33 Winchester Front Sight Height |Winchester Rifles|Forum|Winchester Collector

This is from an early Model 1886 Takedown in .33 Winchester, manufactured in 1902.  The fromt sight wedge appears to be 0.90”.  The sight appears to be ~0.20”at its greatest height, making it ~0.290” in total.

Ian,  is the rear sight on the gun you measured the standard open iron sight or is there a tang sight installed? 

Morgan, If authenticity of a front sight for your gun is the only issue, it won’t matter. But if you intend to shoot it and you have a tang sight on the wrist, you may need a higher than original factory sight, unless the tang sight was original to the gun.

I only mention this because I’ve been struggling with getting front sight heights colinear with tang and receiver sights on several rifles. 

I have not shot my .33 WCF in 30 years or so.  I remember that I had to replace the original front site with a taller site.  The rifle shot to high with original site!  I believe that it was sited for a 6:00 hold.  I prefer to site dead on.  Shot a nice Pa White tail with it back in the mid 1990s, and it has been resting since.  I always think that I will take it out again, but have not as of yet.

If a rifle has open iron sights installed at the factory,  the front sight should — but is not always — of a height that causes bullets to impact with a dead-on hold at, say 100 yards for centerfire, when the rear sight body is positioned in the middle elevator notch. That front sight height allows the shooter a measure of adjustment range up and down. 

The above case requires the sighting body of the rear sight – the “V” of an open sight or the aperture of a receiver sight or tang sight — to be the same height over the bore as is the bead of the front sight. 

When the front sight is of the correct height over the bore to be co-linear with an open rear sight, changing to a receiver sight will usually require a higher front sight. A tang sight may or may not require a higher front sight, depending on the height and elevation range of its stem. I know Marble’s has a variety of stems of differing heights and I think Lyman’s does too. 

The thing to do is shoot your gun with the load you plan to use and see if the tang stem has enough elevation range to comfortably use the existing front sight with some extra adjustment plus or minus left over. If youve got the aperture screwed down as low as it will go and the bullets are still shooting too high, you will want to change the front sight.

There are formulae that will compute the correct height front sight, that require a lot of tedious measuring. I own a rifle similar to yours – an 1886 takedown lightweight in .33 Winchester with a 24″ barrel and a Lyman tang sight. This evening, for my amusement, I’m going to tell Gemini just that and ask it to compute a correct front sight height for a 100 yard zero using a dead-on hold with factory 200 grain ammunition. Tell me a different yardage and I’ll use that. 

The first time I used Gemini for that purpose, i did it as a joke. When I got the answer and the underlying data, I didn’t laugh. Ive used it several tmes since and it’s been on the money. It knows a hell of a lot about ballistics and gun and ammo specs.