TargetTalk

Hi All,
My first post on this site and hello to all !

I have an 1813L and was wondering what age you can start prone shooting with iron sights ? I currently have a scope on it and have tried using the peep sights supplied but wow ! it is not easy, even from a front rest. I really struggle to see the diagram in the front sight. I am 51 and need glasses to read or see fine print up close(had perfect vision until 4 years ago), is it to late to start prone shooting with peep sights ? Not looking for place on the olympic team :), just fun and a league or two. Just wanted find out if any my age or older still uses peep sights and I must just persevere ?

Thanks and regards.
Rob

Hi Rob, welcome to the site.

I'm coming up to 55 and shoot with iron sights almost exclusively.

I know of many who are older than me who do the same.
If you aren't intending on shooting ISSF then there are accessories like lenses for the foresight or rearsight that may well be legal for domestic competition.

I believe that shooting iron sights actually improves your visual acuity over time - my eyesight is supposedly better than 20/20 according to my optician, although I am using reading glasses more frequently these days.

Getting the right size foresight element and rearsight aperture can have a big influence on how accurately you can aim with them.

Never too old.

Regards,
Ken.

Hi Rob,

54 here ... shoot irons almost exclusively as well. You may want to consider dedicated shooting glasses that will allow you to place a proper lens directly in front of your eye while in position.

With these you will be able to see the fore sight properly. I'm at that stage where I'm looking toward getting some for myself. I can no long see the fore sight as crisply as I once could.

Welcome to the belly game! It's a blast.

I'm nearly 68 and I only started prone shooting about 5 years ago. My results are far from brilliant but I enjoy it. My eyesight is generally good but age and long sightedness mean that I benefit from a 0.5 'eagle eye' in the foresight and a corrective lens at the other end. Both are legal for purely club shooting in the UK, which is all that I aspire to. I would hope that the same applies in your country. Our club secretary is still competing quite successfully at the age of 80, also using a corrective lens, though he has the advantage of nearly 65 years experience of .22 shooting.

Stop whining youngster and go shoot.

Hi Rob,

I'm a 'youthful' 47 having taken up prone shooting just under 2 years ago. Almost all the other members in the club are older than me (a fair amount older). Age certainly isn't an issue especially if you have a sense of humour and you've got a good 30+ years prone shooting left in you. Take it one shot at a time.
As regards glasses, I might be taking the advice on this thread shortly. Nearly 30 years of working in IT might be catching up with me....

Rob.
Sussex, England

As you mention your eyes are not so great it really is not an issue. There are plenty of shooters who shoot with glasses.

A few things to try very quickly, if you know your normal distance prescription go buy a set of drug store readers that are about +0.25 or +0.5 diopters greater than your everyday distance prescription. (If your normal distance prescription is +1.25 then try +1.75 for instance. Or if your normal distance is -1.25 then try -0.75) Try shooting with them and you will see very quickly if this is going to help.

As noted, if rules allow you can mount correction in the sights. If the rules say you must wear any corrective lenses then I highly recommend the specialized shooting frames that allow for the lens to be positioned so you are looking directly through it. If you have the special frames, then of course you can get a custom lens that will take care of regular distance adjustment as well as astigmatism.

No, age is not a factor.

Cheers,
'Dude

As Rover said "Stop whining and go shoot"

Shooting is a sport that you can do well as long as you have good overall health and don't blow an elbow.

The oldest Olympic gold medal winner was a rifle shooter in his 70s. In 2004 Mike Anti won the silver in 3p at 41, oldest medal winner on the US team.
Herb Hollister started shooting in his 50s and won multiple national championships and shot well into his 80s. Ron West won the US national championship in his 60s.

However... you do have to work harder at it. And the eyes is probably the first place you need to "focus" you attention. (yeah i know its terrible).

The older eyes are the less well they focus at short distances and the more light they need. Get the best shooting glasses you can and go to an eye Dr. who understands sports. Also talk to other shooters at matches and see what the other geezers do.

I usually agree with Justadude but he is dead wrong. Age is a big factor.

Shooting is not (usually) a team sport. If you blow it, you're not letting anyone down.

You jump in, do the best you can, and garner what satisfaction you can from your performance.

There is ALWAYS someone out there better than you and you have absolutely no control over that.

Just get out there and have fun!

Eye doctors may not be much help, as shooting is different from human vision, in that you are trying to manage your depth of field to see two objects at the same time, something human eyes do not normally do.

However, luckily the answer is a lot more obvious to photographers. And the answer is that you need to get your relaxed eye to focus at the hyperfocal distance of the front sight, so your depth of field is centralized between the front sight and the target. Someone alluded to it earlier, but if you actually work the lens math, based on the front sight distance, the answer is that for a rifle you need a lens that is +0.50 diopters more powerful than your distance vision, and for an AR or pistol you need +0.75 diopters more powerful. These lenses will shift your focal point closer, so you gain focus on the front sight, without giving up too much on the target.

THe lens math to shift your focal point from infinity to the hyperfocal is pretty precise, so these offsets should work, if you start with a good distance prescription. If you do not need glasses to see distance, then you simply need a +0.50 or +0.75 lens.

In terms of how to implement this, you can get custom glasses made, you can get various brands of shooting glasses, or you could get various different systems to mount a lens in the rear sight.

Art Neergaard
ShootingSight LLC
shootingsight@nuvox.net

Hello RobK,
I am 40, legally blind in my non-shooting eye, best correction with glasses is 20/30 ish distance, had four eye operations for glaucoma, cataracts, and a detached retina. I have been shooting prone for five years and wear trifocal contact lenses.

Thanks to feedback from several folks on this site over the last couple of years plus talking to a US Team shooter I met at a regional match, I am shooting irons again. When things are going right on the ISSF 50m target I am a 9.0 to 9.5 shooter in prone with some 10s but more 8s. I am seeking a solution on poor rear sight alignment and slowing my hold now to correct this.

Keys to visual success for me are using an adjustable iris to get the best light possible for the conditions, color filters to further sharpen the target, and use of an extension tube to move out the front sight. You can do it.

Most importantly it's mental. Never ever ever quit. When I temporarily lost a lot of sight when I had cataracts I temporarily shot 10m air rifle prone to keep sharp when I could not see the 50m bull. I also have shot .22 domestic any sight matches with a scope. Never stop fighting until the match is over and the fight done. And have fun! I most sincerely hope this helps you.

Kind regards,
Tony

I started just about 2 years ago at age 47. My daughter took up the sport so I figured I should try it. I have a background in Bullseye and air pistol and competed at a high level. My eyesight has gotten worse.

I use an iris to shoot iron sights. I picked up a pair of glasses from a vendor at Camp Perry. They have removable replacement lenses so I contacted the maker and they put me in touch with a guy that makes custom replacement corrective lenses. He send me some samples to try... basically, weak reading glasses that allow me to see the front sight clearly enough and not so strong so the target is relatively clear too. I only use the corrective lense for the shooting eye.

I started using these for rifle and its been working great.

I don't have the info in front of me now but I can post it later if interested.

You're never too old if you are motivated. I started position shooting when I was 57. I was having focus issues so I started using a scope. Two years ago on advice from a fellow shooter I started using an adjustable iris and front aperture in my iron sights. Now I can have both the sights and target in focus and am enjoying iron sight shooting again... the biggest age issue for me is body flexibility getting into and out of position. I stretch as often as I remember to which helps, and just figure I'm gong to be a bit stiff the day after I shoot.

Thank you everyone for the replys and advice ! No doubt in my mind now, I ordered my shooting jacket today and will be on the range soon with my iron sights.
Great forum and thanks again for advice, I am sure I will be needing more in the future :)
Regards
Rob

A few years ago I was sat one evening in the muzzle loaders association of Great Britain club house having dinner with a group of new friends I had met whilst shooting on the 1000 yard stickledown range at Bisley. At one end of the table sat a gentleman who had just beaten over half of the other people sat round the table.

The shooting that day had been with .451 match rifle at 1000 yards course of fire had been sighters then 15 to count on a standard uk NRA target.

For those that don't know about long range muzzle loaders it involves loading 100 ish grains of black powder topped off with a paper patched bullet of around 400 grains. This is done at the back of the firing point then getting into position on the firing point adding the firing cap and shooting the shot. Then repeating until finish.


Why did I feel the need to explain this??

Because that gentleman sat quietly at the end of the table just happened to be 97 years young and was still going strong, beating kids half his age regularly.


Too old?? .... NEVER

remmy223 wrote:

Too old?? .... NEVER

+1.

The sport will accommodate you at any age, or skill level. You just have to get out there, and enjoy what you are doing. Off mark for international, but if your eyes don't work well with irons, continue on with a scope.

John

[quote="corning

Off mark for international, John[/quote]

Not so, Raymond Debevec won a medal at the 2012 Olympics and I think he was then 50 (or at least close!).
The Gold medalist in mens prone Sergei Martinov shot a qualifying of 600, and set a world finals record, but then he is a kid in his mid 40's.

If the eyes hold out or you get the correct glasses there is no limit, my wife is still shooting regular 590+ at 63 years old, and she has more time to train than she did 30 years ago!

Being too old depends on what you want to do.

At 51 it's probably too late if you want to be an Olympic champion. Yes, Debevec, and Martynov, and let's not forget Harald Stenvaag, have won medals in their 40s, but they had decades of top-level competition behind them when they did.

However that doesn't mean that you can't be competetive at local, regional, or national level, or just to enjoy your shooting.

It's never too late to start!

I agree completely with Art Neergard. He's right on with the suggestion that a +.50 prescription to your distance prescription is the place to start. I would only add that it might help to get yourself a longish bloop tube - 10" to 12" that has the Anschutz groves for the front sight and then try your front sight at different distances on the bloop tube. You'll find that you like the definition of the aperture and bullseye better somewhere along the bloop tube better than at other spots. I don't like variable apertures (they break) so if you decide to go with a +.50x front lens you'll need apertures between 5.5mm and 5.0mm. I think that they're available from Anschutz. Good luck! You've got many years of shooting ahead of you. Mike Barron

+1 on the bloop tube comment.

As I mentioned in my above post, shooting vision is all about managing your depth of field, and the further the two objects are apart optically, the more difficult it is to see them with a fixed depth of field.

Since depth of field optical math is all based on reciprocal distance, moving the target from 100 meters to 50 meters only results in a diopter shift from 0.01 to 0.02 where smallest diopter shift your eye can see is about 0.125 diopters (ie a change from 10m to infinity is below the detection threshold of your eye - so all targets are effectively at optical infinity, regardless of what distance you shoot).

However at the close range, it makes a HUGE difference. If your barrel is 0.8 meters long, and you add a 6" bloop tube to make it 0.95 meters, the diopter shift for those extra 6" is 1.25 to 1.05 (ie 1/0.8 versus 1/0.95), a shift that is well within the detection range of your eye.

So bottom line: get a lens which reflects a +0.50 diopter ADD to your distance vision, and get a 6" bloop tube if that is not enough.

Also, do NOT get progressive lenses. You might want bifocals, and I recommend strong ones, like a +2.5 or +3.0 add, so you can focus way up close. This allows you both to see to write in your logbook, and it also allows you to see the sight markings while you are slung in position so you can adjust sights without having to unsling and hold the rifle at arms length.

Art Neergaard
ShootingSight LLC
www.shootingsight.com