After being introduced to shooting sporting clays by fellow TAG contributor, Nate Schultz, last fall, I had stocked up a couple boxes of clays, just waiting to be turned to powder. When I recently received a Redring shotgun sight, I had the perfect excuse to head out to dust those clays. What follows is my experience with the Redring sight, and plenty of fun at the cold sporting clay range.
Features
Before I get into shooting with the Redring sight, allow me to give you a brief rundown of its features. The Redring sight displays a red ring target reticle that represents the space of the shot burst at 65ft (which also helps to serve as a range finder). The spot metering technology of the Redring sight has a processor that automatically adjusts the brightness of the reticle depending on the background light (that is, the brighter the background light, the brighter the reticle appears, and vice-versa). Although, if the auto spot metering doesn’t give you quite the intensity you’re looking for, you can manually adjust using the two buttons on the Redring sight’s side. The sight has an automatic shutoff. It either shuts off 4 hours after first turning it on, or if you make a manual adjustment, it turns its self off four hours after the last adjustment.
Installation
I’m not necessarily the most mechanically inclined of sorts, so I was thankful that installing the Redring sight was straightforward and simple. With the enclosed instructions and Allen keys, I was able to mount the sight in just a few minutes. I first measured the width of my Browning BPS’s rib (for those of you with Picatinny rails on your shotguns, Redring makes an adapting mount for that, too). Then, following the instructions, swapped a spacer on the sight, mounted it, and tightened it down. Conveniently, no sighting in is needed. Once the optic is mounted, I was good to go.
Performance
I mentioned earlier that Nate first introduced me to shooting sporting clays. That was in fall of last year. I’m a bit ashamed to admit, I hadn’t made it back to the sporting clay range since that outing. That meant that the trip to the range with the Redring sight was to be my second-ever attempt at shooting clays. Even considering my inexperience with this shooting medium, I encountered a remarkable degree of success sending clays into the great dusty beyond. I have to give a large degree of credit for that success to the Redring. The bright reticle was easy to see, even in the varying light of the cloudy sky. The low profile of the sight didn’t alter the shotgun’s balance, nor did I have to adjust how I shouldered or looked down the sight to adjust to the new optic. The parrallax free ring was easy to track whether shooting left or right handed (as a left-eye dominant shooter, I prefer shooting long guns lefty). All I had to do was cover the clay with the red ring, pull the trigger, and poof! No more clay. After about three hours of shooting, I missed only two or three clays (which most likely was the result of me misjudging the occasional breeze). After a couple hundred rounds of 20ga, and many a felled clay, the sight hadn’t loosened at all.
Price
This is bound to be the biggest limiting factor for folks. The Redring sight, as lovely as it works, is not cheap. Brand new, the Redring sight will set you back about $750. If you decide to purchase a Redring shotgun sight, you’ll be making an quality investment into your future shotgun shooting experience.
