I got one of these (direct from MEC, but you can get them from Intershoot.co.uk now) a while ago to try out.
Looked great, but had a few problems – for a start, my rearsight got a little complicated:
Okay, so some of that got stripped off, but even after that, it was still a bit… busy:
Now, I have a fairly pronounced cant on the rifle, so that introduced another problem – the duplex is only anchored at the top and I don’t know if it’s my one alone or the design, but when you cant it, the iris doesn’t hang vertically, it moves slightly to one side and makes a mess of your sight picture, so you’re fiddling with its adjustment a fair bit to try to get everything aligned. And speaking of which, the sight picture itself gets a bit more complicated as well:
The problem is that the gap between the rear iris ring on the outside and the middle ring of the duplex is just as critical as the centering of the foresight ring in the rear iris, and unless the duplex is perfectly centered in the rear iris – and locked solidly in place – then you get a sight picture like the one above, and if you’re mid-match and fixating on the target, you don’t notice the small drift offcenter of the duplex in the rear iris.
Now I know these can work; I saw one or two being used to good effect in Intershoot and in RIAC by the Dutch team (it’s hard to see but look at the rearsight of Peter, second from the left in the photo):
But for me, the Duplex is now sitting in the pile of Bits I Bought Because They Were A Good Idea At The Time But They Haven’t Worked Out So Far But Maybe With A Bit Of Work They Will Later On…
Dude, that’s ridiculous looking!
Whatever about the other rule changes, I think the ISSF need to bring in an “only one iris per rearsight” rule to protect you from yourself! 😀
No, no such rule is needed.
‘Cos I’ve got the “matt fox” rule, also known as the “what the fook are you playing at? *thwack* get that off that rifle ye eejit!” rule 😀
Hello Mark
Just read your write up of the Centra Duplex, Question if I may. From looking at the picture is the duplex clamped to the dome of the lenshood 2?. If so could you get over your canting problem by mounting the Duplex upright when the sights are canted? Interested to try one of these, Your thoughts if possible…
Regards Adrian
Hi Adrian,
Yes, it’s attached to the lenshood, but the problem is that it actually screws into it rather than clamping onto it so you can’t really adjust it to hang vertically while the rifle is canted, because either it’s hanging off-vertical or the lenshood (or the duplex itself) are loose and free to move.
That being said, I’ve seen better shooters than me make it work — I think a large factor there is that they don’t cant their rifles as much as I do. So the design itself isn’t a bad idea in and of itself – it’s just that this particular implementation of it doesn’t work for me.