TargetTalk

I would like some objective opinios of the Gamo rear sight. Anyone have any experience with these and how to they compare in quality to other sight sets?

Disclaimer .... from my experience of coaching this for 3 years.

There are two "versions" of the real Gamo sight, (old & new), and one pretender. All of these should get you about 3-4 clicks per ring on a 10m target. (on 888's it's about 2.8 clicks per ring)

A) The older version of the Gamo sight has on the top base the word GAMO on it. Unless they have been abused these are very tight and repeatable. If you hold the sight base in one hand and "wiggle" the diopter with your other, there will be little to no play. I'd pay up to about $110 for one of these originals in good shape

B) The newer version of the Gamo (still a spanish sight) has a blank oval on the top of the sight base ... I've found that most of these perform just as well as the older sight. There may be some VERY slight wiggle in the diopter on the questionable ones.

C) The look-alike that Daisy has been selling for the past few years is a chinese copy. These are usually either as good as the new gamo's (slight to no wobble) to EXTREMELY BAD .... just a ton of wobble and lots of backlash in the sight adjustments.

By backlash I mean you can run the sight all the way to the left, fire a group, and then begin moving the sight 6 clicks right, fire a group, and continue. You will notice that the groups will not move after an adjustment of 6 clicks and then on the next set will jump 4-5 rings. (this will happen on elevation as well)

VERY frustrating for shooters ... When I order the sights from Daisy, if there is any wobble, I order another set and send the "bad" ones back, keeping only the good sights.

Note that the new Gamo's here in the US run about $90 each, and the chinese copies from Daisy about $35.

The real Gamo's can be difficult to obtain (or were last year) ... I had one order that took me 5 months to get in. This was when Hammerli was the importer and Walther was taking them over and moving all the inventory I guess. There may be others here in the US that you can get them from, but I order mine from Brenzovich.

Ted ... just so that you know that the AR30 (LG30) with the Gamo's on it is not new change, the AR30's were being shipped with Gamo's at least for over a year. Again, an opinion here, if you have shooters that are firing over 570's in 3P and maybe in the range of 360 for a 40 shot INTL, yeah, you might want to get a higher quality rear sight, but then they are looking for those slight (and repeatable) adjustments, but you are going to be paying several hundred dollars for those.

JHMartin,
Thanks for the reply! I took the air rifles to the range today and we had our first pratice with them. The kids didn't know I got them in and were very excited! The sights are the only concern I had about the rifle. They do say Gamo on them. I shot one of the guns for about an hour and tried to see the repeatability of it. The book says .5 mm per click so after I zeroed it in, I moved 21 clicks to the right and this moved the group to the edge of the 7 ring so they did indeed move about 1/2 inch like the manual says. I shot a group then moved it 21 clicks back and the zero did go back to the ten ring. I then repeated this moving the sights 21 clicks to the left and repeated the above. The groups did go back to center. Why did I repeat 21 clicks? Because I see this as about the most changes between shooters who share the same gun. I will try some other changes of clicks next week including going all the way left and maxing out the elevation too. Overall, I am pleased with the sights. I do think they should just put a walther sight on a walther gun and be done with it though.

I'm gald you got the "real" ones .... saves a bunch of heartburn.

That seems like a decent number of clicks per ring. The sporters we fire have a shorter sight radius, so we get more movement on the target

Like I said, your price per gun would have probably gone up about $250.

I don't know what your program is like, but $250 gets me a case of pellets