Trijicon HD's

[BaiHu]

I have the orange P30 Trijicon HD sights and love 'em.

Here are links from PF on these sights and comparisons/discussion:

http://pistol-forum.com/showthread.p...rijicon+sights

http://pistol-forum.com/showthread.p...rijicon+sights

[1slow]

I have the Orange HDs on HK45, P30 9mm, HK P2000SK 9mm. My eyes do better with the orange. YMMV. I want tritium. The HD's orange ring helps in dim light before it is dark enough for tritium to be useful.
I see them better than my 3 dot Tritium Warren Tactical (my previous favorite), particularly in dim light. My near vision has deteriorated some so the HDs help.
My 25 yard groups with HDs are as good or better than with the Warrens on my GL17 or with stock sights on my HKs.

[JHC]

I've taken the HD's off my guns that had them.

They worked well for short to medium distance high probability targets. But for me no better than Heinies or Warrens. I found as distance increased especially on smaller targets, the dot did such a good job of drawing my attention I had to slow right down and force myself to focus on the top of the front sight blade , and then constantly battle the siren call of looking at it again. I decided that for me that the amount of "visual discipline" they required wasn't worth it. I've noticed much better scoring on longer tighter shots since they came off. With no loss of speed or accuracy on closer bigger targets.

I was raised with 6:00 hold and shoot everything that way except up close and fast. Some gun sight combos work out to shooting behind the dot for POI. Is that the case with your gun sight combo?

For those set up that way, I can certainly see the need for a narrow front.

[LtDave]

I have 2 sets of HD sights, both on Sigs. On a P239 9mm, they shoot to the top of the sights which is what I prefer. On a P229 .40, they shoot to the dots :-(

[BoppaBear]

Running them on my sk and my P30. No issues at all. Took a couple sessions to get the sight picture right, but all has been well since. Orange front on both.

[ASH556]

I have the Yellow HD's on one full size M&P 9mm and just bought a set for my backup M&P. These are the fastest, most consistently accurate sights I've used, but not the most precisely accurate sights I've used. In other words, I can pretty much shoot 5" groups freehand @ 25 on-demand with these sights. However, no matter how slow I go or how much time I take, I cannot shoot better than 4-5" groups with the pistol. With other sights (factory 3-dot's) I can make the pistol do 3" groups. However, I have to take a lot more time and care with the 3-dots to make them shoot that well. If not, then it's much worse than what I can easily do with the HD's. I suppose the tradeoff is worthwhile given the use of the pistol (defense, not bullseye matches).

[GMSweet]

New guy here, but I thought I would add my experience to this thread for what it's worth. Since I'm a rookie by all definitions, please feel free to take this with a huge grain of salt; I'm just sharing a little portion of my journey.

I'm a new shooter as of October last year. I purchased a M&P 9FS with a thumb safety and shortly afterwards replaced the stock 3-dot sights with the orange Trijicon HDs. I've run around 2000 rounds through the pistol with these sights and only as of recent I have been wondering my 25-yard accuracy hasn't improved much. Of course it's 99% me, but after reading a few threads here, I put my stock 3-dots back on and lo and behold my accuracy improved so that I'm only mostly terrible not completely terrible; I could put most of my rounds into an 8 inch circle at 20 yards. Like I said, mostly terrible, but improving.

Like any good engineer, I put the Trijicon's back on and went to work with dry-fire and live fire. Sure enough, my long distance accuracy went downhill again. 10 yards and in and I'm doing OK against paper targets that don't move, but after that I'm struggling. I've been trying to find out what isn't working for me (aside from it being just me) and I found that the Trijicon sight is both taller and wider than my stock front sight. My HD comes in at .215" tall from the top of the slide compared to .160" on the factory and is .144" wide compared to .138" wide on the factory. Some experimenting with the 10-8 scaled target and the fronts sight mounted to a piece of metal showed me a decent difference in the amount of the target that was covered. At 25-yards, the formula's I ran show the sight covering 7.2" x 4.8" of the target which is around 2" more height wise compared to the stock sights.

Armed with the new knowledge and a few ways to overcome it, I went back to the range today to see if I could improve. Then, it happened, my orange ring popped off and hit me in the forehead. I wasn't sure what it was but as I recovered the front sight I had black sights. "What? Grrr! Really?" Had I been thinking more about my shooting rather than my sight just breaking, I would've enjoyed a nice string with black sights to see how I liked them, but instead I looked for and found the orange ring. I only had another 8 rounds to go anyway and I was already pummeled by my first attempt at a dot torture string. So I pushed the ring back in, finished up and came home. The ring ended up splitting in half leaving a portion of the orange in and a portion out.

So that's my little story about the Trijicon HDs. I'm not sure I'm sold on them and once I get the replacement from Trijicon, I'll take another look. I have a set of Heinie Ledge's as well as a set of AmeriGlo SW-802s coming. I'll line them up, test 'em out and see what works for me. I'm not sure I'm sold on the U-Notch yet, even though I know the bottom of the sight profile shouldn't even be registering with me.

And for those who were wondering, yes, the sights were pushed in with the MGW tool; I didn't drift them with a big hammer.

Thanks for the great site here. This is the first time I felt I've had something to share that wasn't already in a thread shared by someone else. There's a ton of great experience and information here for the new shooter!

Matt