No4 sight question - from Peter Laidler's article

[Gaijin]

Good morning,
I have been trying to do as much research and reading as I can regarding this Long Branch Lee-Enfield in my care at the moment.

After reading Mr. Laidler's article "FORESIGHTS and the No4 rifle", I of course went to carefully inspecting the sight on this rifle.

From the last paragraph of the article:

But there’s a little more……………. Our acceptable zeroing standards state after
zeroing, the blade of the foresight will overhang or be level with the edge of the
foresight block. If the edge is inboard of the edge of the block, then it indicates that
something is wrong with the rifle. BUT, it was discovered that while the UK made
foresight blade bases were .38” wide, due to a tolerance error, the Canadian bases
were .43” wide. Without going into the technicalities, a rifle fitted with a Canadian .
43” wide base could fail the zeroing criteria unnecessarily. So these Canadian .43”
wide blades were all declared obsolete and withdrawn.

The blade base width (stamped LB) on this rifle measures .429/.428". I would say that it is certainly within the tolerance of the .43" dimension mentioned in the article.

What I found is probably expected given the location of manufacture, but I remain unsure of how this affects anything.

My question is...
If I have a wider sight base that was declared obsolete, does this make this rifle just a touch more desirable (rare)? Is there anything else that this may impact?

Will the front sight protector still fit properly? I just found one that I liked and ordered it yesterday - not knowing anything about this sight blade base 'deviation' at the time. The front sight protector is completely missing, so I have nothing to compare it to.

Thank you in advance for any and all feedback!

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