Y-man is back again, after quite a long absence and I sure am glad to be back writing about some of my continuing adventures.

I am sorry that I stopped writing regularly. I have had some pressures at work and I also got this mistaken notion that my writings were possibly getting a bit “boring and trivial” to an increasingly discerning audience. I began to feel this way seeing the increasingly high quality and range of content on the Firearm blog, which was beginning to have strong direction towards strategic firearms discussions and world–changing weapon developments.

In addition, of course no one can compete with the very crucial analyses about the length (Or lack-of) of James’s shorts! Haha!

I guess I kind of felt my stories were getting clunky and childish compared to many of these reports. Who knows, I may have been wrong!

Well I have here another update on DIY spirit, keeping up the “MacGyver” attitude especially in terms of my improvising, fabricating, modifying, maintaining and updating my limited firearms resources in Nigeria.

Does anyone like the new MacGyver series? Meh…

Improvising Homemade Front-Sights and Protectors:

Scenario: I have been using my rifled barrel for my Mossberg 500A for quite some time now. Sadly, I have had issues where the front-sight blade has loosened up, flown off and even got crushed from times when the shotgun fell, or dinged up against something. Luckily I was able to recover the steel blades almost every time and also had a spare blade from one of my last trips to the US.

With these, I have been able able to fix this situation. The holding screw from the front-sight ramp was missing and I could not find a replacement anywhere nearby. With no trips abroad planned any time soon and not comfortable being without the front-sight on my shotgun: I decided to do some improvising. Very unlike me, right?

I had a few damaged front-sight blades with the reflective inserts broken in my cupboard. I used some old reflective plastic bits from sights I had lying about and did some “Araldite-ing” to get glue them together. They look okay but were still extremely fragile. It became neccessary for me to improvise a protective front-sight hood for the shotgun.
Caveat: I had my own original idea, but did a LOT of “Googling” on this. Eat that, MacGyver!

I clamped my rifled barrel and drilled two 4mm holes in the sight ramp (I believe that is what they are called?). Basically, I simply used dead reckoning: some sort of basic instinct [With fingers, legs and even eyes crossed!] and used my good old Mark-1 Eye to gauge the position of these holes.

I drilled these holes with the idea that I would completely fabricate the front sight protective hood. I eventually did fabricate this from a piece of half-inch galvanised pipe, to align with the drilled holes…

I then remembered I had some old cut-off barrel clamps in the house. I placed these against the holes I had drilled and what do you know: they matched exactly! Talk about serendipity…
Now with these fastened, I have a very solid and robust front-sight protective hood. I no longer have fears of losing or breaking my shotgun front-sight maybe while out on a hunting or target shooting trip.

I have also gone ahead to fabricate a proper Peep-sight type protective hood out of galvanised steel.

Let me know in the comments what you think.
This seems to be the one I will go with: it seems to fit very well.
To avoid issues with rust: I blued the area drilled very well before fixing.

I drilled and smoothened two holes on the top of the hood to allow sunlight through to illuminate the sight.

Some recent Y-man Shooting fun stuff:
Below is a video where I am practising some shotgun-to-pistol transitions. Just a little fun target shooting on one of my “foreign” trips. Wink-wink!
(I have been able to travel to some other African countries recently, where I impressed a few people with my “tacticool” videos on YouTube!)

Here is my video below on latest iteration of shotgun slug adventures…

Many thanks guys!

ShotShow 2018:
PS: I have some crazy but realistic dreams of finally attending ShotShow in 2018. Maybe I could come up with a fresh, wild-eyed outsider’s perspective on different aspects of the coverage? I am going to need to de-mothball my stored warm clothing!

Cheers!