Tilting the sights (rather than the grip)

[Funny Farmer]

Hi all,
I saw that the new FWB 44 allows to swivel the sights if you prefer a more angled hold. This seems a lot better than to adjust the grip for an angle as the relative position of your finger towards the trigger remains unchanged.

Now I have to idea to do the same thing with my Steyr LP2. The rear sight is fastened by a single center screw and two small pins that determine the sighting plane. Drilling new holes for these pins would allow the sight to be canted. Of course I would have to re-adjust the aiming point.

Just wondering - has anybody done this before and is there any unexpected downside?

[BenEnglishTX]

...has anybody done this before and is there any unexpected downside?

I've wondered about doing it on a 50M pistol because I have a strong tendency to cant outward/palm up. I'm always fighting it. But that's neither here nor there.

I've done this, quite radically, in a completely unrelated pistol shooting sport. The one big downside was that once the sights are flopped over you must ensure that the center of the sight line is still perfectly aligned over the bore when everything is in shooting position. Generally, that's not the case. If the aligned sights aren't perfectly over the boreline, the result is that every time you adjust the rear sight for windage your elevation changes. Adjust elevation and windage changes.

For some sports, this doesn't matter. In the action pistol sports when use of the weak hand is mandated, there's a slight gain in strength and controllability when the pistol is slightly canted inward, palm down. Of course, they're typically shooting at targets where the X-ring is 4 inches, the 10-ring is 8, and 25 yards is considered a ridiculously long shot. At 10 yards, even a radical cant doesn't screw up accuracy bad enough to matter. (Addendum: Add some Hollywood firearms "trainers" who started exaggerating this technique more than 30 years ago and the end result is today's "gangsta stance", with the pistol 90 degrees out of alignment.)

In the real world, where I was shooting in matches that required a great deal more precision, I found it to be more trouble that it's worth unless the particular design of the pistol allows the canted sights to remain plumb to the bore. Otherwise, the windage sight adjustments needed to compensate for the elevation adjustments made to compensate for the windage adjustments, etc. and ad nauseum, just made it more trouble than it was worth.

I'm not familiar with the design of the piece you're considering modifying. I suppose it can't hurt anything to experiment as long as you pull out the protractor and satisfy yourself that the altered sight positions will remain perfectly over the bore.

[Funny Farmer]

Ben,
thanks for the ideas. Indeed the FWB design is made to keep the sights over the bore, whereas the Steyr modification would not.

As I do not change my sight for 10m AP shooting often I assume that this is less a problem than in action shooting under varying conditions. I would expect to do some fiddeling and once the sight is on target again leave it there.

I laughted when you mentioned the Hollywood 90 degrees hold. Use that technique at a serious air pistol match and watch the faces!

Robert

[BenEnglishTX]

I laughted when you mentioned the Hollywood 90 degrees hold.

I want to cry when I see it. I was around and saw how the slight cant came into legitimate use, conceived and used in the fire of competition. Then I saw "gun wranglers" (Yes, that's what they're called) in Hollywood start teaching an exaggerated version just because it looked "cool" on screen.

There have now been documented cases of police agencies in parts of the world (where they don't have the resources to get *real* police training) who have begun teaching this technique. They can't explain why. They only know that people in the U.S. know how to shoot and that's the way all the American movies show to hold a gun.

The "gangsta stance" with a gun is an example of art imitating and exaggerating life, then influencing life (as all art does, one way or the other) in a very negative fashion.

It's more than a joke; it's a tragedy.

[mika]

About the gangsta stance - I think it's probably just good for the rest of us if the gangsters adopt such stupidities. The same often applies to full-auto fire. It's amazingly easy to empty even a big magazine with zero hits on the target. I have to admit having done that with a FAMAE submachine gun, trying to shoot six bowling pins at a relatively short distance. Just to see how spray and pray works, I shot the whole magazine empty in one not so long string, holding the gun on my hip. Moved the gun once from left to right and then back, hitting the ground in front of the pins on the first pass and behind them on the second pass. Zero hits. I don't remember how far the pins were, rather close anyway so that either with a pistol or an SMG shooting semi-auto it was easy to hit them every time.

Anyway, closer to the real subject, I have noticed that while shooting olympic rapid fire I rather often tilt the pistol inward while moving left on the target bank. Even if I try to adjust my stance so that it's close to neutral when facing the center target, it's easy to hold vertical on the first three, but then I often start canting to the left. I don't know whether I should really be worried about that, as I tend to shoot better towards the end of the string. The angle is rather small and it doesn't seem to affect the trajectory, which is very close to the sight line at these distances anyway and it's center hold for RF, . But I guess it might affect my shooting mentally.

Do you have any guesses on what I might do wrong? If I take the stance and sight picture slowly for each target, it's easy and natural to keep the gun upright. But then, doing it fast, especially the 4s string, I notice I start canting. I've been thinking that maybe I twist my body differently when not concentrating as much on the movement and position.

Mika

[BenEnglishTX]

Do you have any guesses on what I might do wrong?

If the question was meant for me, then no, I have no guesses. I don't currently do any sort of ISSF shooting. I'm getting into bullseye and I spend hours practicing just for my own fun with a couple of outdated free pistols but the sport where I tried canting the pistol was long range silhouette. In that sport, the finals generally require using your pistol to hit a mark about 3 inches across at a distance of 200 meters. In that case, even the slightest (unintended) cant will cause a miss. I found I was unable to control all the variables when intentionally canting the pistol (though the cant did make for a steadier hold) and abandoned any further research into it.

Imagine my surprise to find, a couple of decades later, that various rifle sports had begun using sights specifically designed for canting the rifle. Sometimes I think there hasn't been a new idea in civilian shooting since the miserable failure of that piece of garbage, the Gyrojet. I think all the same ideas just circulate in the ether and occasionally lodge in someone's brain.

Just for grins, when I'm next at the range I may document POI change with degree of cant, using a .22LR pistol at 25 yards. It might be a fun experiment. I've never done any actual measuring at such a short range.

[paulo]

Is that 90 degree rotation?
Look for this post particularly, middle picture
http://toz35.blogspot.com/2009/10/melen ... inder.html

from Ruig's great blog

http://toz35.blogspot.com/

[Funny Farmer]

From what I know Moritz Minder had an accident and his arm was a bit twisted. This was his natural hold.