Long story short, I can't focus on the front sight anymore without tilting my head so far back with my progressive lenses that I might shoot the sky. I will be 60 this year and all of a sudden my progressive lenses are not working for me. I went to the eye doctor and got a new pair of glasses and they are not working. I plan to re-contact the Dr. and try again maybe with bifocals. I am interested in what has worked for others.
I have the same situation. I’ve learned to be comfortable with a less than optimal sight picture with either a bright orange or gold bead front and a black serrated rear. As my eyes progress I’ve been moving more and more to RDS, which solves it for me.
Ken
BBI: ...”you better not forget the safe word because shit's about to get weird”...
revchuck38: ...”mo' ammo is mo' betta' unless you're swimming or on fire.”
64 next month. I had this problem a couple years back, switched to red dots, no more issues.
Is running a MRDS an option or do you have to stick with irons? How about a pair of single focus glasses set to the range of your front sight? (I had a pair made for the range, they worked very very well but kinda impractical for edc).
Steve, consider taking your prescription to the optometrist and ask them to make you a set of lenses with the reading plane (which you want for front sight) on the top instead of the bottom. Works wonders. If your local optometrist won't do it, SSP eyewear (Google will get ya there) will do it for ya.
Alternatives include, of course, RDS on the carry pistol or if that's too bulky, try Advantage Tactical sights. They're the best non-optics "geezer sights" solution this geezer has found so far.
Heavy and RJ thanks for the advice. I have started down the red dot road with a trijicon rmr and holosun SCS. I am bummed if that is the future.
Mas, thank you for the glasses advice, I will do that. I read about it for auto mechanics but didn't think about shooting. When I took your class in 1994 I think I could see a little better.
I’m 71, and I’m in the same boat as well. I’ve replaced the sights on many of my autoloaders with Ameriglo sights, and I’ve painted the front sights on my revolvers bright fluorescent red to give the same effect. I tried a dot on one of my pistols and decided retraining myself from 50 years of front sight focus wasn’t worth the effort and expense.Originally Posted by HeavyDuty
My progressive lenses have the computer-distance part more toward the middle of the lens so they work relatively well with the sights.
Do you wear contacts?
--Jason--
I used to think the Warren/Sevigny competition sights were the best thing that ever happened to Glock 19's & 34's. I recently picked up a 19.5 & put on an, old, leftover set of WS, though the tritium dot is pretty much dead and the thin white ring around it is long faded into obscurity. I wanted to test my own personal sorta Tom Givens theory that a nice orange blade is really all I needed. I cheerfully paint the whole front blade with a white primer & a couple blaze orange topcoats.
I get to the range only to find that I definitely shoot drive the dot, POA/POI. I'd probably been that long before I acknowledged it. My eyes were once young enough that I mostly shot the Warren's based on the white outlined tritium dot. Their tall, thin profile was largely irrelevant to my needs...but it was always there, so I thought it must be right. I quickly learn that treating the entire Warren front like a dot results in very high hits. A true 6 o'clock hold was needed for bulls. Utterly antithetical to how I "think" I know how to shoot these days.
I've got a set of these en route, will advise.
I did for about 33 years, soft lenses.
I'm in the early stages of moving to RDS for exactly the reasons you describe. Thankful it took this long; it's time though. Shooting with RDS is fun, irons have just recently become work.
I figure shooting is 1% of the time and the other 99% is the rest of life... so the gear needs to be adapted to work with everything else I'm doing. Here in California that means direct milling, because pretty much anything with a factory optics cut is off-roster.
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