Glasses and contacts

Glasses and contacts 
I am new to shooting with glasses and I hate it! I want to go to contact lenses. Should I tell the doctor that I need to focus at the sight radius or should I tell him I need to see at a distance? I shoot an ar15 in dcm matches. My 45-year-old eyes are starting to slip. I got my first glasses this month. After shooting with them I think contacts will help with a lot of the problems the glasses cause. Any help would be much appreciated…pat

Glasses and contacts 
jetmech: Have you considered trying a Jones diopter rear sight? Depending on where your eyesight is, you may be able to shoot without prescription glasses using a Jones sight. I’m 48 and have to use reading glasses, but a plus .5 diopter lets me see a good, sharp front sight. Bob’s phone no. is 602-840-2176,Mon.-Thu.6-8pm MST.

Glasses and contacts 
Hi Pat, – – My best solution has been to order a pair of Knobloch Shooting glasses. Have the prescription lens measured for the exact distance from your shooting eye to the front sight This works well. I wear bi-focal lenses, and have considered another option – have the shooting eye lens ground for the eye-to-sight correction, and the other lens ground for the normal bi-focal prescription. Sound as if it should work, but I haven’t tried it (yet!). Hope this helps. -Bob Hendry

 Glasses and contacts 
I normally wear contacts during matches, however, I have had problems with my vision ‘fading’ if the contacts dry out a bit or float when I blink. This isn’t too cool during the rapids since one second you have good focus on the front sight and the next you see nothing but a gray blur. I keep a spare set of glasses and a contact case and solution in my shooting kit just in case I run into problems. If you have problems seeing the front sight, I concur with the Jones diopter. It does help.

Glasses and contacts 
The Jones diopters are at http://www.bjonessights.com

Glasses and contacts 
Hi Jet Mech, hope this helps. I have worn daily wear ‘toric’ contacts for some years now and have enjoyed some success. As you can surmise from the other posts in this thread contacts, more precisely your reaction to them is a very individual thing. When I started shooting in competition I recognized some problems with regular glasses, specifically parallax, because I didn’t think I was looking through the optical center of the lens over my shooting eye. Initially, after getting used to wearing them I did well with the contacts, but a few years back I was reading Jim Owens book, “The big Lie” or what ever and when I tried his drill of putting a pencil mark on the rear of the front sight I realized I couldn’t see it very well. At first opportunity, I returned to my practitioner, rifle and all, and they tried different lenses until I could see the front sight clearly. I tried this offhand as well as prone because my stock weld is different in each position. And a few years later, at Perry I had Bob Jones install one of his lenses in the rear aperture of my M1A, and the combination still works great. The problems still reside with the jerk behind the trigger but I can’t blame it on vision. I do notice that if I don’t break the shoot quickly after I get on the gun my accuracy drops off noticeably, but from all my experience laying on the gun trying to dress up the sight picture is futile, because your accuracy will deteriorate while you hold your breath anyway! I once spoke with a Navy optometrist that is also a Distinguished shooter after he examined me while we were both stationed in Italy, and his comment then was to not waste my time with contacts, a good set of Knoblochs would serve me better. Obviously I didn’t pursue his advise, my feeling has always been that fooling around adjusting them on the firing line detracted from the time I spend on other equally important things while I get ready to shoot especially if I’m trying to do all that stuff during a hurried prep time. I really do feel that if you can get used to wearing them, and take the time with your practitioner to get the right diopter actually using the rifle to do so that contacts are an excellent choice, but as I mentioned initially it is a highly personal things, one size does definitely not fit all! Sorry, for the long post, but not a simple subject. HTH

Glasses and contacts 
Pat, I’m not the HP guru, but I’ve been shooting most of my life. I must say that my experiences with contact lenses and any sort of precision shooting are similar to dmcali and GcS’s, namely no success, so far. When I concentrate, they “gray out”; I imagine that they are drying out from my not blinking often enough. When I blink, the world clears, but I must “rebuild” my sight picture…. then it grays out… ad infinitum…. I just put up with precautions to avoid fogging and sweat streaks on my safety (-1.50 prescription) glasses. I have a friend that shoots smallbore and a bit of HP, who says that the old style hard contacts are the way to go, but I haven’t shelled out the bucks for an experimental pair of contacts, yet. HTH, Tommy

Glasses and contacts 
I have used Champion frames for most of my shooting career and have never worn contacts; call me paranoid, but I have never liked the concept of putting something in my eyes. I have several friends who have alternated between contacts and glasses over the years and the main complaint they have always had over contacts is because the eye is open for a somewhat unnaturally long period, they find they suffer more from dust and dryness than when they wear contacts normally. One good friend of mine used to reckon that in the mornings he needed at least 90 minutes before he could shoot in contacts. The universal problem with shooting glasses is the weather, but I just carry around a lot of chamois and towels! – Bill