7mm venezuelan mauser

[Patrick Chadwick]

Thanks for the photos. The foresight blade appears to be very short. However before rushing out and getting a higher one, you need to know "How high". And that means that you need to have more-or-less the right ammo and be quite consistent in the way you aim.

So I am now going to be impudent enough to advise you as to how to aim your rifle. Cheeky, I know, for a grandpa who needs to keep his glasses on a string round his neck so they don't get lost, but there is something to be learnt about using open sights that I have not yet found in modern books on target shooting.

For open sights, the usual aim is with the tip of the blade at "6 o'clock", i.e. with the merest crack of white between the tip of the blade and the bottom of the black of the target. The difficulty is to have the smallest strip of white, WITHOUT the foresight blade merging into the black. As soon as that happens, you have lost control of the height of your aim, and many targets, including my own, tend to look like a vertical pillar-box slit - two inches wide, but eight inches tall!

So practice this "6 o'clock hold" until it is the natural way to aim with open sights, and you have reduced the height of the group to something more like 4". If you can do much better than that with a carbine at 100 meters or yards, then you are a natural talent and don't need my advice.
Now we come the bit the books (at least, the modern ones) don't tell you. You will often see sketches suggesting that you aim like this:

Attachment 24295

Alas, with real-world eyes, what you are likely to see is more like this:

Attachment 24297

And with many open sighted rifles, even this:

Attachment 24296

- because the V is wider than the entire target frame. It is just not possible to line up the target black and foresight on the top of the V with any great precision. An expert shot with the Martini, Gerd Claes, has aptly described this view as "looking at the Great Pyramid through a railway cutting". And he can nevertheless shoot very well indeed, because he learnt to re-apply old knowledge that can be found buried in 19th century training instructions - namely, that the foresight should be held NOT at the top of the V, but deep down, and in fact with the depth varied according to lighting conditions and range. That is how riflemen were trained to use percussion rifles in the days when the backsights only had three or four settings - if any. The wide view at the top of the V was for what, in modern jargon, is termed "rapid target acquisition. The sighting was then taken more or less "fine" according to range and light conditions.

If you experiment, you will observe that as the foresight blade and the black sink down into the V, the whole picture sharpens up, being sharpest just before the blade disappears.

Attachment 24298

As with the sliver of white between the blade and the black, you have to find out by experiment just how far you can go and still hold a reliable, repeatable sight picture. I tried it on my own Martini, and, if you will excuse a muddled metaphor, it was an eye-opener. To be a bit more scientific, the local restriction of the optical aperture sharpens the focus.
I seriously recommend that you try this out until you are happy that you can hold the aim. It may be more awkward at first than the “all level” method, but if you persevere you will achieve better results. With better grouping you will be better able to judge just how high the foresight blade needs to be.

Yes, I know it looks wierd at first. But please give it a try! Your carbine may positively surprise you!

Patrick

[ProfessrH]

Hello, Everyone.

Brand new here. Joined, in fact, to thank Patrick Chadwick for that excellent bit on iron sights and sight pictures. Off to the range tomorrow to see about putting some of this new info to work.

ProfessrH

[jmoore]

To Patrick Chadwick: I've stolen your last illustation for use when describing the Carcano sight picture at 100 yards, if you don't mind!



Very useful indeed!

[Patrick Chadwick]

if you don't mind!

No problem, if you acknowledge the source!