In Part IV of the build, just when I thought I was getting close to done with the front sight, I had to restart.
I'd hacked too much off the LPA front sight. It was unusable, so here I try again with a new shotgun front sight from Fusion. The plan was the same, get an adjustable front sight, modify it to attached to the revolvers MCX-based rail and then illuminate a white jade bead on the front sight post.
Below are pictures of the process pretty much in order. I'll add a bit of commentary between, but the steps were pretty similar to what I was working on with the original sight post. And, if a picture is worth a thousand words, 8 pictures of sloppy metal work has got to be worth..... hundreds of words.
Above is the Fusion sight straight out of the box. It's build to attach to picatinny rails, so the easy button would have been to simply attach it to this future blaster as is and move on. But, that would also make it useless because it sits too high and co-witness with the Sig Romeo Zero. And it looks clunky.
Below is looking from the bottom on the front sight where I used my trusty Dewalt Brushless Drill to drill holes for bolts to pass from the top of the front sight, through the handguard's mounting holes and into the mounting block on the front of the GP-100's barrel.
With the LPA front sight, I attempted to remove a bunch of material so the front sight wouldn't be in the way of the handguard attaching to the barrel. This time, I'm using the same bolts to lock the front sight and the handguard to the revolver at the same time. This will be much more secure.
As with the LPA front sight, I had to cut the base off of this one. Not only did I want to reduce the bulkiness of the picatinny rail arms, I also needed it to sit lower on the handgaurd. The red dot mount is nearly flush with the top of the picatinny rail (you can see that above), so I need the front sight so sit pretty low as well. If it doesn't it'll block a large percentage of what is seen through the red dot.
Below you can see it sitting lower on the rail and the picatinny arms no longer sticking out to each side. I also had to put a small notch in the front of the housing becuase it's ~1/8" longer than the section of the rail I'd flatted.
Then it was time to test. It's hard to get a good picture of the illumination of the jade bead on the front sight post because the camera picks up a bunch of light from the flashlight that is an inch away. However, when looking down the rail, the jade bead shines brightly against the contrast of the black housing.
