Sighting Aid

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Chris3755
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I have an old man's eyes and it is often hard to focus on the open sights of my handguns when I'm target shooting or even just plinking. I was familiar with the old aperature sight discs that can be clipped on glasses but was never interested in buying them for whatever reason, maybe my aversion to spending money! I saw a product a while back that advertised a stick on paper aperature that would do the job of a sight disc. Problem was, I didn't buy those right away and when I decided to try them the company was out of business. Being very industrious I decided to make my own. If any of you are like me, you get stick on address labels in the mail from various organizations and soon have such a stockpile that they get thrown away eventually. I figured if I punched a pinhole or similar aperature size in one of these labels I could stick it on my glasses and it would be the same as a sight disc! In the pictures I show how I used a leather punch to put holes in the label and then stick it on my glass lens. It ain't perfect but it does work and I can attest to how it sharpens the sight picture when I target practice. If any of you are interested try it and it may surprise you. Chris
 
Punch and Sticker
 
Aperature hole
 
Sticker on Glass Lens
 

mworkmansr
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The problem is...

Would that be legal for CAS?
It probably works great, but if I showed up at the range wearing a getup like that, I'd have to shoot a few of the guys while they were rolling around on the ground.
I have found that, if I tilt my head back a bit, my trifocals will help the front sight focus. God, we never talked about stuff like this when we were 25.
100_0670
Here I am supervising a proctoscope exam on a civil war cannon. What we won't do when we get too old to chase cars and girls.
 

Don't worry. Be happy.

Chris3755
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If........

....you find some clear labels you can always say they are invisible and nobody will know! Just off hand I really don't know much about the rules for CAS but I bet if an old time cowboy figured this would give him an edge he'd a used it...... Life ain't always about the rules, sometimes it's about what helps you stay in the game. You look entirely at home supervising so I would stick with it and demand a consulting fee. Chris

Mak
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Aperture

Chris, what you have there should work great, its the same principle behind the aperture sight, which has for centuries remained the penultimate in iron sights. The advantage of making your own apertures is that you can custom size them for your needs. The entire thing is getting a nice, round hole.  Wonder if a dremel tool would cut a nice hole, or wreck the paper?

I have a number of friends who enjoy SASS events. Extrapolating from their commentary, pinpoint accuracy is not the primary concern, so they probably haven't thought at all about apertures.

I was wondering about the rubber there on that cannon chassis-not quite period, MW!!! I assume, radial tires?

mworkmansr
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Tires on cannon

Yer right, MAK. The guy who gave it to me has been an archeologist of southern civil war battlefields for sixty years or so. He raised two ironclads from rivers in Georgia. They are in museums now. The cannon has kind of a vague history, but I suspect it may have been associated with one of the ironclads. It has US 1864 cast in its top. Of course, the wooden caisson would have rotted away over a hundred years or so. He made the present caisson from an old hay wagon. He gave the cannon as well as a ball mold for it to me because he was moving from Philadelphia, MS to Washington, DC to move into assisted living.
It shoots well now that I have smoothed the bore and removed the old crusty rust. You can see it go off at youtube if you do a search for "caleb shoots + cannon". That's my grandson firing down the pasture into a ridge on the other side of the creek about 350 yds away. Makes a nice boom. I would like to fire it down the cotton field to get some elevation data. The cotton field is about 800 yds long and, since it has been harvested, I could see the dust when it hit.

Don't worry. Be happy.

Mak
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Ha!

MW, wish you had a link to go to to watch this piece in all its glory. Its amazing how well made our forefathers' "primitive" weaponry was, I highly doubt any current tricked out piece would be in any kind of shooting shape after a long hiatus in the river bottom mud!
Most likely, with today's artillery, we'd all be worried about radiation, or something similar!

Chris3755
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Cannon

Mak: I'm not much at embed or whatever,try this. Chris
 
http://www.youtube.com/embed/1TKEYjlYXI4