I don't know if I would say the rear sight is too far back. When I was younger, I wanted all rear sights back as far as possible.
Brent
Brent, IMO the key phrase in your post is "when I was younger". Well, when
I was younger, I remember wanting a number of things that later proved to be, shall we gently say, quite unfortunate in their eventual results. I think you'll find that extensive testing by several reliable people, among them Finn Aagard, has demonstrated that rear iron sights work best and fastest when using a peep positioned close to the eye or a wide vee notch positioned relatively far from the eye. Now, a square-notch barrel-mounted rear as used on some Continental target rifles is also quite accurate with a post front but is slow and, again, you'll find that many if not most of these target rifles have their barrel-sight dovetails running quite far to the front so as to get both sights into as nearly the same focal plane as possible. Now this is JMO and worth every penny you paid for it but that's my story and I'm sticking to it at least for the time being.
It would be interesting and might make part of a good article to actually test perfomance at the different eye-to-sight distances and see just how much difference resulted with shooters of various ages. I used to have a very accurate little Mauser 350 22LR with the long dovetail arrangement that would have been perfect to use to test this, but it's long gone. Too bad.
Brent, it just occurred to me that some here might think I was flaming you with the above, but I hope you know me well enough by now to realize that if I had intended anything but respectful disagreement then there'd be
no doubt. I figure that you knew this but some others might have been wondering. We've been courteous & respectful posters on this new forum, at least we have for the most part and so far, and let's hope it stays that way.
Regards, Joe
