Ye olde front sight Tritium discusion

[toad]

My personnel preference is for a night sight on the front sight only for low light level shooting. At close range I found that I was faster and "indexed" well enough for close range accuracy. With luminous sights both front and back, as far as I could tell, I would subconsciously shit my focus back and forth from the rear and front focal plane and lose time. If it is a pitch black situation out comes the flash light.
There was a long discussion pro and con on this on the 1911 Forum back in the day.

http://forums.1911forum.com/showthread.php?t=78102

Feel free to have fun

[Yogimus]

Can not recommend crimson trace enough for social work.

[First Shirt]

If both front and rear are tritium, then they should either be different colors, or of substantially different sizes or shapes. For instance, I use the Big Dot sights on one full-size 1911, which has a vertical bar in the rear sight, and a "goose-egg" sized front sight. (Apparently they call it a "big dot" sight for a reason!)

The Meprolights on the Pro Carry have a slightly bigger, and much brighter front dot.

Point being that is should be impossible to mis-align the sights. Otherwise, having only the front sight emit that comforting green glow is advisable.

[PawPaw]

Oh, I suppose tritiums would work okay, but I prefer to be so thoroughly familiar with my preferred firearm that when I point it, even in total darkness, the muscle memory is so ingrained that I know without a doubt that my front sight is on the target.

Yeah, right. (I slay myself) Anything you can do to make that front sight visible is fine by me. The reason that they make so damned many sights is because there are so damned many people. What works for you won't necessarily work for me. That, and those things get dim over time and folks need to buy new ones.

[D5CAV]

If both front and rear are tritium, then they should either be different colors, or of substantially different sizes or shapes. For instance, I use the Big Dot sights on one full-size 1911, which has a vertical bar in the rear sight, and a "goose-egg" sized front sight. (Apparently they call it a "big dot" sight for a reason!)

The Meprolights on the Pro Carry have a slightly bigger, and much brighter front dot.

Point being that is should be impossible to mis-align the sights. Otherwise, having only the front sight emit that comforting green glow is advisable.

+1 on different colors or sizes (I prefer different colors).

However, I tried a friend's piece that only had the front sight tritium. Didn't work for me. I still need two points to make a straight line. Just knowing where the front sight is tells me nothing about what angle my pistol is pointing.

[toad]

I'm reminded of an old race gunner practice that I never got a chance to try out. You'd set up a paper plate at about 5 yards, sight on it then lower your weapon close your eyes and then raise your weapon to point at the target. You'd then open your eyes and see if you were on target. If not you'd reposition your feet for lateral movement and your back for vertical. Then repeat until you were always on target. Then put up multiple targets. The you'd try it with live ammunition. You'd still use front sight/press but supposedly you got that front sight a lot quicker if your form was always consistent.

[Erik]

This is a very personal thing. I don't have much experience with Tritium, more with fiber optic sights, but I think it's basically the same principles.

We've discussed this much when shooting IPSC. As a very general rule you will get faster with fiber optic sights, but you will give up accuracy. What is a very personal thing is how much faster you will get, and how much accuracy you are giving up. Every shooter seems to have his own preference. For instance, the two best shooters in my club went totally different ways. One has no fiber optics, the other has big inserts both front and back. Both feel it's the best choice for them personally.

Personally I find that I speed up too much if I have too visible sights, and my accuracy goes down too much to be acceptable. I tend to fire the instant I see the front fiber on target, before the sight's lined up. And fiber optics in the back is just distracting to me. After experimenting I settled on a fairly small fiber optic in the front sight. It's big enough to be visible and to help me pick up speed at short range, but not so big it distracts me from lining up the sights.
But that's a choice I made with competition in mind. If I were to have a gun solely for self defense I might go a different way.

And what toad says about finding you natural point of aim. To really gain speed you need to be able to get your eyes on the target first and the sights should just line up in front of you. The principle works for precision shooting as well, you'll get a lot more accurate if you are not fighting your natural body position when aiming.

[randy]

Back in the days when tritium sights were new and uncommon, I took a revolver course where we performed low light practice by indexing the on the outline of the cylinder and adjusted aim point to get to center of mass hits. Worked OK, but obviously needed some sort of ambient light tow work.

Having since gotten a Glock 21 with tritium sights, I'm a believer. All three green dots, but I have never seemed to have a problem of mis-aligning the dots or losing track of which is the front sight. YMMV

[toad]

Yogi mentioned the Crimson Trace: When I win the lottery (if I can ever remember to buy a ticket) I'd like a .38 special or .327 Manum S&W snubby with a trigger job and and the Crimson Trace grips.

I saw a movie that kind of made me drool for a holographic pistol sight ( I know battery life and size preclude it for concealed carry).
While I'm sorta hijacking my own thread, I saw an interesting Hong Kong movie with subtitles on Hulu. It opens with a race gun match and then has actual shoot out involving one of the race gunners. The shoot out is interesting because the race gunner's fire arm and ammo is stored in the trunk of his car and he is taking it to a gun club were he has to store it. All the instructions at the race gun match are in English. Also during the shoot out the race gunner puts two round through one side of a car and out the other.
While I wouldn't want to live in a place with such restrictive gun laws as most of East Asia is, I find it interesting that for the most part they have heavy penalties for using a firearm in a crime instead of the US approach which is too arrest the firearms and let criminals go if they are "disadvantaged."

[BDK]

It is an interesting movie. There are links to it on the Enos forum, as its really the only one about IPSC

All IPSC matches are in English, and all fencing matches are in French.