I have a set of Dawson Precision sights on one of my Springfield XD-9‘s. The front sight has a fiber optic insert. While at the range today, the insert popped out. It wasn’t really a big deal as you don’t use the fiber for aiming, just to help attract your eye. Interestingly, just seeing “white light” through the hole in the front sight was still enough to attract my eye. Funny thing too was foo.c was shooting his EMP and the roll pin holding in the front sight started to come out. Just wasn’t a good day for front sights. 🙂

When my gun came back from Springer Precision, they included the extra fibers that came with the sights. One red, one green. I had red in before, and I opted to go with green just to see if I’ll like it. I tried both out at the house just to see how my eyes felt and it didn’t make much difference, but the red did seem to have a bit more contrast… something seemed to grab my eyes a bit more, but it could be nothing more than just being used to seeing a red dot and not a green. I figure I can try the green for a while and if I don’t like it I can always switch back to red.

The cool thing? Installation is a snap. Dawson provides instructions here.

One quirky side-effect of the melt approach was I perhaps melted a little too much and left a bit of a “mushroom head” on the breech side of the fiber. That actually ended up making the dot a little bigger. I’m not sure this is a sound installation technique and it wasn’t my intention to do that, but it makes me think if green doesn’t work out that I might melt a little more of the fiber to give it just a bit bigger melt and thus a larger dot. It’s not much larger (10th of an inch? I mean, very minor), but it’s enough to be noticeable.

We’ll see how it goes.