TargetTalk

2 wks ago I accepted the challange to take up shooting. My kids hand me downs...sling they dont like, crappy rear sight etc. Regardless

Any tips on equipment, or anything else to help my 40 plus year old eyes focus? The bull gets real blury real fast. Scatt show my shots, when im doing my part, go where im aiming, but that isnt always in the center. Focusing on a blade of grass or the second hand of my watch helps.

my thoughts,

1)Longer sight radius..how long?
2)Bigger apature...seems to be helping
3)Prescription lens...my eyes together the eye doc says are better than 20/20 with contacts, but individually he cant get to 20/20..makes no sense to me but it has been the same story for years

There is a bit more to it than that. you are younger than many that shoot so, ait all old eyes. The youth can focus differing distances faster, but that is not everything. Assuming you are shooting 'irons' then one of the best changes is aperture sights and changing to larger front apertures. Another change is adjustable rear / front apertures that are dialed to size. Big gift to anyone......sling.
One of the big game changers is a type of aperture that fits to the rear sight and adjusts to make the TARGET come in focus. Dont just try shooting, get into it and make it happen!

Step 1 - Get eye exam and get copy of prescription

Step 2 - Buy a set of actual shooting glasses like this

http://www.intershoot.co.uk/acatalog/Ch ... r-654.html

or this

http://www.intershoot.co.uk/acatalog/ME ... s-217.html

This will allow you to position the lens directly in the correct line of sight and keep your lens parallel to the target no matter what position you are shooting in

Step 3 - Contact Art at Shooting Sight at the address below. He will need your prescription and will ask you for a few measurements (distance from eye to front sight, distance between front and rear sight, etc.). You will also want to send him the lens holder so that he can make you a lens for your new shooting glasses frames.

Shooting Sight web address - http://www.shootingsight.com/index.html

Red - check this out:

Shooting Sports USA Magazine has a GREAT article from their November/December 2010 issue, on common sight issues. It's a three part article, written by Marcus Raab:

http://www.usashooting.org/library/USAS ... e_Size.pdf

I still have issues shooting iron/metallic sights at 100 yards - It can be frustrating. But read the above series of articles first - you may be committing a common error, one which you can remedy before spending lots of $$$.

As others have mentioned, 40 is young, most shooters are the wrong side of 40, and many a long way the wrong side !

You need to understand sighting and what is most important. The bull should be slightly blurry because you need to focus on the foresight. Get the gun set up properly for you so that it fits you and not the other way around, then get used to it.

Keep it simple and stick to standard settings to start with. Most rearsights have a 1.1mm peep hole, which is fine. Foresight elements should be big enough to fit around the bull with a large white ring between sights and the bull - I use about 4mm but it will vary. Forget a longer sight radius, it's irrelevant. For beginners it just shows up the movement more and won't make you any more accurate.

Rob.

Thanks for all the replys! Keep them coming

Shooting SB prone.

1) Adjusting the rear iris helps with bright light on the target...I can see fine. I dont have any filters and probly dont need them anytime soon. Adjusting the rear iris in lower light (overcast) doesnt seem to help. Sunday at the match, shooting east, I had trouble seeing in the am but in the pm I could see well.

2) Going from 3.9 to 4.3 front apature helped me center the blur...I think.

3) I tried looking through my daughters gun last night. The light wasnt bright but I could see well. WHY? 39" versus 31" between front and rear sights? Thinner black ring in front apature? Rear sight closer to eye? All things to try.

4) Yellow glasses didnt help

Kinda talkn to myself!! Great article by Raab. Great reply on how to get glasses for shooting.

3) The distance between the foresight and the rearsight should not have an impact on the brightness of your sight picture. Eye relief and rearsight aperture size will, but your sight radius should not.

If the longer sightbase (I'll presume there's an extension tube) looks better, then it's a matter of focus, not brightness. If you are slightly long sighted, it's easier for you to focus on the foresight if it's further away from you. You could add an extension tube to your rifle for the same effect, but it's not ideal. You are acknowledging a problem, but not really fixing it. You still have to consciously focus on the foresight so the tube isn't foolproof, it just makes focussing a little easier. A much better solution is to visit an optician who understands shooting and get a prescirption for a corrective lens. This will place your focus exactly where it should be for a crisp foresight, without any effort or thought on your part.

Please don't think I'm against extension tubes. I think they are good, and can help to reduce aiming errors. I've used one now for eight years, but as Rob said previously, you have to have a need a good tight hold to get the benefit, so it's best to wait a while before bolting on onto your muzzle.

Thanks Tim!

To be clear...you are saying a tube will help, BUT is a bandaid and correcting my vision specifically for shooting is the better way? Adding a tube later, will also help my score, when I'm ready...

I'm thinking I need to bring the rear sight back closer to my eye tonight and dry fire. I have it pretty far forward to keep the front sight centered in the rear.

For what its worth, Im trying to keep my occluder just barely covering the target and little else. This should get as much light as possible to both eyes. Correct thing to do I think?

Yes, exactly that, lens, then tube. The bandaid is a good analogy. Be aware that if you add a long tube, it may affect your prescription.

Experimenting with aperture size and eye relief is a good thing, but make sure you give different settings a thorough trial.

Getting light to both eyes is often recommended, so both react equally, and avoiding strain. Opaque material is very good as it doesn't block light, but does obscure the target. A small blinder, irrespective of material, has the advantage of letting you see wind flags. Find a size that works; it's a bonus if you can see flags.

redschietti wrote:T
I'm thinking I need to bring the rear sight back closer to my eye tonight and dry fire. I have it pretty far forward to keep the front sight centered in the rear.

Hi,

as you say, you have not only to center the front sight on the target, you have also to center the front sight tunnel in the rear sight and shooting errors because of not really centered the front sight in the rear sight are often much more difficult to observe.

If a shooter can't explain a bad shoot, there are often two reasons, to long aiming and not to center the front sight in the rear sight.

There is a rule of thump for the hole picture. The ratio of the seen size of front sight tunnel and the rear sight should be 2 to 3. Many shooter prefer a shorter distance between the rear sight iris and the eye, so the ratio will only be 1 to 2 or even 1 to 3. But as i said, this makes the control of the centering more difficult and than often some of the not seen bad shoot are the result of the to close distance between iris and eye.

So if you go closer with your eye do not forget the risk of not really centering the front sight tunnel.

This is also one reason why some shooters prefer the bigger 22mm front sight tunnel and this is yet more important if you use a tube. There is also a new product called Dublex out. It will give you a third ring in the rear sight, but makes the hole process also more complex. So it is not the best recommendation for a starter.


Good seeing is surely important for good shooting. But on the other hand it will also oft overrated. For a beginner is to build a good and stable position, the NPA, good triggering and to learn, all that ever the same to repeat much more important. So use a not to small front sight element and learn to group your shoots. A good lesson is to predict the point of your shoots on the target before looking there. An other good lesson is to watch the recoil of your rifle. Your front sight should jump always nearly straight upwards and after that the front sight should as precise as possible back to the center of the target. This is always a good indication for a good and repeatable position.


Regards

Frank

Although it could be your eyesight, I suspect that Frank in the previous post is on the right track. I have observed what you described with my daughter in prone and kneeling. Using SCATT I can clearly see that her hold is 100% 10 ring, 80+% 10.5 ring size. However, that hold is sometimes not centered on the 10 ring.

Playing around with eye relief and aperture sizes has helped and is important. For us, most of the issue seems to revolve more around sight alignment. Yes, aperture sizes and ratios are important to be able to see that you are aligned. The other thing that seems to matter more is the painstaking setup of the cheek piece. If it is not set up perfectly, your head will drift a little as you relax and your sight alignment will drift right along with it.

You will want to take your distance vision prescription for your shooting eye, and add +0.50 diopters to the spherical value. That will shift your focal point in sufficiently to give you a good front sight, without giving up too much focus on the target.

Then you want to use as small a rear aperture as you can, before the image goes dim. Your brain wants more light, but that is only because in normal vision more light causes your pupil to constrict, which improves focus.

THe two elements to address here are that you want a lens of the right power to get your focal point at what is called the hyperfocal distance of the front sight. If you search my name, I have posted a couple of times, including the optical match, but bottom line is that adding the +0.50 diopters does this. The benefit of this is that your depth of field is now centered between the front sight and the target, so both are in focus at the same time.

The smaller aperture will get you the depth of field you want. 1.0mm is about as small as most people go, but this will be a function of the available light.

Art Neergaard
ShootingSight

What suprises me here is the lack of discussion of supplements aimed at the eyes...... anybody using them?

spektr wrote:What suprises me here is the lack of discussion of supplements aimed at the eyes

I'm guessing there's a good reason for that....

Rob.

The nearest thing to a supplement I've heard of are the various eye drops for dry eyes. My optician periodically reminds me to use them more often.

Carrots!

Though sadly, it turns out that is not likely true. The carrot story was invented by the British in WWII.

They had radar, and it was top secret. But when their pilots kept intercepting the Germans during night raids over London, they had to come up with an explanation for the astonishing success their pilots were having, so the Germans would not realize the advantage was coming from this secret technology. They started spreading the word that the pilots were eating a special diet rich in carrots which was supposedly helping their eyes. And so, years later, people still tell their kids that carrots are good for their eyes.

Of course I also don't think there were many Spitfire pilots who were over 40 years old ... I think 23 was considered old at the time.

The only other think I can recommend is giving up porn. The following eye chart will help you determine how far gone your vision is.

Just an update for everybody that helped.

Moving the rear sight 2 cm closer to my eye helped. Just by accident yesterday I found a pair of +.50 computer glasses. They helped greatly! Hard to look through, keep in position etc. They will be usable intill I get a real pair of shooting glasses...which Im ordering today! LAst night I wasnt planning on live fire but everything felt so good and looked so good and there were 10 rounds just sitting there in the box..best 2 five shot groups I have shot!!

Which frames have you settled on ?

I have tried it all. My sight is very bad uncorrected. The best solution is old style hard contacts. The downside to this is a small grain of dust can be very painful. The up side is that these are the best way to correct vision to the maximum extent possible. The best my doctor could do with glasses was 20-25. With hard contacts I was able to get my vision to 20-14 for several years until other issues changed that.

If you are nearsighted the farther away from your eyes the lens is, the smaller the apparent size of the target. Therefore the contacts being on the eyeball achive the maximum relative target size.

The next best option is shooting glasses.

As you get older the size of the front needs to be increased slowly. Also a long bloop tube is a huge help to older shooters shooting iron sights.

Red - go back and read all three parts of the article - I only posted the link to the first one.

Here is another helpful article:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/26445851/Wigg ... bore-Notes

Position building, and NPOA are quite critical with prone shooting.

Wearing yellow glasses indoors may or may not offer anything of value; they're intended to cut a certain color spectrum (blue) from the light, and the indoor lighting type will determine if it emits that color.

Avoid "admiring" your sight picture - it only takes a few minutes for your eyes to "memorize" the small target bull - and once that happens, you need to take about a 20 minute break for your eyes to re-adjust. Generally speaking, 4-5 seconds is all you should allow yourself to focus on the bull. If you can't break the shot in that time, then look down, away, or soft focus on something else, and come back to it again. Using too small of a rear aperture will cause your eyes to tire quickly, too large, and you inflict alignment errors, or experience glare/washout.

I use a 10" bloop tube - it has helped me tremendously with sight alignment, and sharpening the target bull. It is not a substitute for NPOA/Positioning, or developing a clean trigger break.

Subtle changes in things like your elbow placement, cheek placement, eye relief, etc. can have an effect on shot placement. One of the most helpful things my mentors showed me, was to shoot a scope for half of the day - it can help to identify some of your non-sight related issues, which you can correct while in place, and then focus on the metallic sights as the sole issue to your errors - once you've identified and developed a repeatable, stable position.

Someone mentioned supplements earlier - there are several, and used sparingly, and under your physicians advice, they can help - but they're never a substitute for the basics: NPOA, Breathing, Sight Alignment, and Trigger control. Certain types of vitamins, when over-used can actually cause adverse effects elsewhere on the body, because they are fat soluble, instead of water soluble.

Good Luck! No matter what anybody else says - this is till the most you can have lying down while still fully clothed!