Hi all, finally got my hands on the 99, in 303 Savage, from fellow member here Johno . Did some hand loads for it and had some fun the other evening. My question regarding these old rifles is about windage adjustment for the sights.
I'm assuming that you'd drift the fore sight to make corrections for POI with the tang sights. Is this correct? As I'm not overly familiar with these old tang sights.
What's the lever on the LH side of the sight for as well while I'm here?
Your help is greatly appreciated too, thanks guys.

FYI, 31gns of AR2208 (Varget to you) under a 150gh Sierra FN works very nicely.

Cheers,
Aussielad.

drifting the front sight works but is obviously hard to be precise. Others have shimmed one side of the tang sight.

The lever is a lock... you can lock the sight down or up.

if your 99 is a one that has a dovetail front sight then go ahead and move it if you need to .some of the 99's have fixed front sights. for these model's lyman built a windage adjustable model tang sight I believe is a model 2 1/2 ?? I've used them before and they work ok but have a pretty good price tag.
I have a williams tang model on my hunting rifle and I really like
it. it has lots of adjustment they're cheap too. you can also use a lyman# 57 like the 99RS came with. redfield made a sight like the lyman 57 but I forget the model

plab

Yes, the front sight is dovetailed. Forgot to mention that. The blade is brass, and is actually pretty drab at the moment. It does make getting a sight picture a bit difficult against a darker background. Any recommendations? ie, polish it, or put a dab of paint on it? I'll try to get some pics posted up later on.

Thankyou.

The windage adjustable tang sights were Lyman 29 1/2s or 30 1/2s.

The RS never came with a Lyman 57... this was why I recommended that people try not to learn too much from the recent post. RSs only were ever sold with Lyman 30 1/2s and later Redfield 70LHs.



Is the front sight drab brass or "German Silver" ? Either paint or polish will help... paint probably better than polish but does not really look "right" on an old 1899. I've seen many use their wife's red finger nail polish!

Don't believe anybody in that thread ever said a thing about Lyman 57's on RS's.

As promised, here's some pics.


Serial#


Fore sight



Folding rear sight. Can anyone tell me if the "arrow" indent on the leaf was once painted?


Action/Stock and tang sight.

my bad on the lyman numbers should got the book out to look the numbers up mind ain't what it used to be.. but I think he got the drift

plab

That front sight sure looks like a Sheard. Might be hard to move after all the years in place. I'd try shimming under the base of the tang sight first.

Not sure which fold down sight that is. does it have just the one leaf? That indent was likely white at one time.

It's a 2 leaf sight, Mike. To my eye, looks just like the #12 leaf sight in the 1900 catalog - price $1.

And, yes, it would have had a white triangle at one time.

Page 40 on this:
http://stevespages.com/pdf/savage1899.pdf

Mike the rear sight is a lyman 6B. I left it on for Troy when I sold the rifle to him as it was on it when I got it. He's going to have a lot more time to enjoy it than I would have

Johno

The gun that started the post apparently had a Lyman 57 on it and there were a few mentions of Lyman 57s in the thread and just a lot of confusing information and people saying things like "the gun is legit" Someone without the knowledge to understand what was being said and separating the facts from the opinions could have been lead far astray from the entire thread... all I was saying...

I think you need to go reread that thread. I couldn't find that anybody was saying the gun was a legit RS when I just reread it. And nobody said a Lyman 57 was legit on an RS. Steve said it wasn't an RS, I said it wasn't an RS, somebody else flat out said it was an R that had a Lyman 57 put on it.

There WAS talk about when RS's switched from Lyman to Redfield, but nobody was talking Lyman 57 - though we didn't explicitly say Lyman 30 1/2. I think you were reading Lyman 57 into that, and yes, a newbie without Murray's might have missed that we were talking Lyman 30 1/2's.