Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Installing iron sights on a slick barrel?

I'm thinking about adding iron sights -- perhaps ideally front sight plus QD rear peep -- to a barrel with no previous iron sights installed.

One option is to do that on the original 700 Ti "Mountain Rifle" (IOW very skinny) profile barrel. Another option might be to rebarrel and at the same time increase twist rate and lop a couple inches off the original length. Either way...

How to I get there from here? I shopped a little on the NECG website, but otherwise I'm starting from mental scratch...

-Chris

Are you planning on a DIY job or having it done professionally... DIY you'll need to drill and tap for the screws and use permanent loctite. I had to re-do one in the past when the banded front fell off... I have them "welded on" now... works like a champ and the bases aren't going anywhere.

Easiest way is NECG banded front and a peep rear. No holes to drill that way and the band can be epoxied in place instead of soldering.

Otherwise it would need to be setup in a jig in a drill press or ideally a milling machine. Leveled up off the scope bases to get the sights on at top dead center, and drilled and tapped.

Williams makes pretty good iron sights that are a bit less expensive than NECG, albeit not as refined. Brownells has a good chart with the plug and play formula for figuring sight height to help you order the right stuff.

Be careful who you chose or installation, once a hole is drilled in a barrel it’s there even if it’s not centered or it’s too deep. Also depending on caliber the TI contour barrel maybe too thin at the muzzle to drill and tap for a screw on sight base.

I wasn't thinking DIY; didn't know it might be possible...

Welded on? Epoxy? I dunno from welding, but I can spell epoxy... Really? "Glue"?

Are NECG and Williams the only (and/or best) options? Marbles? Lyman? Or...?

I forgot, another idea might be to have the barrel threaded (I don't think I could do that myself), either the original barrel or a replacement. In case sometime I finally get off my keester and shop on suppressors...

The only I'm wondering if it might come to a replacement barrel is about twist rate. I'd like to be able to shoot some of the longer 147/156/160-grain 6.5s at least semi-accurately... just i case I think of a reason somewhere down the road for using those weights... but I haven't yet tried any of those from the original barrel either. One of these days...

-Chris

I've drilled and tapped about 100 barrels for sights and never used ANY loctite much less Permanent. Never had any sight come loose. Welding the banded sight on, really? Soldered a ton, never had any of those come loose either. That said, when soldering, some do a better job than others.

Any barrel can have sights added. Thin barrels can be trickier to drill and tap so soldering is often a better solution. Something to think of, skinny barrels will require a taller front sight.

As for barrels, I always recommended folks go with a faster twist than they anticipate needing. Why, well, even if you don't plan on shooting heavy for caliber bullets, monometal types are longer for weight than their lead core counterparts. As more states adopt lead free bullets regs, the need for a faster twist becomes more real.

Thanks all, for comments so far.

Unless I'm looking wrong, all the viable Williams options from Brownells seem to be true receiver sights. I'm thinking more of an immediate solution to "my scope just crapped out" (dropped it on a rock,whatever...), to salvage a day's hunting until I can get back to camp or wherever and swap in a pre-sighted back-up scope. Hence my thought about Weaver/Picatinny-capable rear aperture sight. Thoughts?

Agree, ref longer mono-metal bullets. I dunno that the original 1:9 twist won't work for those; haven't tried that experiment, yet. I just assume it's fixable, if necessary.

-Chris

FWIW, I think it's going to remain easier to just continue with my initial solution: a FastFire3 (or similar) red dot sight, pre-sighted-in, to be easily mounted on the front scope mount base.

The thing weighs less than 2-oz, easy enough to stash in the backpack somewhere... and in the grand scheme of things, they're easier for my old eyes to work with than an aperture sight, or especially open sights, would be.

-Chris