The Riddle Of Iron

Reading at The Counter Jockey Chronicles.

He's absolutely right, "You don't need iron sights on that .270 you are going to put a cheap Wal-Mart scope on."

But was Cletus wrong in asserting that the Winchester Model 70 originally came with iron sights?

Because the first years of the gun did come with irons.

New Model 70's don't unless you're looking at the Safari Express or Alaskan.

The gun was designed for and came with iron sights on day one.  However Model 70 has had, also from day one, space dedicated for scope mounting on both the front and rear rings of the receiver.  Early on they also could be had with the side mounting holes from the 54 too.

Originally the Model 70 was an evolutionary improvement on the Model 54.  One of the goals was to make it easier to mount a scope on the gun, because the 54 is a pain.

The 54 fights mounting a scope from the design of the receiver, how the safety works and even the shape of the bolt handle.

The factory solution was a bracket that mounts to holes in the side of the receiver and cantilevers the mounting plane over the top of the bore.  There's a lot of tolerance stacking to worry about here and it still doesn't fully address the bolt and safety.

The aftermarket and gunsmiths came along and got very creative in working around the problem, but the solutions were often less than ideal.

Both guns (at least initially for the 70) were also drilled and tapped for a Lyman 48 aperture sight (see the pics!).  There are scope mounts for both models which use these holes and the front receiver ring to mount a scope mounting bridge.  There are even mounts which tie into the dovetail on the barrel where the rear sight should go.
Do you like confusing variety?  Because vintage Winchester bolts guns supply it in spades.

Cletus said, "originally."

I think he's right, the Model 70 was developed in a day when optics were fragile, fiddly and unreliable.

That has not been true for a very long time.  The cheapest POS scope at Wally World is a miraculously good scope when compared to the top-end glass from 1936.

A stock cut for using low to the bore irons isn't going to be fitted as well for a scope and vice-versa.

At a certain point all of the bolt-gun makers took a look at the market and asked, "is there anyone who isn't putting a scope on their gun?"  The answer was, surely, not enough people to justify the extra costs of including them with the gun because all of them stopped including the things.

I only noticed their departure from these guns when I was first afflicted with Bolt Gun Agony.  At the time the Browning/Winchester BOSS (Ballistic Optimizing Shooting System) was the new hotness, must have (all the gun writers said so) item for your deer assassination bullet launcher.  If you selected the BOSS, you could not select the iron-sighted option.  Steeped in gaming where the GM would fuck you for not having a back-up to something he had rules for breaking... I wanted irons!

That's also when I discovered that only a couple of models still offered irons and they were obviously not intended to be the primary sighting system.  The rear sights were often too small to be useful in the field and too coarse to be useful on the range.  They were on there so the owner could feel better about going to the boondocks and having his scope break on him.  We started calling them vestigial sights.  A better rear sight could be tapped right into that dovetail, but it didn't come with the gun; which by the way was often a special order in the early '90's.

Sometime after that (1995?) it seemed that you couldn't even special order the irons anymore.  Except for the Safari type guns.

You just don't need them if you've even a "crappy" variable scope nowadays.