Whacky Project For Mini-14
 

My Brother and I bought a couple of Mini-14's last year. They are the new 580series and we have found them to be considerably more accurate than the old 180 series version. One thing we've been bothered with is the cheesy rear iron sights they come with. In researching aftermarket replacement iron sights we've found all of them lacking for our tastes. At present our rifles are both scoped but would like to have considerably better iron sights than they come with or can be had.

So, I've taken one of the iron match sights (SA # 5004) off one of my Springfield M1A's and delivered it to a C&C shop that I'm a silent business partner with. At present they have copied this part into their CAD system exact and to it's full scale. At present we could manufacture exact copies of these sights but that wouldn't be cool to SA or their OE supplier that makes them.

What we intend to do is scale this Springfield M1A match sight down, re-dimension where required, and re-design the sight base to fit the Ruger Mini-14 580 sereis rifles.

I've discussed this project with some of our friends here local and they say: Why waste your time and effort to do this? And my reply is; Because I can and why not? Others say : If you can make it work it would be a nice piece for this rifle.

So my questions to the forum members here, who are in the know, is;

Is this a whacky idea doomed to fail?

Any changes I should make to the basic functional design of the original Springfield Match sight before I redesign to fit the Mini?

Aside from a possible height change to the front blade sight of the mini; What design change should I make for it? If any.

I'm a multiple Mini-14 owner and think this is a great idea. More quality, well-made and well thought-out parts available for a long-running, long-standing and respected rifle is never a bad thing, especially if it's not "just another" part that's already available.

I'd love to test one for our new hunting/outdoor magazine and write it up when it comes out! If you decide to go through with it and want some free press and/or any marketing help, get in touch with me!

Best of luck!

Josh

I'll keep that in mind. Today we discussed the tooling we'll have to purchase. Actually it wont be that much as this shop does alot of contracts for defence contractors and alot of what the machinest says we need to build a couple or so prototypes he already has. The process with this will be somewhat slow as he has quite a bit of paying work, but thats O.K. We've been "bench racing" this for several months now and I finally broke down and paid the CAD guy for his time to copy the Springfield part (s) into a CAD file. The machinest will work for free on this in his spare time for a "cut of the action". Thats O.K. too. I may be buying some needed tooling in a short while.

I think it is a great idea. The M1 Garand/M14 sights are the best battle rifle sights in the world, so scaled down versions for the Mini would be cool.