Thanks everyone for the comments. It is indeed a unique pistol so I am happy to share more about it.

The red dot setup is actually kinda what triggered the entire project because I had seen Guzzi's own 3rd gen with a Sig Romeo and given that I was not familiar with pistol red dots I thought it made sense to get on board with the new technology but in a properly built metal pistol. Don't get me started with the polymers or striker-fire pistol...

So Optima already had a red dot aluminum base which would fit the 59 series at a decent price (and tried by Guzzi and by Cherrypointmarine) so that looked like a logical way to go. However, I opted for a Holosun red dot rather than a Rome for two reasons: Aluminum housing and glass. Why was that important? I don't own safe queens. Any gun that I own needs to be a "SHTF-able" tool. I need to be able to run them hard and with confidence in any scenario (more on this reasoning later). Choosing a Holosun red dot has some implications because the Optima base pattern doesn't perfectly fit the Holosuns so we had to flatten two of the attachment guides so that it would fit (not a problem because you still get 4 attachment points when you include the two dovetail screws. Really not a biggie.

Now, where things got interesting is when I told Guzzi we needed to co-witness. A proper "SHTF-able" pistol cannot rely solely on batteries so co-witnessing was for me a must. The problem, of course, is that there aren't any ready to go solutions in the market for our setup. Older pistol, aluminum base with a red dot? Most people just laughed when I called except for Dawson who told me they could fabricate one for (get ready for Dr. Evil's face): "SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS". Just kidding of course, but it wasn't cheap so I told Guzzi. I think we can make it. So the task began of thinking where to find proper steel and we were fortunate to locate a Metals Supermarket in the area and sourced a square-forged rod. Now let's get to work.



So that was our guinea pig. First step was to create the dovetail for the base. Not an issue for the talented Guzzi. Couple of passes and done. Where things got interesting was on the shaving of the sides because afixing the dovetailed base to the vise without damaging it required some work but after some work and swearing we got it to work.





Then some work on the angle and voila.



We took some measurements, shaved a bit of the top and did some initial fitting based on rough measurements. Guzzi took a picture and sent it to Bill who aptly commented: "That thing looks like a sailboat"...



So here is where we got to the real tricky part: Co-witnessing. To be able to co-witness you need to ensure proper alignment between the rear and front sights. The Holosun red dot has a built in rear sight which is not that good as the aperture is very short, so it is tricky to do a proper measurement of the distance between the base of the slide and the "summit" of the built-in rear sight (you need a good caliper - don't bother if you have a cheap one) but you also need to account for some difference in angle between the rear of the slide and the front. Yes, they are not perfectly flat, even less the "value" 915, so Guzzi had the brilliant idea of not just measuring but looking at the sizes of the original sights adding the added height and then we were able to match/confirm the measurement. From there (a couple of days later, literally) it was downhill. All we needed to do was to shave the excess, add serrations and fit. We opted just for serrations and no dot or fiber optic because we didn't want to have multiple sight points with a red dot. The front sight just needed to be the right size and I'll do the rest if the red dot fails.



So that's it for the red dot co-witness saga. We learned a ton and it was very fun. I'm absolutely delighted with the work. As previously said, Guzzi is an artisan. A true renaissance man of many talents.

More on the build in a later post.