| Building a Muzzleloader - Fitting the sights | |
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I'll tell much of the story with photographs, so each page may be a bit slow to load.
Fitting the sights should have been one of the easiest tasks, but that wasn't to be. The rear sight mounted easily enough, but I'm very disappointed in its quality -- it's made of "pot metal" rather than steel, and the black paint was falling off of it in several places.
The rear sight has a dovetail insert that simply slips into the dovetail slot in the top of the barrel. That insert is threaded, and a screw goes through the sight body into the insert. The insert fits quite loosely in the slot, but in this case that's not a problem -- you simply loosen the screw, slip the insert into the slot, and tighten the screw. The sight body squares itself against the flats on the octagonal barrel as the screw draws it tight, and you're done.
I was able to touch up some of the ugly spots on the rear sight using Birchwood-Casey Aluminum Black, which works to darken some aluminum alloys. Unfortunately, the sight is made of soft alloy material, and will no doubt continue to shed its crummy factory finish with use.
This is the stuff I used to touch up the rear sight.
The adjustments in the rear sight are quite coarse, and detents intended to make it click-adjustable are not very dependable, especially for windage. Care will have to be taken to ensure that the adjustment screws don't move around with handling.
This shows the ugly rear sight. The only steel parts are the dovetail insert (only barely visible here) and the screws.
The front sight is really where I had the most trouble. It came from the factory with the male dovetail grossly undersized, and it would simply fall through the female dovetail slot in the barrel. I checked the barrel slot against other front sights I had lying around, to ensure that it wasn't over-cut -- it's not. This defective sight seems to prove what Dad has told me many times -- that the factories will often toss the worst of their materials into their kits, so they don't have to deal with trying to fit them. At the very best, they're not particularly choosy about what parts go into kits.
I first tried CVA's suggestion of peening the corners of the sight dovetail using a centerpunch, and it didn't do the job -- the fit was just too poor. In all my dealings with CVA attempting to procure missing parts (see page one for more on this), I mentioned the bad sight numerous times, and asked if they would replace it. They failed to do so. I gave them the chance to do me right, and they didn't take it.
I wound up getting out my copy of Roy Dunlap's Gunsmithing, and following a suggestion therein, i.e. peening the dovetail slot in the barrel to raise enough material to hold the sight in place. This worked fairly well, but there's visible daylight between sight and barrel (which is unsightly, no pun intended), and I really would have liked a better fit. Oh well, it seems to be doing the job so far -- I'll just have to purchase a replacement sight if I want something that fits properly.
This shows the two rows of punch marks I had to make, in order to extrude material upward to hold the front sight in place.
This illustrates the width of the front sight -- in peening the notch, I had to be careful not to peen anything that wouldn't be covered by the sight.
This shot was intended to show the "gaposis" between barrel and sight, but it doesn't show it very well. It can be seen somewhat, to the right of the dovetail.
I also had to file and re-blue the front of the front sight. In the manufacturing process, material had been extruded forward, creating sharp edges. Unfortunately, I didn't take any "before and after" pictures of it.
Something I don't understand is why I was supplied with a rear sight with a fairly large square notch, and a bead-type front sight. The front sight doesn't fit very well in the large square notch, and being a bead-type it would be better used with a buckhorn rear sight. Apparently this is business as usual for CVA, and it seems to work tolerably well.
Next Page - Inletting for Wedge Pin Plates
- Russ Chastain
