Good color for front sight for older eyes?

[DaveInFloweryBranchGA]

I've got a bunch of milsurps I've been enjoying for years. In the last year or so I'm having a good bit more trouble bringing the front sight into focus. This is resulting in vertical stringing of groups that are tight otherwise on rifles I know capable of round groups.

What I'm wondering is if there is a color I can use to color my front sights to allow me to continue to use them for a while longer.

I'm also interested in shooting glasses or other products that might help me get the front sight back in focus.

Regards,

Dave

[KCSO]

Dave
I black my sights prior to and during use as needed. They also make a Merrit Eye Disk that fits on your glasses and sharpens things up considerable. I , being cheap take a piece of black tape and put a hole in it with a leather punch and set it on my glasses so I look through the hole at the sights. You might also want to talk to your optromotist(s$%t, eye doctor) as most glasses are made to look through the center and when you shoot you look through the corner. By fiddling with the grinding of the lenses they can give you a sharper focus. I also robbed off a bunch of front sights from Swede's and put them on my other mausers as the square flat blade shows up a LOT better than a barlycorn for me.

[curator]

DaveinGa:

Sure, a flat black square top post is easier to see. I also smoke my front sight with a butane lighter to keep it from glaring. One of the best tips I have gotten for us older shooters is to find a pair of minimum diopter machinists glasses (reading glasses) for shooting. I picked up a pair of +1.25 safety glasses from a local machine tool shop. They bring the front sight into clear focus and only blur the target a bit. My shooting has improved significantly! Sight alignment is much more important than sight picture as small amount of error in sight alignment makes for large differences in bullet impact. Small errors in sight picture make only small differences in bullet impact.

If you need glasses for reading, you'll need a similar correction (or slightly less) for shooting. Forget bifocals. Get your Optometrist to make you a pair of glasses (safety lens) that allow your thumb to be in sharp focus at arm's length. Use these for shooting.

[Maven]

Dave, KCSO & Curator's suggestions are right on the money. Black works very well for me except when I must shoot (for record) at a black bull @ 100yds. on our range. (Unfortunately, we must shoot to the SW.) A Day-Glo orange paint solves the problem. (Buy a small bottle and a fine paint brush and prime & paint your front sight. It can be removed easily enough.) KCSO's point about Swe. Mau. sights is a good one. He sent me several a few years ago to replace the barleycorn on my Arg. Mau. and things rapidly improved. Lastly, as Curator said, have an optometrist make you a pair of shooting glasses for distance vision, not reading. If you already have the frames, the cost will be under $100. I replaced a non-prescription pair of B & L lenses (scratched) last summer with carbonate ones and couldn't be more pleased.