Misc shooty stuff
Posted By matt on June 9, 2009
You know that burger king mascot dude?
Who, like, shows up at the end of peoples’ beds all Donnie Darko creepy
in the commercials?
I want to see someone do a bedstand draw and mozambique the dude.
That’ll teach him to sneak up in the middle of the night.
In other news, I ordered some 3-dot fiber optic Novak sights for my PT1911. The Heinie sights are lame. Let me explain.
The sight picture is two vertical dots, which you line up one on top of each other. This helps with left/right alignment, but not up down. In order to do up/down alignment, you have to level the sights at the top. This is conventional, but not fast.
Consider the alternate (which is what I’m used to) – three horizontal dots. Your eye naturally lines them up, so rather than trying to line up the top of a bunch of black squares, you line up the centers of three dots. Left/right is handled by the fact that you line up the center post in the rear notch.
Doing a little looking around, apparently I am not alone here – in late 2008, Taurus changed from the Heinie sights to Novak sights.
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I personally prefer vertically-oriented sights. I've never used the Heinie Straight Eights, but I have XS Big Dots on my Kahr and they are just perfect. Left/right sight alignment is mostly an issue of a proper and consistent grip. I find that regardless of the sights mounted, with most handguns I can draw and present with my eyes closed and have a very acceptable degree of left/right alignment. The “dot the i” configuration of the Big Dots helps me quickly turn “acceptable” into “excellent”, as it is very easy to align. Up/down alignment is just as easy, by dropping the front dot right on top of the rear post. I find it to be very fast and it can also be very accurate when necessary.
My major problem with three-dot sights is aiming with both eyes open. When I do that, I see six dots swimming around in my sight picture, and it's difficult for me to distinguish between the front and rear sights. Up/down alignment is easy, but left/right becomes a bit of a challenge. Frankly, six dots in my two-eye sight picture is just a bit of an overload. With the much simplified (and for me, more intuitive) sight picture of the XS Big Dots, I tend to shoot much faster without any loss of accuracy.
Actually, I was going to get XS big dots, except they don't make one for my PT1911. I could get something which might work and then would have to recut the dovetails, but I really don't have time for that right now, and want to shoot the gun. Maybe in the future.
Here's the difference:
With the XS sights, you put the dot right on top of the I, right? If it's floating a few mm above the I, that's wrong, right? Well, that's what I would call “natural” – the “dot the i” is “place the dot vertically aligned so that its center is right above the centerline of the bar, and horizontally aligned so you see the whole dot, with no gap between it and the bar, and no “flat spot” on the bottom of the circle”.
(Please correct me if I misunderstand the XS sight picture).
With these straight 8 sights, if you put the front dot just above the rear dot, you will be hitting the dirt at 50 feet. You need to have the top of the front sight even with the tops of the rear sights (just as you would if there were no dots), which means that there needs to be about 2mm vertical spacing between the two dots. So, instead of:
it's more like:
.
.
Dig?
And this is what throws me. I was sighting it like I would an XS sight, and hitting the dirt. Finally, when I figured it out I managed to get it on paper… and then got annoyed with how they work.
i can't stand figure 8 sights, which is why i stick to three-dot. it's just so much more happy that way.
well, tritium or fiber 3 dot is the happiest for me…
Damn. Now I want to try the figure 8s but, don't know anyone with them off hand…will have to ask around the club.
If I was more graphically inclined, I'd photoshop a picture of the BK King the way you describe, too.