Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Target size for scoped rifle sight in ?

That bright orange is too close to the same brightness as a white background for me, despite the color contrast. The next time I run off some copies of mine, I'll have to try to crank out some blue ones.

I also like the various splatter targets for practice and the pasters they provide make good targets themselves. The self-adhesive ones work great when the backer board is getting too shot up to hold staples.

I'm one of them. On a bright sunny day flourescent orange goes fuzzy and seemes to move around for my eyes.

At 100 yds, if I am not using mountain plains blue diamonds, then I am using homemade targets (4ea 1" black squares, arranged two on two and separated by 1" of white. Line up the cross hairs on a corner of a square and you can hold pretty tight. Plus you get 4 targets/page which I use for load development. I am not a big fan of orange, or dots of any size.

For years I have made my own. I use 1" red/orange flagging tape on white computer paper. Mostly I hold on the lower right hand corner with the cross hairs aligned along the bottom and right side. The bullet holes show up well on the white paper background and on the tape. Few of my guns are quarter inchers so any "floating" due to the colour of the tape is of little concern.

Within the next couple of weeks I have to have a cataract removed from my right (sighting) eye. I noticed that my group sizes have been increasing for the last few months and I attribute this to the cataract. It has also been affecting my reading. I hate the thought of having an operation on my eye but there isn't any alternative.

Jim

I make my own as well. I'm a minimalist. This is the template for my CF targets. I get 500 printed at Staples on fluorescent green paper. The fluoro-green works in dull, foggy conditions as well as sunny. It is not fatiguing to stare at and is easily located.

The thin outer cirle is 5.5 inches in diameter. The black dot is 3 inches. I use these for scopes and iron sights.



The only thing that I've done to them over the years was remove the area at the bottom where I used to record load data. I also made the outer circle thinner and narrowed the iron sight block at the bottom of the circle..

I modded them because I found that I was saving the group and not the whole sheet. I cut out a small square with the info written beside the holes.

These were my older ones.

Interesting. That big black circle would be too big for my liking... Hard to be precise with that set-up. But hey, if it works for you...

The only time I can't clearly see the orange dot:

This is a hunting target, not for paper punching. I originally designed them for iron sights.

To be able to put the crosshairs in the same spot time after time, I added the two rectangles, but living creatures don't have lines or dots on them. The cost in CDN dollars for 1000 copies, including paper is $93 0r 0.093 a sheet. USD cost is about 0.072 a sheet.

Well if you're trying to use a little snow as an excuse for that 7:00 flyer, we ain't buyin' it!

For shooting with a .22 target rifle I make 1½" black bullesyes with ½" white centers, on white paper stock. The tiny white centers are just right for quartering with the fine crosshairs in my old school Fecker and Unertl scopes at 50 yards. Aim small, hit small. Zooming the image 200% in the copier makes a good target for both aperture sight and scope use at 100 yards with centerfires. I like the stark contrast of Xerox black on white for all my targets. Orange bullseyes on a white background tend to float away on me too.

Heck, one time I was forced to re-sight in a rifle out in the middle of nowhere with a Reese's candy bar wrapper tacked to a tree. Worked, and saved my hunting trip.

I use various styles, like one-inch white diamonds with either a 1/8 or 1/4 center ring. Depends on final scope power, whether a dot or FCH center, etc etc. I had a graphics program where I could experiment with all sorts of fancy textures, it seems like everything boils down to, the simpler the better.
Globe sights get round blacks with enough white for no distortion.
The target needs to be big enough to be visible -- and small enough to tell you whether you've actually centered it or not.
The color does not have to be black. Even a darkish gray works, or subdued reds, or mild blue.
One thing about orange targets that many don't know. Scopes and all eyeglasses have a prismatic effect to a certain degree, intense colors shine through the glass in a different spot from other intense colors. That's why we have a hard time seeing blue and red together.
This is called chromatic error. If you look for it, it can be really easy to see, especially with "cheaper" or older glass where the chemistry to pour optically-good (not perfect) glass was not well-understood.
So the deal is, we can SEE the fluorescent target really well, but we can't REALLY see it where it actually is.
I have found that orange dot targets don't mix well with black and white target backers at all. The focus is wrong, or maybe it's too narrow in the spectrum. But for me, they just float right off the target.
That is why the moderate blue of the targets John B. likes makes John happy.