Tritium sights......

[thunderpout]

I put a really sweet sight set on my marlin 45-70, a Brockman Generation 3 set, but in low light conditions this season, it was very hard to see the front sight post.... I e-mailed Brockmans Gunsmithing, who Mfg'd the sight, and they said they make a tritium inserted replacement post for the sight I have, and its supposed to last (the glow) up to 14 years.... Ive never had a tritium sight on any of my firearms, I know theyre pretty popular on self defense pistols... anyone have any experience with these?

[Uplander]

Tritium is a radioactive isotope with a half life of about 12 years. The sights typically consist of a small sealed glass tube/vial coated with a phosphor and containing the tritium gas. As the tritium decays, the electrons react with the phosphor coating to produce light (glow). The sight will gradually lose about half of it's initial brightness by the time it reaches it's half-life. This cycle will repeat every 12 yrs or so getting dimmer until no more light is produced. The more tritium in the vial, the brighter the initial light and the longer the useful lifespan.

Personally, I don't own tritium sights, but have shot numerous guns with them. The glow is best seen in very dark or totally dark areas. Some of the sights I used were much brighter than others.

Offhand I can think of several reasons for some sights to be dimmer than others:
1. Inferior phosphor coating on the glass tube
2. "old" tritium (past it's half-life point).
3. less tritium in the vial.

[thunderpout]

Thanks, I new what the half life was for it and all that, but yeah, I suppose its only going to be as good as the phosphor quality, and the age of the tritium used... in the daylight, do the "dots" appear white?...anotherwords, even when the glow wears down, it would still be better than just a solid black front blade sight....?

[Uplander]

In daylight the dot should appear more or less "white", similar to the look of typical 3-dot combat sights - definitely better than just all-black sights.

One thing that I do is use a dab of phosphorescent paint on the standard white dots (or even paint the front sight blade and outline of the rear notch on non-dot sights). The paint I have will appear white in light conditions, but then you can shine a bright light on it for a few seconds and it will glow greenish for several hours in the dark. Same stuff is used on jigs/lures for night fishing.

On a related topic, I have found certain fiber optic sights to work very well in low light conditions also. The larger the fiber optic rod diameter and the more rod that is exposed the better they transmit light.