I like to experiment with oddball concepts, and while I freely admit that many (most?) don’t work out, I always learn something along the way.
My latest acquisition is a Meprolight Foresight optic. For those of you with short memories, this is a digital reflex sight that came out a few years ago. You configure it with an app, there’s a compass and level in it, there used to be a shot counter, etc. Unfortunately, it oozes unrealized potential because they never got around to adding features like custom reticles, configurable BDC, and so forth.
Anyways, one cool feature of the Foresight is essentially that it stores multiple zero configurations in the app that can be uploaded to your sight. This has obvious application for .300 BLK where supers and subs can have somewhat different zeroes. Being able to adjust zero for my chosen ammo with a few clicks seems nice. How can I leverage this on my night-fighting .300BLK gun? Will it work with NV?
Early on in my gun-owning journey, I bought a Saiga 12 and converted it to a 13″ barrel SBS. It’s a slick gun, albeit I think it’s been since eclipsed by some other contenders (especially the VEPR 12 and RIA VR80). I still enjoy shooting it as the opportunity presents.
Ever since I got into the night vision game, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of a night vision-oriented shotgun. I don’t think the Saiga 12 the BEST choice (rock-and-lock in the dark is rough with shotgun magazines), but I think it’s respectable, and it’s what I’ve got. However, in order to get my Saiga 12 SBS into a night vision ready mode, some upgrades were in order.
First, it had an old-style Chaos tri-rail. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I felt that moving to MLOK would give me a lighter gun to compensate for the stuff I was about to bolt on to it. I went with the KS-12 TRSS handguard, which wasn’t overly expensive and fit my SBS tightly (always a good thing when you’re about to mount a laser).
Next, the optic needed an upgrade for passive aiming use, with better light transmission characteristics and night vision brightness modes. I had an AEMS Core (green) optic on a PCC I wasn’t using much, so I bought a low mount for it and put the AEMS on the Midwest Industries side rail sight mount. This gets it nice and high, but not so high as to be obnoxious when not using night vision. The AEMS is widely regarded to be the next best thing to an Eotech E/XPS3 for night vision use.
Then… lights and lasers. I wanted to retain the shotgun’s white light ability, thus the solutions needed to be able to go in the visible and IR spectrums.
For the laser, I decided to go with the Holosun LS221G I had previously bought for my .300BLK SBR (and replaced with a Somogear PEQ-15). While it’s not optimal, I decided to mount it on the right side of the handguard. I didn’t have a top rail, and for reasons you’ll read about later, I didn’t want to put it on the bottom rail. One funny note about the LS221G is that the turrets are all labeled for side mounting.
For the light, I decided to go with a classic: the Surefire KM2-C “Vampire” head on a Surefire body with a Surefire UE tailcap, mounted offset from the bottom of the handguard. This would give me good IR and white light flood, which is all I really need out of a shotgun.
Finally, for the switch, I used a leftover Unity TAPS Sync V4 switch, which gave me the choice of light+laser or just laser. Since both the laser unit and the light could be individually configured as white light or IR, this gave me a lot of flexibility in how I could configure the whole system – and would eliminate the possibility of negligent white light discharges. Very handy!
This setup worked really well. However, when I put my Salvo 12 on the gun, the suppressor blocked the KM2-C. The Salvo-12 is a rather oblong suppressor and has a lot of mass below the barrel – fine on a tube-fed shotgun, inconvenient on a mag-fed shotgun. This got me thinking: how could I build this gun so that I could further offset the light?
The solution I wound up with was to utilize a knockoff fusion hub with an offset rail mounted to the top of it, on the right hand side of the handguard. I then mounted the LS221G to the rail on the hub, and the light straight to the offset portion of the hub (up and towards the centerline).
This pushes the light out of the way of the laser unit and the suppressor, while not blocking the field of view for the optic. It looks weird, but it works great. The suppressor does cause some shadow in the light beam, but it seems pretty usable in general. Unfortunately, since I don’t always run a suppressor on this gun, I was reluctant to mount the light further forward using a wing.
I ran the shotgun at action shooting practice, and there was no discernable zero shift. That’s a testament to the LS221G, but it’s worth noting that I was also shooting slightly-spicy birdshot, not hard-kicking 3″ 000 buckshot. The recoil is pretty anemic with the suppressor on; you can run this gun pretty fast if you want to.
I’ve also run it at night. And it’s a ton of fun. Reloads suck in the dark, but just shooting it until it runs dry and transitioning to pistol is great. The IR setup works really well for what I need (which is shotgun distances).
Obviously, this is a for-funsies gun for the most part. Yes, I could press it into home defense use, and I’m sure it would excel, but it’s mostly there as an oddball gun to run at night shoots to see how a shotgun can break stage setups. I may send it out to Dissident Arms at some point for a VEPR magazine conversion to aid in reloads.
I’ll make this post short. I bought a Vortex Defender MRDS to replace a Romeo0 on my backup P365X carry gun. It came, I took it out of the package, and put in a battery to function-test it before I did anything permanent.
It has a TERRIBLE refresh rate at anything other than max brightness. Like, I could cant the optic up and down at a very moderate rate and see a trail of red dots with substantial gaps between them. I have literally never seen this problem before, including on some really cheap optics. I am not sure what caused Vortex to make this design decision, but it was a terrible idea. Unfortunately, higher brightness levels caused substantial halo with the red dot as well. (On the plus side, it got very bright.)
I returned it. The 507K is still the RMSc footprint optic to beat. I thought everything else about the Defender seemed pretty solid, but those were deal killers for me. Keep in mind that this is coming from a guy running two UH1s, two Razor LPVOs, and two Razor RDSs. I am perfectly happy buying Vortex. But the Defender… not so much.
After messing around with night vision a bit, I discovered that the amount of light you let in makes a huge difference in your ability to see detail at varying distances in different light conditions. There are a couple ways of dealing with this:
Flip-up lens cap systems, such as the Phokus Hoplite or the improved Butler Creek setups (sometimes involving 3D printed components)
Irises
My RNVG came with a flip-up system with a 3D printed “shutter”. It works well enough, but is not up to hard use. It’s also the wrong color, which offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I knew in my heart that I wanted an iris system. The problem with irises is that the go-to Matbock Tarsier Eclipses are hugely expensive – as in $250 each. While I’m not afraid of spending money when it’s called for, $500 for a couple irises seemed a bridge too far, especially when there had been some complaints that they were so tight that adjustment frequently adjusted focus. If I were using these in a duty context, sure, I’d buy the Matbock solution and then expense it to my unit.
However, with the power of the internet, I discovered there was a far cheaper way of approaching this problem. Here’s the recipe I used:
If you’re in a hurry, you can get the same irises off Amazon for 50% more, but if you use my recipe, it’s ~$50 for each tube. Besides the much more acceptable cost, one thing I really liked about this solution was how I had more finely-grained control over light, and how the sacrificial lens was screwed in (vs sandwiched in my previous setup). The amount of force needed to turn the diaphragm was also just right, and did not affect focus. They also look super cool, and if they get damaged, it’s a LOT less money that I’m out. I was quite impressed with the amount of thread engagement that each piece of this solution also had – the iris and lens are not going to be coming off by accident.
As mentioned in passing in other posts, I bought a Smith & Wesson R8 revolver about a year ago that I have basically been using for messing around with OSR and low-light shooting. Reloading 357 Magnum (at 38 Special pressures) is a good excuse to use leftover powder that I am uninterested in stocking longterm (Bullseye, Unique, etc.). Nothing wrong with that, but as any reloader can tell you, swapping out calibers on a progressive press is typically an annoying affair. I also find that 9mm moonclips typically work much better than 357/38 moonclips due to cartridge length. You can see where this is going: I like the R8 in 357 Magnum, but I’d like it a lot better if it were in 9mm.
After getting some solid life lessons at my first night vision shoot, I bought some gear and went back to another event. Would you believe I found out some more?
I had the opportunity to go out to my first “night shoot with night vision” on Sunday night, and as you may expect, it was quite the learning experience. I’ve done a fair amount of white light shooting, but this was the first time I took my RNVG with Omni VIII tubes out for a spin. Here’s some essential lessons I learned.
Words have meanings, and the 2011 vs double-stack 1911 terminology is extremely confusing to many people… hence a lot of misuse. With a number of new entries coming into the market, I thought a refresher would be in order.
A double-stack 1911 is literally just that: a 1911 with a wider grip, and no other structural changes. Examples of these include the Para P18, BUL M-5, and RIA TAC HC. This necessitates certain parts differences (trigger bow being a big one), but the parts differences may vary from model to model; for example, Para P18s use different grip panels to hide the trigger box near the grip safety, vs the BUL M-5 which has a very specific grip safety with wings.
2011 is a registered trademark of Staccato (nee STI), but it is the generally accepted term for a 1911-like pistol that has a steel module with rails and a pair of grip bushing as its serialized part. The key word here is modular; the grip can be changed out separately, and is often polymer. Examples of these include the Staccato P, BUL SAS II, and Springfield Armory Prodigy. There may be certain parts incompatibilities (BULs use different grips and magazines) between them, but they usually use about the same parts you’d see in double-stack 1911s. One key thing to understand is that not all 2011s are double-stack. The Cosaint COS11 and Staccato R are 2011s that use single-stack 1911 magazines.
So… now you know. Don’t say 2011 when you’re look at that RIA, and don’t say double-stack 1911 when you’re looking at a Staccato P. 🙂
I have to admit, with some shame, that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the blog this year. I had a nice run of SHOT posts, but real life was so busy that it was hard to find time to finish a couple of bigger articles I had going. I had a great shooting season anyways.
The Hebrew Hammer 