Fundamentals of Marksmanship

[tim slater]

It's quite uncommon amongst rifle shooters; uncommon as in twenty years of competitive smallbore shooting, I've never seen one. The simple reason is the rifle already has an aperture. Now if you'require shooting historic service rifle with notch-and-blade ladder sights, then the increased depth of focus an aperture gives would be useful. I can't see how a double peep will help, except to darken your sight picture, straining your eye.

A lens with your distance prescription (and any cylindrical correction for astygmatism) + 0.50 is common for rifle shooting. The extra +.5 puts your focal distance at 2 metres, which is about double the eye-foresight distance. Placing the focus ahead of the foresight makes the target less fuzzy, without blurring the foresight.

A cheaper alternative to specialist shooting glasses is to put the lens in a rubber eyecup (Anschutz cups have little ribs to grip a lens) or one of the monoframe lens holders.

[SerenityNetworks]

Thanks Tim. Those explanations make perfect sense.

My vision plan allows me to get a new pair of glasses this year. My prescription hasn't changed and my daily glasses are in good shape. I may use the vision plan to just get me a pair of shooting glasses.

So I have two follow-up questions:
1) When I was active on this forum a couple years back, I recall seeing some recommendations on a company or companies that cater to shooters in the making of prescription eyeglasses. Can you (or anyone) point me to those companies?
2) Since I have multiple rifles with different styles of peeps on them, I'm not really sure a lens in an eye-cup would work very well. So before purchasing any glasses, I was wondering if testing might be a good idea. It seems I could take the distance part of my prescription, add 0.5 to it, grab a pair of inexpensive reading glasses with the appropriate magnification, and try it out. Since reading glasses usually come in 0.25 increments I could try +0.25, +0.5, and +0.75 to see what works best. Or would I just be wasting my time and money (assuming I don't already have the glasses laying around)?

Thank you again for the response and advice,
Andrew

[tim slater]

If you're switching between a number of rifles, all with slightly different sights, then yes you want the lens to be attached to you. Buying a few pairs of cheap reading glasses from a chemist isn't a bad idea. The disadvantage is that the lens won't be centred over your eye, or perpendicular to your line of sight. How much of a problem this is dependson your shooting position; in prone most regular spectacles are much too small and low, and have to be raised with padding under the bridge, even to peek out of a corner, but shooting from a bench may be OK.

You might try here, Brian is an optical engineer not an opthalmologist, but he has good reviews: http://www.bjonessights.com/glasses.html

[SerenityNetworks]

Thanks.

I hadn't planned on using the reading glasses except as a test to verify the prescription value I'm sending is what I will need.

Thanks for the reference to Brian. That is one of them I recall seeing.