Are the Skinner sights adjustable for windage and elevation? Also for the Renegade, it looks like the sight is far away. I assume you can see through it easily?
Yup - the Skinner sights are adjustable for windage and elevation. The base of the sight is screwed to the rifle. The base has a dovetail slot, and the aperature holder is mounted on a dovetail which fits into the slotted base. To adjust windage, you loosen a set screw and move the dovetail left or right. The bottom of the aperature holder is threaded, and it screws into the male dovetail. To adjust elevation, you loosen a set screw and turn the aperature holder to raise or lower it. The finest elevation adjustment is therefore 1/2 of a turn. The thread looks like a 10-32, so 1/2 turn moves the sight about .015 inches, which is a pretty fine adjustment.
The aperatures screw into the aperature holder. Skinner sells aperatures from .040" to .155" ($11), and if you want something even bigger, you can take the aperature out and just use the aperature holder. With the sight mounted in the factory holes on my Renegade, I find the .125 aperature that came with the Skinner sight to be useable, but a little small. I bought a .155 aperature to go with it, but for hunting, I would probably just use the aperature holder if I was going to mount the Skinner sight in the factory holes.
My preference is to have peep sights mounted as close to my eye as possible. Tang sights for the Renegade are now very hard to find, so I'm going to have the Skinner sight mounted with the back of the sight base even with the back of the barrel. Very easy - just two screw holes to drill and tap - although the holes have to be centered on the barrel and with the correct separation, so you want to have a gunsmith do it unless you have a milling machine and know how to use it.
For hunting, I will use the Skinner as a true ghost ring sight - just the aperature holder. Very fast and easy - you just put the front post on the target and shoot. The beauty of a peep is that if you don't pay any attention to the peep, you eye will naturally line up with the center of the peep, and even with a ghost ring, it's surprisingly accurate, in addition to being the fastest of all iron sights, considerably faster and much more rugged than a conventional telescope, and just as fast as a red dot while being more rugged. That's why the military used ghost ring peeps until very recently. And, for those of us with old eyes, you don't have to see the rear sight at all - just the front sight and target, which is something that even my 65 year-old eyes handle pretty easily, at least with a rifle.
Another advantage of a peep is that it is what's known to optical engineers as a pinhole lense: Everything is at least somewhat sharper when viewed through a peep, which is a great thing for those of us who are on the far side of 50. The smaller the peep, the greater the lense effect, but you get a little advantage even with a ghost ring. With a small enough pinhole, it's possible to build something called a "camera obscura" which has infinite depth of field (meaning that everything is in focus no matter how close or far it is to the pinhole). Only problem with such cameras is that because the pinhole lets in such a small amount of light, it takes a long, long time to expose the film, which makes such cameras impractical for most purposes.
