It's been rolling around in the back of my mind for a while, and I finally decided to put it together and make it happen. I now have an Osight SE mounted to the dovetail for the rear sight. It was a bit of a hodge-podge of parts I needed to get it done, but it's on.
My Henry BBS in .357mag has been a journey for me. There's a couple other threads on getting acceptable accuracy from it, and about going through a bunch of different loads with the various Hornady XTP and FTX bullets. The journey evolved to mounting a Bushnell Prime 1-4x scope, and I was happy with that on the rifle. It did change the balance point a bit, and you can't just grab it at the action in the same way you could when it had just irons. I wanted something smaller, and something that would let me grab the rifle around the action. I kind of liked the looks of the rifle Jeremy Renner had in Wind River, with the scout scope, but my .357, and my application of it, seemed better suited to a dot sight.
The Cliff Notes version is that I bought the dovetail slot scope mount from Skinner, a Monstrum Picatinny to RMSc adapter plate, and the Osight SE with the green reticle. I took off the Bushnell I had on the rifle, removed the Skinner sight base, and then removed the rear buckhorn sight from the barrel. On went the dovetail slot mount, then the pic to RMSc adapter, and the Osight on that.
Haven't shot it yet, and it looks, at least to my eye, that it isn't aligned very well right now, so there may still be some gremlins to work through. But it makes the rifle a lot easier to handle, and has brought back that easy to tote feeling again.
Pictures to follow, don't have time to get any right now.
Site seems to be OK. Load issue should be resolved now.
Scout Scope Style Dot Sight Mount
Re: Scout Scope Style Dot Sight Mount
Here's the rifle as it looks with the Osight mounted.
Shot it a bit with Fiocchi 142 FMJTC ammo to get it sighted. It's kind of interesting that when I mounted the rifle and looked through the sight at the illuminated reticle, I immediately got a sense for how far off it was, and in which direction. The sight is like a tiny heads-up display, and I could see that the reticle was high and left in relation to where it felt like it should be. Some initial observations are that the adjustments are incredibly fine, meaning that it's the tiniest bit of rotation to move it "one click". And the clicks weren't all that tactile, but they were there. When using their supplied tool for the adjustments, and concentrating on what I was feeling, moving a click or two was not all that difficult. Another point is that being a handgun sight, it had 1 MOA clicks. That's not really all that fine, but it's not really designed for much more than about 25 yards and closer kind of shooting. I don't really consider this a "target rifle", and have only gotten about 1½ to 2 MOA groups with reloads, so the adjustments are good enough.
I selected a green reticle because it's supposed to minimize the effects of astigmatism, and the "flare" that happens with red dots because of it. I have a cheaper dot on an old crossbow, and the green dot on that is perfect, but unfortunately, there's still a bit of a flare with the center dot on this sight. It provides a choice of three different selectable reticles, a circle and dot combo, the circle alone, or just the dot alone. I tried just the dot, and that worked fine, but the circle and dot are much faster and easier to pick up when first mounting the rifle. I'm still playing around with those choices, and with different brightness settings.
After a couple shots at about 10 yards to get my hits near point of aim, I backed off to 25 yards, and made further adjustments. Then I moved back to 50 yards and used my bench for some additional adjustments. This ammo has never really shot great for me, but it'll do three inches at 50 in my rifle, and that's about what I was getting. I'm expecting better results with reloads, and hoping that the 180XTP bullets perform well for me, but I haven't worked anything up with those yet.
Positives so far are that it weighs next to nothing on the rifle, and everything balances just like a stock sighted rifle, or when I had the Skinner peep on it. I can easily hold it with my hand gripping around the receiver, and it stays level with no effort to keep it that way. The sight lies within the zone that you normally look when mounting the rifle, and when using the circle and dot combo reticle selection, it's very fast, almost effortless, to move onto the target. I also don't have any of the complications with adjusting the ocular focus between glasses and no-glasses, at least not to the extent that a normal telescopic sight has. The sight includes a "shake awake" feature, so I never have to turn it off. It shuts down after three minutes of zero motion, and returns to the prior settings as soon as there is any movement.
On the negative side, it's not as low as I hoped it would be above the barrel. When I mount the rifle with a good cheek weld, I still have to lift my head a tiny bit to get the reticle centered looking through the sight. That shouldn't matter, as it will shoot to point of aim wherever that dot is in the lens, but I find that I do adjust to get it centered, which means a slight lift with my head. It's still way lower than the scope I had on, so not a big negative, but not my ideal.
More trigger time will tell how this is going to work out in the long term. I'll add more as I get more time with the new configuration.
- IMG_3422.jpeg (26.17 KiB) Viewed 37 times
Shot it a bit with Fiocchi 142 FMJTC ammo to get it sighted. It's kind of interesting that when I mounted the rifle and looked through the sight at the illuminated reticle, I immediately got a sense for how far off it was, and in which direction. The sight is like a tiny heads-up display, and I could see that the reticle was high and left in relation to where it felt like it should be. Some initial observations are that the adjustments are incredibly fine, meaning that it's the tiniest bit of rotation to move it "one click". And the clicks weren't all that tactile, but they were there. When using their supplied tool for the adjustments, and concentrating on what I was feeling, moving a click or two was not all that difficult. Another point is that being a handgun sight, it had 1 MOA clicks. That's not really all that fine, but it's not really designed for much more than about 25 yards and closer kind of shooting. I don't really consider this a "target rifle", and have only gotten about 1½ to 2 MOA groups with reloads, so the adjustments are good enough.
I selected a green reticle because it's supposed to minimize the effects of astigmatism, and the "flare" that happens with red dots because of it. I have a cheaper dot on an old crossbow, and the green dot on that is perfect, but unfortunately, there's still a bit of a flare with the center dot on this sight. It provides a choice of three different selectable reticles, a circle and dot combo, the circle alone, or just the dot alone. I tried just the dot, and that worked fine, but the circle and dot are much faster and easier to pick up when first mounting the rifle. I'm still playing around with those choices, and with different brightness settings.
After a couple shots at about 10 yards to get my hits near point of aim, I backed off to 25 yards, and made further adjustments. Then I moved back to 50 yards and used my bench for some additional adjustments. This ammo has never really shot great for me, but it'll do three inches at 50 in my rifle, and that's about what I was getting. I'm expecting better results with reloads, and hoping that the 180XTP bullets perform well for me, but I haven't worked anything up with those yet.
Positives so far are that it weighs next to nothing on the rifle, and everything balances just like a stock sighted rifle, or when I had the Skinner peep on it. I can easily hold it with my hand gripping around the receiver, and it stays level with no effort to keep it that way. The sight lies within the zone that you normally look when mounting the rifle, and when using the circle and dot combo reticle selection, it's very fast, almost effortless, to move onto the target. I also don't have any of the complications with adjusting the ocular focus between glasses and no-glasses, at least not to the extent that a normal telescopic sight has. The sight includes a "shake awake" feature, so I never have to turn it off. It shuts down after three minutes of zero motion, and returns to the prior settings as soon as there is any movement.
On the negative side, it's not as low as I hoped it would be above the barrel. When I mount the rifle with a good cheek weld, I still have to lift my head a tiny bit to get the reticle centered looking through the sight. That shouldn't matter, as it will shoot to point of aim wherever that dot is in the lens, but I find that I do adjust to get it centered, which means a slight lift with my head. It's still way lower than the scope I had on, so not a big negative, but not my ideal.
More trigger time will tell how this is going to work out in the long term. I'll add more as I get more time with the new configuration.