Open sights excellence: the HW77K

[North Country Gal]

My old eyes, notwithstanding, I do enjoy a truly excellent set of open sights for target work. Unfortunately, serious target grade open sights have never been a tradition on American rifles. The traditional open sights on this side of the pond have been more a matter of a bead front and shallow notch rear designed for hunting. Those still work fine for hunting, but great bullseye target sights they are not. Hardly surprising, then, that so many Americans think of factory open sights as something to replace when they buy a rifle.

In Europe, though, quality open sights suitable for target work are more much easier to find. I've found them on two types of rifles. For those of you shoot rimfire, the CZ tangent open sights are very useable for bullseye work. I'll do a post on them another time. Even better open sights, as in true match grade open sights, can be found on quality German air rifles made by Diana (RWS) and, of course, Weihrauch (HW). In fact, I bought one HW to specifically shoot with those iron sights. It's one of my favorites.


It's the Weihrauch HW77K under lever in 177. It's the grandfather of under lever spring piston airguns, the oldest under lever still in production (first appeared in the early 80s). It's the gun that took the sport of Field Target by storm and the gun that started the under-lever love affair for so many air gun shooters. While the 77K can be scoped, the stock is designed with open sights in mind.

So lets take a look at the sights. First the rear. The unit attaches to the scope dovetail and can be removed or re-positioned on the receiver by loosening just one screw. The rear blade offers the user a choice of blade notches of varying styles and widths. All the user needs to do is pull out the blade and rotate it. As for the adjustments, when was the last time you saw an open sight with finger click adjustments? Yup, there is such a thing.


As for the front, we have a globe sight with a variety on inserts. For my bullseye work, I much prefer a blade front for tickling the bottom of the bullseye at the six o'clock position, but plenty of other inserts are available as you can see.




My scores 10 meter offhand scores using these open sights are almost identical to my scores when using a peep sight on this rifle (98) and only about a point off for an average score with my scoped HW rifles.

Shot, yesterday.


And, yes, I do shoot open sights for 50 yard target work. Will shoot some of those for you come spring when I don't have to put on the snowshoes just to get out to the 50 yard target.

In the meantime, I shoot air rifles indoors on a daily basis. Best fix I know for a shooting addict like me.

[ditto1958]

Cool thread! I am an open sights enthusiast. Posts like this are good to see, as far too few of today's shooters are aware of what is possible with irons.

[RanchRoper]

I'm an open iron sights holdout too. Must be a cowboy thing.

Nice shooting.

[Les]

Good write up, NCG, and great shooting.

My peepers won't allow the use of open sights, although I have discovered that I'm "OK" with aperture sights.

[North Country Gal]

Thanks, guys.

I get that about the peepers, Les. I have good peepers days and some not so good peeper days, now, too. I find that the type of open sights and the rifle in question makes almost as big a difference, though. All open sight setups are not the same.

[ditto1958]

Last week, a guy had his Henry Big Boy at the range. He had some 38 specials he was shooting up, and we put some clays out on the 100 yard berm. We took turns shooting at the clays from sandbags. At that distance, the clays looked like little specks on top of the brass bead front sight. It would take us four or five shots to do it, but we could hit the clays. Our misses were very close to being hits.

I had to wonder what a person could do with some practice.