One thing that got me more focused on the front site was low light shooting with tritium in front sight only.
I like contrast between front and rear. Glowing front only caused me to get better with my index too. Never goin' back.
Ameriglo Bold orange/tritium front with OEM rear is my preferrence.
Went to range yesterday to work on a contrarily feeding .22. Tossed my G26.5 in the range bag with a few (precious) 9mm rounds, really just to see if I could still shoot iron sights (been almost exclusively shooting red dots, as irons have gotten fuzzy with age). G26 has black rear and red FO front (to be honest, I can't remember who I bought those sights from).
Ran target out to 10 yards, and shot a 10-rd group. Had light in shooting booth turned off, as I done with red dot. Thus, sights appeared black on black. Without thinking about "black" FO, I defaulted to top of front sight on center of POA. Group was reasonably tight, aligned laterally, but about three inches low.
Thought about it, then repeated process, with booth light on, and putting center of FO (now glowing) on POA. Group was back where it should have been.
Interestingly, thinking about it later, I don't recall focusing tightly on front sight beyond the first shot with either group. Recollection is that I was seeing sights and target in about equally slightly fuzzy focus.
If there's a point here, and I'm not sure myself that there is, it is that perhaps general focus either way (sights or target) can work, as long as there's good alignment, and, of course, trigger control.
That's where all of my sights are zeroed: top of the front sight.Originally Posted by flyrodr
“There is no growth in the comfort zone.”--Jocko Willink
"You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
I dislike drive the dot. How am I supposed to hit something that I can’t see because it is covered by the front sight?
im strong, i can run faster than train
This is a bit of a personal preference, I reckon. I got used to drive the dot shooting HKs, and prefer it. All my Glocks are set up that way. I don't perceive a "dot" (front sight dot) covering a significant part of the target, to be honest.
A stock Glock Polymer front sight dot is about 0.0895" in diameter. Using my eye relief distance (31"), some basic math shows that "dot" covers approximately 2.5" at 25 yards (Law of Similar Triangles, viz: 900" * (0.0895"/31")=2.584" ), which is inside the black of a NRA B-8 "9" ring (5.54").
But I totally get some like a "top of sight hold" vs. drive the dot. It's all good.
I like orange front sights of various flavors — orange fingernail paint on my SuperCommander, orange FO on my PMC9, and absolutely every Glock gets Hacks.
However, there are times at indoor ranges (specifically, and not one specific range) that the orange sights get fuzzy (regardless of vision correction). I live with it and drive on, haven’t found a fix. I don’t have the same problem with my other preference, black serrated with unlined tritium, but my first shot at 7y to a 2” dot is faster with the orange. That’s my gold standard metric, so I have about 50/50 among my guns at this point.
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Ditto! And when I go to FO, on some setups, because of either the particular sight design - - - center the "dot" (FO) instead of top of front sight - - - or how I align it (FO "too low" relative to rear), I shoot low.
But then, straight black irons, three dot, FO, red dot - - - a person just has to figure which works best for him/her, and keep guns set up that way as consistently as possible. Or, if different, remember (hopefully) that Gun X requires a different sight picture than Gun Y. Not something I'd feel too comfortable doing under stress.
I think the issue is there's no perfect sight for every environment, whatever you go with us gonna be great in some situations, and in some, less so. Always gonna find places and lighting where it washes out, has lost contrast, etc.
Welcome those opportunities, to know and learn shortcomings.....shoot at as many different types of targets, in different lighting conditions, with as many different backdrop types as you can, to how your sights will work in different environments.
I shot irons in a match for the first time in a long time last Tuesday. The stage where i performed the best is where I target focused (habit after using a taped over red dot a lot). I had the least points down, the fastest transitions, and the fastest splits. Meanwhile, hard front sight focus on the last stage rewarded me with about the same on points down, with slow transitions and splits.
So, i'll be doing more experimentation with Target focus, rather than front sight focus.
Excellent podcast, thanks for sharing.
I've been experimenting with target focus and iron sights for about a year, after reading some of the other posts here. I like it, but I do lose some accuracy on difficult targets. For example, on a B-8 at 25yd I will drop about 10 points when I use target focus. But that is much less degradation in accuracy than I originally imagined.
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