Pistol RDS

Last weekend I did a lot of shooting. A buddy came up and we shot pistol one day.

I wasn’t shooting as good as I would have liked. I noticed about halfway through the day, I was not getting hits. Rounds were all of a sudden going to the 10 -11 o’ clock on nearly everything I was doing. I was watching my dot the entire time and it was staying where it was aimed. I wasn’t pushing into the gun or pressing the trigger with my whole hand.

After doing some reps at distance with my favorite trigger control exercise and with less than stellar results I noticed my RDS was loose again.

Well atleast it wasn’t me.

After wearing out an SRO after about 18,000-20,000 rounds, ever since I replaced the original steel mounting plate with an aluminum model when I warrantied the optic, about every 500-1000 rounds the screws would loosen. This time after about 1500 rounds with red loctite.

Shortly after my buddy’s RMR shit the bed. Ironically his screws were rusted in from carry with no loctite.

It’s been the nature of the beast.

Red dot sights on pistols, even the best models out, are relatively new technology. They just still haven’t figured out how to build them to handle the reciprocating mass of a handgun slide.

Type 1 RMR’s barely made it past 10,000 rounds. Newer models run on average from 15,000-40,000. Better but still not great. Cheaper models can die from installation to much lower round counts.

It was said with race type guns, you have to do more maintenance. More tinkering and tweaking. And it’s sort of true.

Running a more race type set up, I have yet to have any reliability issues. But you have to clean behind the extractor every 10-15,000. Springs wear out but I haven’t replace any yet.

There are batteries to replace on RDS’s. Mounting plates are less robust than direct milling but on certain guns there is no other option.

I’ve had issues with irons. Different height sights to get the gun zeroed. I’ve seen the sights fly off at classes.

At the end of the day, I still think the performance I get from a dot gun by far outweighs the other issues.