Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders accuracy with open sights

yes it does, you get lax and in a hurry and your groups open up, but you concentrate and you can nail the bullseye. Lack of a better word its like you zone in and it almost points itself. Its hard to describe until you do it and you see that it works. With that 22 you can shoot 4 or 5 and almost get cocky and don't focus and you know you are gonna miss when you squeeze the trigger

I was shooting my Blackhawk hunter yesterday at 40yds are so. Anticipating recoil etc excuse excuse and I was all over the paper. Calmed down and put 12 in a spot about the size of my fist. Makes a difference. I think scopes are more of a handicap than a help. They make mediocre shooters be able to hit stuff. Almost immediate gratification but irons are more satisfying to me.

I shot a doe with my knight at 96 yards a few weeks ago with the Williams peep. I sighted 4" high at 100. I put the front sight on the point where the back of front leg met the body. Put the bullet right through the lungs. Im taking the same rifle to NM in dec after an elk. Ive got my target knobs on the way for my Williams. Planning to mark sight at 100, 150 and 200 for 4" high so no matter what I range the animal I can place the front sight in same place. No Kentucky windage or Tennessee elevation.

Good shooting ,Phoneman.....sounds like you have it dialed in.

What would one expect from a Phoneman?

I run a rear peep and I am about to change out my front sight from the fiber optic on the right to the set up with the crosshair on the left.

https://imgur.com/bOAemsG

3 to 4 inches is dead game year in and year out, when I went to the builders place to pick up my newly built J&S style 58 cal Hawken rifle, the builder had two red clay birds sitting on a hillside, on 50 the other 75 yards away, he told me the load the rifle had the sights filed for and handed me his bag, I loaded my new rifle with 140 gr FFG blackpowder and a .570" patched round ball.

I set the rifle in my hand and rested it on a bag, with the rear of the rifle shouldered I shot and busted the 50 yard bird, reloaded the rifle and did the same with the 75 yard bird, paid the man for the rifle, went home the next day, reloaded the rifle and hit three for three of my own orange clay birds at a full 100 yards, the sights are filed in a way that you put the target right on top of the front sight, that things deadly accurate to 125 yards with worry of holdover.

OUTFUGGINSTANDING!!

Not muzzle loaders but the same thing should apply....Most rimfire position shooters compete with both scopes and iron sights...in fact you can use open sights in the "any sight" (scoped typically) matches.
I did such a thing before I could afford a scope. My scores were maybe 2% better scoped than iron sighted. More dependent on the many other factors like fatigue, nutrition, solunar tables and voodoo hexes.
Excellent shooting conditions indoors Winter or outside Summer really makes the scores pretty close usually a matter of Xs to win.
Extra status to beat a few scoped shooters with your one and only (iron sighted) match gun!

Thanks Sharpsman, guessing a clay bird is around 3 inches, so I'm shooting right with the OP, what got me is how accurate and consistent these round ball guns are with Black Powder, that stuff doesn't take a back seat to any powder, we all know with our Sharps rifles mid to low single digit extreme spreads are the norm, smokeless powders cant even invent a dream to try and approach that level of consistency.

Years back in the 1970s I built a .54cal chunk gun. It had a 48" long Bill Large [ famous barrel maker and chunk gun shooter of yester year ] barrel, 1 1/4 across the flats. You had to shoot open iron sights and the matches where shot at 60yds, laying on the ground with a chunk of a log you'd rest the barrel on. We'd shoot at a X and the closest to the center won. Just about everyone would use a spotter - a piece of paper you'd sight in on and could move around on the target to get centered on the X. I ask Bill what kind of sights I should use. He said a partridge rear sight with a .100 notch in it. I could then use a 3X5 menu card as a sighter. It would just fit in the rear notch. He said to make the front sight a hair smaller than the menu card. Keep everything lined up on top.This way it was like a peep sight. He also cherried out a .535 RB mold to .545. I had to start the ball with a small hammer. That gun would lay one RB on top of the other. I won some matches but was more of a pistol shooter at the time so I sold it to a fellow here in Michigan. I saw him about 3 years latter and he claimed he won a couple of Michigan chunk gun matches. I believe a big part of it was the sights. You need the right sights for what you're doing. Must be why when I aged and had trouble seeing the sights I went to Trade Gun matches - flintlock smooth bore - where no rear sight is allowed. Now that I'm just a old fart it's shotguns and if I want to shoot a rifle it's with a piece of tape with a small hole in it on my glasses [ to clear up the sights ]. Works great on my 43 Spanish Remington rolling block.