeball is in the right place, you must first locate the rear sight. Locating the front sight first could get the gun out of alignment with your eyeball.

You probably just do it without thinking.

Besides, I don't think you understand how serious far sightedness can be. There's blurry and there's so blurry its not even there. You can't put the post in the notch if there's no notch.
 
I know peep rears have to be close to your eye, but I don't know why (or if) open rears have to be far from your eye.
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Aperture rears ("peep" sights) and open rears ("notch," "V-notch", etc.) work somewhat differently.

For aperture sights to work best, they need to be very close to your eye, and they do indeed "ghost" out of focus. You will automatically center your view, and the front sight, through the very middle of that circle.

Open or v-notch sights work best when they are forward quite a bit. You do have to shift your focus between the rear sight, the front sight, and the target -- then back to the front sight as you break the shot. They don't work well if you cannot clarify the notch in your focus so they need to be a bit farther away from your eye.

This is why pistol sights work, even though they are relatively quite close together, and why you don't see effective aperture sights mounted on handguns. (Your eye is too far away from the rear sight for it to "ghost out" as it should.) This is one of the major complaints with the Mojo sights available for AKs and SKSs, which claim to give you an aperture sight to replace the v-notch that came from the factory. The problem is, where that notch sight sits is too far forward for apertures to work. So, while those rear sights are rings instead of a notch, they are working like normal "open" sights and that isn't much of an improvement over the factory units at all.

Believe it or not, Wiki has a really good discussion of all of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_sight Read the section under "types of sights" and all will become clear. Or blurry, whichever is appropriate. :)
 
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Anyone on this forum acquire the rear sight first?
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Let's not be too hasty (or smug).

You absolutely DO locate your rear aiming point first when firing a long arm. When shooting a shotgun, or shooting a rifle very quickly, you can dispense with locating the rear sight itself (and obviously there isn't one on a shotgun anyway). Your practiced, repeatable location of your eye over the stock, via your cheek weld, gives you a fixed rear aiming point from which you can place the front sight onto the target.

Putting the front sight on target first indicates a need to jink around the butt of the gun to align the rear sight, which would be non-conducive to quick or accurate shooting. Everything starts with the "mount" of the gun which, again, establishes your rear aiming point.

The idea of a front-sight focus and the "front sight, press" mantra have almost everything to do with close, fast "action" pistol shooting where the front sight is all that is needed to establish an approximate point of aim on a close target that must be engaged in a very short period of time -- where the target is close enough not to need a more complete sight picture, and the time is short enough not to allow you to establish one. Further, in handgun shooting, is actually IS possible to put the front sight on target first, and then "dress" the sight picture by bringing the rear sight into better alignment. Doing that with a long gun, with the butt into your shoulder and your cheek weld in place would be futile.
...

Anyone been to Rear Sight Academy? :)
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How is it that renaming a certain establishment in this way seems to make so very much sense? :D ("Hey dudes, the wife and I just bought into a condo up at Rear Sight! I'm going to get 1/2 off all my classes and a free HAT!" ROTFL!)
 
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How is it that renaming a certain establishment in this way seems to make so very much sense?
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I pictured a firing line of slightly overweight doctors tracking their pistol muzzles left and right with eyes firmly glued to the rear sights the world beyond a blur.... Zip-line after lunch.

Your practiced, repeatable location of your eye over the stock, via your cheek weld, gives you a located rear aiming point and then you put the front sight on target.
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Never thought of it that way. hmmmm....
I was taught to shoulder the weapon in such a way that the front sight post or bead (or scope objective) interposes itself between eye and target.
 
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