Handgun Hunting Afield

Once you have gotten old, time and how you can spend it  occasionally becomes important.. 

Right how it’s 117 degrees. The air is full of dust from last nights dust storm.  And—I no longer have a shop to mess around in if I so choose.  

So, to kill some time I’lll try to bore you. Got some old S & W revolvers laying around that I put to good use years ago but don’t anymore?   Kinda miss using them?  I kept a few dozen guns when I moved  and dug some out.  Started going out into the desert and finding a place to shoot for fun.  My wife was never really a shooter but started with 22 autos mainly with dot sights on them.  

That ended up kinda getting out of hand and out came the snubbies, four inchers and whatever I happened to pick up.  Eventually I settled on 4” big bores to play with as I like them and some days the sights looked decent enough to make shooting pleasurable.  Dot sights improved my accuracy substantially.  Don’t forget—accuracy is a thing of the past which fails rapidly if you don’t keep it up and I didn’t.  I’ll never be as good as I was 40-50 years ago but  banging away  a few hundred rounds at field targets picked accuracy back up substantially, still not very good but good enough to have fun.  

Well I never was much good at leaving factory products alone and tinkering around decided to  “doitoem”.   I was aware S & W revolvers of recent manufacture were drilled for a mount.    Since frames have changed very little I quickly decided on the EGW mount.  It’s a Picatinny Rail, inexpensive and readily available from the manufacturer.   Simply removing the original sight and having three holes drilled in the top-strap for the EGW rail and quickly putting it together gets you in business.  Not all dots sights are set up for a rail mount but there are adapters to convert them if desired.  Not all dots are created equal and you generally get the performance  you pay for.  A hundred dollar dot isn’t going to give the performance a 400 buck dot will.  Always watch for parallax problems.  I’ve used a wide variety in testing over the years and they seem to be constantly changing.  I recall one the dot used a mirror to project the illumination rearward.  Yessir –could see it on a sunny day  on snow. Problem was when the light was poor you couldn’t see anything behind the dot.  I ended up with a few  Holosun 512C sights as they suited me for a variety of reasons among them the ability to switch to a hard kicking rifle if I wanted to.  Also you might catch them on sale at Optics planet at a couple hundred bucks off.  I assume that particular model is discontinued.  It has a big window , easy to find reticule, and mounts about as high as a scope which gives the effect of a longer point blank range than a low mount.   For my wife for her K 38 which will mainly be used with wadcutters at short range I chose a small low mounted dot.  

Interesting  all three of the sights I mounted on 357, 41 Mag and 44 Special 4” guns all hit within a few clicks of dead on at about 25 yards.  The heat and statewide ban on shooting aside of a few ranges due to fire hazard got to me. In general The three mentioned guns are very dangerous to any dirt clod or rock I can see at 100 yards.  Need to find another spot to shoot to get more distance when it cools and the ban probably lifts October first.  Until then skills continue to deteriorate. 

For details of the products mentioned go the manufacturer’s sites.   .