Friday 6 April 2018

VIASS, I knew the plastic clamp was a mistake

Whilst doing some home training with my new LG400 I decided to try fitting the VIASS to it. To my surprise it was not quite as simple as I had been expecting. Initially the LG400 looks like it should be very good for VI shooting as the loading lever can be fitted on either side, either going up or going down when in the open position. Having the lever going down means that there should be no problems in fitting a scope to the rifle as nothing comes above the mounting rail. Well that is what I thought, but it turns out that on the right hand side of the rifle there are a couple of linking rods connecting the spindle of the lever to the sliding mechanism of the bolt and when the loading port is in the open position these actually rise up alongside the mounting rail. Unfortunately the bulky plastic clamp of the VIASS is just too wide and will get in the way of these linking rods.

Not all is lost if you want to fit the VIASS to the LG400, there are a couple of possible solutions. The first is to use a sight raising block to mount the VIASS and the LG400 comes with a sight raising block which is suitable. However if you want to avoid raising the VIASS more than you need to the other option is to consider fitting it to the rail just in front of the loading port, but this does place the VIASS further from you which means you may need to reach further when making adjustments. I cannot help thinking neither of these need to be done if the VIASS had been slightly differently designed. If it had either used a narrower clamp like that on the EcoAims VIS500 or used standard scope mounts then this problem would simply have not occurred.

Experience of creating shooting videos

You may be aware that over the last few weeks I have been creating some videos for IBSA on vision impaired shooting. It has been quite an ex...