I bought a Ruger LCP 2 .22LR Literack, and I’ve been having a plinking good time with it. It’s a fun little gun, but the all-black sights don’t do much to catch the eye. I thought about doing the old nail polish trick, but somehow before I got into my wife’s bathroom cabinet, I stumbled across the Birchwood Casey Super Bright Sight pens. These are pens dedicated to painting your sights and making them easier to see.
It seemed like a neat idea. Ultimately these seem to be just paint pens. Paint pens are fairly common, but the Sight Pens were a bit cheaper than every other pack of paint pens, albeit most paint pens had more than three. I didn’t need more than three and hoped the fact they were designed for guns would make them a bit tougher. I hit buy it now, and a couple of days later, they were in my lap, ready to paint some sights.
Touching Up With the Sight Pens
The Sight Pens come with white, red, and green paints. The red and green are bright fluorescent colored. The idea is pretty simple. Prep the paint and paint the sight. If you are painting the sight green or red, you need to apply a layer of white paint to the sight first, then let it dry. After that, you apply the color you so choose.
Prior to utilizing the Sight Pens, you have to shake them for thirty seconds, which is plenty easy. Next, you have to prime them, and admittedly this took more than a few seconds. To prime the pens, you push the tip in to allow it to prime. This took a lot of time to get done, to the point where I worried I got bum pens. Just keep pressing the tip in, and eventually, some paint finds its way to the tip.
Once that was done, I carefully applied the paint. I let it dry and followed suit with the red pen. The paint needed to ‘cure’ for 12 hours, so I put the gun away instead of watching the paint dry.
The Final Product
The final product of the Sight Pens gave me a bright and easy-to-see front sight. The paint applied evenly, and it almost looked like I knew what I was doing. The sight is bright and very easy to see. It stands out a ton and makes the gun much faster to get on target and makes it easier to focus on the front sight for accurate shooting.
The final product of the sight pens is an impressive one. Now I have paint pens to provide a nice layer of paint to any other guns that have tough-to-see sights. My Ruger LCR could certainly use a brighter front sight. I’m sure I could dig through my collection and find one or another to touch up.
It’s a simple and cheap means to make some fairly drastic improvements to your firearms. Sure, you can swap the sights, but I’d rather spend ten bucks on a gun I’m only ever going to use to plink or on guns where swapping sights isn’t an option. The Birchwood Casey Super Bright Sight Pens are a solid little get for my firearm’s toolbox.
