Do You Adjust Your Rear Sight?

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I'm close to CPE,
I've always been a six O'clock shooter.
Sight most of mine to 2" above POA at 25.
I'll file or add sights as needed (if I can't just install or make a new one).

While I've turned SAA barrels in or out slightly to line up a favorite load for windage,
bending the barrel on a pistol is a new one to me.
But then again, Les Bauska sure knew how to straighten a rifle barrel
with a press and his eyeball, so who can say.
Straightening with a press is more like an art than a science IMO.

JT
 
I think I messed with the rear sight just once, trying to get a gun to shoot just a hair to the left.


Speaking for myself, I am much more likely to attribute any aim issues to either myself or the way the ammo shoots in the gun. Most of what I dealt with early on was fixed sight anyway. I generally view adjustable sights as a nice luxury to have, but by no means required.
 
I adjust mine once, to zero for 25 yards, then leave it alone. My M19 is the only revolver I have with an adjustable sight, and I enjoy precision target shooting with it (as opposed to self defense or combat style). I figure if I can't hit body mass at less than 25 yards without the sights, I should just quit.
 
I have sold a number of handguns just because their Point of Impact was too far from Point of Aim to suit me, so yes I adjust the rear sights when I can. On fixed sight handguns I file the front sight and file the rear notch if the POI seems salvageable with a bit of effort. If not, it's gone.

Imprecision is easy enough to accomplish if it is not required in a particular situation. But I want the capability of precision and accuracy should I judge the need to arise.

Just my preference, if you disagree, that's cool. No need for either of us to lose sleep on the issue.
 
A reminder: the topic of the thread is simply "do you adjust them?", not "how to use them". Posts that mainly seem to discuss the latter will be deleted.
 
I don't care for adjustable sights on pistols. Too damned fragile for me. If you're just sitting in a hunting blind and not wearing a revolver while cutting firewood, fencing, pushing brush with a tractor, or riding horseback, clambering over or through barbed wire fences, i.e.- working, you're probably not going to have problems with adjustable sights. When I was a kid I was shooting my Dad's Colt Gov't Model on which he'd had a Bomar adjustable rear sight installed. I squeezed a round off and felt something hit me in the forehead. The rear blade of the sight had snapped off. I know, 1-in-1000 odds, but it happened. I do have a couple of revolvers with adjustable sights, a Flat Top Blackhawk and a Security Six, and I've sighted each in. But if those revolvers aren't shooting to the sights, I damn sure don't go twiddling with the adjustment because 100% of the time, it's my fault. Same with any good fixed sight revolver, if it's not shooting where it's supposed to, it's always my fault and is always directly traceable to a lack of practice.

My modus operandi with my fixed sight revolvers is to sight them in, or regulate the sights, not from the bench but from a seated back rested position with my hunting load as this is always the most important load I use. All other loads are fired with elevation adjustments, but I find this needed very rarely. At 50 yds. there's not enough POI difference in a 258 gr. Keith SWC @ 1000 fps and a 255 gr. RN @ 775 fps to worry with. Last year I popped a blue quail with the latter load at about 25 yds and just held the sights as though I were using my hunting load.

35W
 
At one point in my mostly misspent life I was the Manager of a indoor shooting range. I generally observe three very different groups of people that adjusted the sights.

1. The first group is one we are all familiar with. The macho know-it-all that has not mastered (or even understands) the fundamentals of pistol shooting. He would go out onto the range, blast away with some rounds getting some type of pattern that most of us would not even call a group, then would blame the sights for being "off" and out came the screwdriver.

2. The second group are the precision shooters, such as Bullseye. They are milking every bit of accuracy they can so for them windage is not desirable. When they change loads they rezero the gun. Until then the gun stays at the same setting with the shooter carefully protecting the gun from bumps that will knock the sights out of adjustment.

3. I belong to the third group; Those of us with eyesight problems. I am cross-eye dominant. Bit of bummer for fixed sighted guns but I have learned how to compensate.

I can only recall adjusting the sights on my new guns on two occasions. Used ones are a exception. (See Shooter Group #1).

The first time was on my Colt Gold Cup. This is a wonderfully accurate gun that is capable of one inch groups at 25 yards. (The shooter isn't but that is another story). I was on the range one day finishing putting 50 rounds on 230 gr. bullets into a very nice 1 1/2" group when round 47 went low into the 9 ring. Surprised but thinking I got a bit lazy I bored down and round 48 went lower into the 8 ring. Now I knew it was the guns fault and, sure enough, the round pin that holds the rear sight in place had walked itself out of the hole and was barely holding the sight assembly onto the gun. (This is a common problem with Series 70 Gold Cups.) So after replacing the roll pin I had to rezero the gun.

The other gun is a Ruger Vaquero that shot several inches to the left. As it was one of pair I knew the barrel needing tweaking. I had a gunsmith correct the windage when I had some other work done on the gun.

p.s. I suppose tweaking the barrel of a fixed sight handgun to shoot p.o.a. is actually adjusting the front sight, not the rear.
 
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BSA1

I had the same problem with the rear sight pin on both my Colt Trooper Mk.III and with my Series 70 Gold Cup. On the Trooper the pin actually broke in half while the Gold Cup pin had a habit of walking out of it's hole. I used a section of drill bit to replace the pin and thus the pin problem was solved.
 
BSA1 said:
I was on the one day finishing putting 50 rounds on 230 gr. bullets into a very nice 1 1/2" group when round 47 went low into the 9 ring. Surprised but thinking I got a bit lazy I bored down and round 48 went lower into the 8 ring. Now I knew it was the guns fault and, sure enough, the round pin that holds the rear sight in place had walked itself out of the hole and was barely holding the sight assemble onto the gun. (This is a common problem with Series 70 Gold Cups.) So after replacing the roll pin I had to rezero the gun.
Click to expand...

Reminds me of something that happened to me in CAS a couple of years ago. My Main Match rifle is a replica of the 1860 Henry Lever Rifle. Big blade front sight and a generous semi-buckhorn rear sight. As I think I have stated elsewhere in this thread, pin point accuracy is not a requirement (at least for me) in this sport. The ability to repeatedly hit the target is. So one day, half way through a match, suddenly I couldn't hit anything with my rifle. Three or four misses out of ten is pretty bad. At first I blamed myself, my bad eyesight, and perhaps flinching for the misses. Then I took a look at my rear sight. The Henry rifle has an octagon barrel, and it was at once obvious that the rear sight was not centered on the barrel as it should have been. Something had happened and the sight had slid in its dovetail to one side, causing my misses. I was quickly able to drift the sight back where it belonged and the rifle began shooting again like the champ that it is. But now, just before I go to the firing line I make sure the rear sight is centered on the barrel the way it should be.
 
With the informal cut-throat handgun benchrest target shooters at 25 and 50 yards that I have to shoot against adjustable sights are a necessity. The loser gets the ribbing and buys the beer. We're always looking for the magical powder and load and wadcutter (mostly) bullet.
 
I have adjustable sights on my current Ruger Security Six adjusted once for 125gr +P .38 Spl when I acquired it in 2006, left alone since then. If I make a major switch in ammo (say to 158gr .357, or start shooting it in the black powder matches) the adjustable sights might be useful.

Thirty years ago when I first got my Mark II Ruger, I zeroed it with fixed sights for six o'clock hold on a 3 inch bullseye at 25 yards, using .22 LR 40gr HV.
That included filing the front sight (which like a lot of new handgun front sights was too tall). And zeroed resting the heel of my palm on sandbags. I have not needed adjustment since then.
When I have found myself not hitting center with it offhand, it shows me I have developed (and need to correct) some flinch habit from shooting my .45 or 7.62x25 in the military matches.
 
I cannot even imagine having adjustable sights available and not adjusting them to point of impact.
 
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Bend the barrel?!? Holy cow! I do believe in the "old days", they bent the front sight right or left, not the barrel!

Do I adjust my rear sight on my handguns? Well, in all honesty, I've never had to. I have...ummm, lemme think here...3 semi-autos and one revolver, my wife has one semi-auto, and I've owned or shot a slew of others. I've never had, or felt the need, to adjust the rear sights...or the front sights either, for that matter.

And it's a moot point on my SAA, anyway.

If I really needed to adjust the rear sight, I'd likely do it once and that would be the end of it. With the variety of ammo I've shot over the years, I've noticed a far greater need to adjust for elevation than horizontal.
 
Mine have adjustable rears so I adjust them for the load they will be shot with. Some variables but largely POA is POI.
 
Unless I'm drawing a handgun from a place where it might snag on my clothing or unless I want a handgun to retain its look of traditional authenticity, I prefer adjustable sights on all of my handguns. I use many handguns for many different reasons and sometimes one gun is expected to have the point of impact agree with the point of aim in terms of elevation while using different bullet weights and types and/or different powder charges, requiring a sight change. Too, I think adjustable sights are generally easier to see with and, thus, easier to aim with.

I think the argument that adjustable sights are fragile is way over-blown. I've had and have used a lot of handguns over the past half century or so, most having adjustable sights, and I can recall only one incident when one got damaged: another le officer and I were attempting to arrest a parolee and we all ended up wrestling on the floor before he was subdued. In the process, a piece of the blade on the adjustable sight of my K-frame Smith & Wesson revolver was broken off. But the real point is that, if I had to use that revolver to save my and/or the other officer's life at that close range (a distance where most of these things tend go south at), no kind of sight, fixed, broken or otherwise, would have made one whit of difference in determining the outcome.

Finally, in my experience, it's not at all uncommon to get a brand new gun, straight out of the box, that needs the sight to be adjusted before it will "shoot straight".

All of which is why I insist on having adjustable sights on all of my handguns whenever practical.
 
i bought myself a birthday present last monday, a gently used glock 30. took it out to the "range" with some pmc 230 gn ball ammo. at 15 yards the gun shot 6 inches high (no wonder it looked brand new!). was thinking of how tall a front sight i needed when my dad said, "why don't you just file down the rear sight?". duh! so i put a piece of crocus cloth on the kitchen counter top, inverted the slide (no frame attached) and sanded the rear sight down .010". the gun then shot 4.5" high @ 28 yards with my 230 gn lrn load (750 fps). sanded another .004", now 2.75" high. sanded another .004" down to 2 inches high @ 34 yards and an inch, or so, high @ 15 yards.

just thought i'd share this "cheap" method of adjusting glock sights. and yes i adjust all my handguns to shoot where i want them to hit.

murf
 
I can't, for the life of me, imagine having a handgun with an adjustable sight and not using it. I have an aversion to that borders on paranoia to pointing a firearm at one point and expecting the bullet to impact somewhere else. It's just me, I guess, but I am kinda anal.
 
The KEY question that must be answered before touching the rear sight is;

Is it really the gun...

or

Is it me not following the fundamentals and touching off the round before the sight picture is perfect?

Unfortunately for me it is usually the latter.
 
BSA1 said:
The KEY question that must be answered before touching the rear sight is;

Is it really the gun...

or

Is it me not following the fundamentals and touching off the round before the sight picture is perfect?

Unfortunately for me it is usually the latter.
Click to expand...

Yeppers.

A good reason to put in some slow-fire, bench-rest shooting to be sure where the problem lies.

When I bought my Beretta 92FS (good Lord, has it really been more than a quarter century ago now?), I couldn't hit SQUAT with it, no matter how hard I tried. But I absolutely could not believe the problem was the gun or the sights.

I knuckled down, sat down, and put in some careful, slow-fire from a bench rest. And was able to hit EXACTLY where the gun was aiming.

I eventually figured out my problem was the trigger pull. The Beretta trigger pivots...my other pistol triggers pulled straight back (1911 style). Once I recognized this, it was a matter of paying attention to my trigger pull and learning the difference.
 
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