Alright fella's here is my scoop. I recently acquired a 325pd with gold bead front sight. Says SCM on side of it. I like it and it's staked properly in. The rear blade was slipping left to right very easily. So I bought the same size blade kit 1.46 and white outline square notch. Just now I finally got it apart as I had to unscrew the nut off to get it off. I didn't understand what was going on until I got it apart. Seems the screw threads at head end are just stripped and threads seem okay in blade. I just now realized it's a V notch in a black blade. I have a new kit with normal notch with white outline. Looks as the V notch helps to center gold bead as the regular notch there would be a lot of daylight on either side. Should I reinstall V notch blade and take a chance it's threads are still ok after floating around for who knows how long??? Or does everybody else have a regular notch with white outline on your gun with gold bead front sight??

Maybe a picture can help to demostrate my dilema. And as you can see the front sight has SDM on the side. Anybody know what this stands for? A sight company i presume.

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The 625PC comes from the factory with a DX style patridge gold bead front sight & a traditional square notch white outline rear sight. They work fine together. I changed mine to a SDM red fiber optic which isn't really a whole lot different IMO.

SDM Fabricating makes some different accessories.

SDM Fabricating Home

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Waiting for the break of day

My 325 Thunder Ranch came with a gold bead front sight and square notch w/o white outline rear sight.

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My 27-5 came with a factory gold bead front sight and it had the regular square notch rear sight.

SDM is indeed a sight company. Dillon Precision has them in their catalogue. I prefer the V notch sight but either will work.

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Foster Positivity.

Hah. Based on long ago experience with rifles, I would expect a bead front sight to be paired with a U-notch rear. Every day I learn (and forget) something.

I'm considering a gold bead replacement front for my 69 which has a 0.278 height front right now but am having a hard time identifying which one I need - a call to S&W customer service didn't help. Can any of you gold bead front owners measure the height of your front sight blades for me and mention what gun you have? Then I can call S&W and order the right thing. Thanks!

All mine are DX style so those won't work on your pinned sight.

One thought, SDM makes a .300" tall pinned gold bead front sight. If you also changed your rear blade to a .146" tall, which also has a deeper notch than the factory's .114" [.080" -vs- .060"], all you'd need is to go down a few clicks on the rear sight's adjustment to get your zero back.

You'd end up with a better sight picture with the tall front sight & bigger rear notch, which is one reason I really like shooting my 5" 686+.

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Waiting for the break of day

There's a reason most guns have the squared rear sight...

I'm not sure what the benefit of the V notch would be but I replaced mine right away.

SDM is my fallback option. I'm replacing the rear sign with a Bowen first, so I will have some flexibility for sight height. Thanks!

I appreciate everybody and there advice. I ended up putting the .146 white outline regular notch on the gun. I was mostly afraid the old blade has some stripped threads. Weird I could not break the old screw. I just ended up holding the nut with spanner wrench and unscrewed it all apart. The whole brand new unit works great went to range yesterday to test out. Had to move rear sight to the right a few turns and she was firing dead on at 15 yards!! Now just waiting for my EZ moon clips made from a poly type plastic(no tools required) to arrive, what a pain in the butt to load and unload regular moon clips. I am not spending $50 for tools to just load and unload moon clips that's ridiculous.

It's not absolutely necessary to spend $50 for tools to load and unload moon clips. Thanks to a fellow on You Tube, I was able to fashion this loading/unloading equipment from stuff I had lying around. The moon clip rotates and the aluminum bar gently slides and snaps the cartridge into place. The long piece for removing cases is an old graphite golf club shaft (the You Tube fellow uses copper pipe). Note that the moon clip hangs out over the edge of the wood just enough to allow the golf club shaft to slip over the spent shell and drop down enough to twist the shell out. Works like a charm!

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Some brass is much easier to use with moon clips. I use Winchester for the most part, but I reload just about everything I shoot. If a piece of brass is difficult to load or unload in a moon clip it gets tossed with the brass to be used in autoloaders.

To unload the brass I use 2 sharpie markers (or anything else with a similar diameter). One marker goes through the moonclip to make it easier to hold onto, while the other is inserted into the brass used to extract the brass piece. To load I just use my fingers.