SLR -Fitted with double aperture rear sight

[Flying10uk]

Is any-one, please, able to tell me what is special about a Self Loading Rifle fitted with a Double Aperture Rear Sight and who may be have been issued with a SLR fitted with such sights if such a thing exists. The way the rifle was described it sounded as if it was unusual. My limited contact with SLRs comes from the Cadets which was years ago and, working from memory, they had a 2 position flip sight. Thank-you for any information.

Information

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[Peter Laidler]

The double leaf aperture was called the Hythe Sight. It was designed to give a large aperture for night shooting based on the Viet-Nam experience of mass attacks at dawn and dusk. Together with a half-turn foresight blade that housed a tritium vial. Night vision pout paid to it. The sights are not at all rare. They are also fully described in the L1A1 rifle user handbook. Available from Brian at BDL Ltd

[mrclark303]

I have the duel aperture hythe back sights fitted to my rifles and it does help to tighten up groups via the smaller aperture.

I believe they were fitted for Army target shooting team use after their primary use ended.

Sal at MDW supplies gets the Hythe back sights occasionally and I have a small number of L5A1 front sight posts I bought from him a couple of years ago, they obviously have long expired tritium and I am still looking for the retaining spring and screw, anyone with a lead on these?

Never came across a rifle with any of the three variants of the tritium foresight fitted though, so I assume they were withdrawn long before the the L1A1 left service?

[Gil Boyd]

Were always preferred for SNAP shooting on the falling plates ranges in Sennybridge CQB

[Flying10uk]

The reason that I asked was because an old spec UK deac recently came up for sale fitted with this sight which I had never heard off and it was described as being very rare in the advert. I thought that I had better find out a bit more before buying the rifle but when I phoned back today it had already been sold this morning. Thanks

[mrclark303]

Well, not very rare, but not that easy to come by either these days, a complete Hythe back sight unit is about £65 when you can find one, a standard unit is £25 - £45 .

[Peter Laidler]

I seem to think that they just faded out of use without actually being made obsolete as such. The small aperture meany the ability to acquire the target took slightly longer because of the much smaller field of view.

We used the sights on night shoots during 4 and 8 RAR pre-deployment training to SVN in Malaya and the scores were dismal

[muffett.2008]

Yep, used in the teams as the preferred option.......Attachment 72245
bottom right in plastic packet.

[Gil Boyd]

I must say I preferred it especially IS operations as you never knew when you were going to be zapped, and the bigger the hole made sure they kept their heads down till "i" was ready to respond adequately and accurately

[Flying10uk]

Thank-you for all this interesting information on something that I hadn't known existed until recently. I need to make a slight correction to my last post, in order to be fair to the dealer concerned, which was caused by having a bad memory and not having the actual advert in front of me when writing the post. The advert read that the sight was rare not very rare as I stated and so many apologies for that mistake.


So if I have understood matters correctly a SLR with this type of rear sight will also have a different fore-sight fitted too? Would it be a simple job to replace the original standard sights or would there be modifications that would need to be undone? Thank-you to everyone for all the information.