Sunday, November 1, 2009

No range day. :-(

Not really that sad about it. Hunting season is open and being a Sunday, Clear skies, and cool, every shotgunner out there is going to be at the range setting up. I would be lucky to get a lane.

So what do I do?

I tear apart a Russian scope and replace the illuminator for the reticule. The PSOP scope that comes with the PSL was originally illuminated with Tritium vials. Unfortunately these degrade over time(that whole half-life thing with radioactive materials) and no longer light up enough to light the reticule. I was checking out another site where a guy was trying to replace them and saw how the layout on the scope was. I felt confident enough to give it a go but decided to NOT use Tritium. Several reasons for this, 1) Hard to come by 20) Expensive. Instead I went to Radio shack, picked up 2 LED's for $1.50 (part #276-026 if you want to emulate this mod.) I had everything else in stock. I drilled a 1/8" hole into the cover of the tritium vials after removing them. I then epoxied in the LED and led the wires out of the housing. Before reassembly I tested the reticule by closing up the house and turning off all the lights. ITS BRIGHT! I can actually use this during daylight hours and it offers enough lighting offset to compensate for dark backgrounds. Its really intended for low lighting such as you get at sunset or sunrise: it is not for night work. Typically though if I were to use this for hunting, those are the hours that I will be more inclined to see my quarry.
I will make arrangements to go to the range to verify my zero again but it seems like everything reassembled dead on. The reticule isn't part of the elevation/windage prism so I think that it will still be on target. The biggest thing was making sure it was still horizontal to the rifle.
I was going to post pictures of the Mod but my camera really sucks for closeup detail pictures. Everything is so blurry that a picture in this case is only worth one word; Crap.

Kind of itchy to get to the range now. LOL I am such a gungeek.

2 comments:

Bitmap said...

"ITS BRIGHT!"

You could put a potentiometer in line with the LED and dim it down when it gets darker.

Diogenes said...

I actually just dropped one of the batteries and it came down to tolerable levels. The Pot idea would work but there isn't a whole lot of room to work with where its located. I would need a micropotentiometer and those can be finicky. Too much or not enough and little in between.
Good idea though.