Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Skinner 860 Reliable peep sight

This arrived in the mail last night and I thought I'd share my first impressions and a few specs for anyone interested. It's called an 860 since the mounting screws are on .860" centers which matches the standard hole spacing for a bunch of rifle scope mounts. You can see it toward the bottom of this page: http://www.skinnersights.com/index.html

The Numbers:
The base is .5" wide and 1.155" long and the whole thing with screws weighs a whopping .6 ounces or 270 grains since I weighed it on a powder scale. Skinner's site says the center of the aperture is approx. .400" above the top of the receiver, the whole thing measures .58" from receiver to the top of the aperture. Mounted on the Model 70 the center of the aperture is .985" above the centerline of the bore.

Elevation is adjusted by loosening a lock screw on the right and turning the threaded aperture up and down. Windage is adjust by loosening a lock screw on the top and sliding the dovetail mount back and forth. The slide moves freely in the dovetail but it's not too loosey goosey. The aperture stem is threaded at 40 tpi so each turn moves it .025", a half turn would be .0125. On the Winchester this will have a 28" sight radius, .0077" movement = 1" at 100 so each half turn would move the POI approx. 1.6" at 100.

They supply two allen wrenches for the 6-48 mounting screws and the smaller adjustment lock screws.

Impression:
This is a good, really sturdy set and forget peep sight for those desiring such. It's not a target sight or something to change back and forth for different loads but for a hunting rifle or other application where you want to mainly use one load and have a rock solid but lightweight and unobtrusive sight this is the bees knees.

You can see how sturdy the aperture is in the pics below. In my mind this is what the Williams Guide sight should be. The Williams is okay but they give you small, soft slotted screws to hold all of the adjustments in place. I've buggered up those screws trying to get them tight enough and then they come loose anyway. This one has good steel machine screws to lock down the adjustments that will take several inch pounds of torque. I don't know what spec to use but you don't need to crank down on them, a good two finger "snug" is all you need.

Skinner supplies one .096" threaded aperture but others are available. A Williams or other same sized aperture will fit but having a little larger disc it is scraping the base when the stem is fully lowered.


Here it is with aperture removed on my Model 70. The elevation lock screw wasn't fully tightened for these pics since I wanted to adjust the stem. When fully tightened it isn't completely flush but only sticks out a few thousandths. The other three screws are flush or slightly below. Sorry for the dust. Thought I had cleaned everything up but that camera really catches it.




Here you can see how strong that aperture is. Any bump hard enough to knock this out of whack is going to do damage to the rifle anyway.




The aperture in place. Is it just me or does this thing remind you of the garbage monster in the original Star Wars movie?





Another view of my uncluttered, organized work space with a rifle in the foreground.




This is the aperture raised four full turns. Even now you can see that it is a strong sight and would need a hard hit with a hammer to bend it. The only aesthetic drawback, if you can call it one, is that this thing looks a bit like a periscope when you raise it up. But this represents 12.8 MOA elevation change so I doubt it would ever need that much for hunting ranges. One thing I'm trying to do with my project is to match the front sight as closely as possible to the rear sight at its lowered position to give it the cleaner look in the first two pics above.

Good write up and photos, you showed the strength from simplicity very well. Too bad it can't marry my Winchester 30/30 but it would look fine on my kid's 336.

Nice, Jim.

I've got their version of that on my No.1 and it's a great setup--very sleek. I left the aperture ring out of mine basically turning it into a ghost ring. Very fast acquisition in the field and, like you said, nearly bulletproof.

I really like it.

Thanks and nice write-up. Very simple and strong, when I build my dedicated iron/peep rifle, It will probably wear one of these. Very nice.

I've got a Skinner Express on my Marlin 38-55. Simple, stout and quick

Peep sights aren't exactly cutting edge these days but I grew up using them and they are still very effective sights. Even with 64 year old eyes I can keep a 200 yard gong clanging about every shot from the kneeling position, as long as I wear my glasses and the barrel is long enough to get the front sight out there a bit. They still use peep sights in matches out to 1000 yards - obviously ones a bit more sophisticated than this Skinner, but basically as long as you can distinguish the target you can hit it with a peep sight.

I'd love to see someone make a quality, rugged steel sight with click adjustments about the size of this or a Williams guide that fits on top of receivers in the scope mount holes, but it would necessarily be kind of expensive and probably not have the widest market.

Anyway, hope this was helpful to folks looking for a good useful peep.

One mistake in the original post is that the aperture center is .9285" above the bore, not .985". No biggie but I hate to make typos like that in technical details.