How To Use A Universal Handgun Sight Tool To Remove Sights?

Sight pushers come in all different shapes and sizes. I’m about to show you this article is a universal handgun sight tool produced by Fisher Solutions.

It’s a pretty good sight pusher tool for Glocks, Smith & Wesson M&P 40 Shield, or other easy installs. Trust me when I say this; it doesn’t get any easier than this.

For SIGs and XDs, you really want to have a site pusher because sometimes they are locked on there, and you just can’t get enough purchase with your mallet onto these sites to get them out. So, hence, the sight pusher.

Using the power of the screw allows you to position the slide in the exact spot and then get some pressure on there and work those sights off. Let me show you how it works.

Taking The Sight Off From 1911

For this demonstration, I’ll be using a 1911 slide. First, just take an old business card and wrap it around the slide to protect it. Slide the slide into the tool. Clamp it down.

At this point, we want to check our alignment here, so we’ll slide over the pusher blade. If you think you are aligned pretty well there, you can proceed to the next step. So now, we tighten it down.

After that, we will tighten down the jam nut. What that does is that it will go ahead and eliminate any flexing of the clamping screw.

After that, take a three-quarter ranch, and we turn on the bolt head itself, not on the nut. You always want to be turning on the bolt head itself; otherwise, you’ll loosen or tighten in that.

And what we do then is we just start to turn it a little bit and as you will notice the sight will start to move.

Now the blocks that are in the tool right now are the flat-sided block. They’ll work with pretty much any handgun slide out there that is flat and doesn’t have any contour to it. You can find blocks for different contours.

Now, rotate, and the sight will come right off.

Taking The Sights Off From A XD

As I’ve mentioned earlier, you will get contoured blocks slides that are not flat. For example, the 1911 slide has a flat slide to it. However, on an XD, it has a step-slide. That is why you will see most universal sight pushers come with different blocks.

An XD slide has a step that makes the slide smaller on the top than it is on the bottom. The step blocks or XD blocks will follow that contour. So, let me show you how you can take the sights out of these slides.

As most of you know, the XD sights are infamous for being very hard to take out. However, you can easily take out both the front and rear sight with a good sight pusher. If the slide is bigger, you can take out the bottom block from the sight pusher.

You want the tip of the blade to be at the very bottom of the slide surface or the dovetail. Get it right and make sure it is lined up good. It’s a good idea to go ahead and push the slide up to where the tip of the blade itself is actually pushing down on the slide.

That gives you a good alignment. Now one thing I recommend is using a vise with the tool itself. It helps a lot with these very stubborn sights.

Now, some of you may not have a vise, and that’s fine; you can still remove your sights without a vise. But with the vise, which you can do without using a shim, you can use the vise itself as a shim.

It will also be better if the vise is mounted to a bench. When the slide itself is sitting on the vise, there will be no need for a shim block. And what we do now is once again we turn on the bolt head itself. We do not turn on the nut.

and these may take a little bit more pressure than your standard sights because, as you know, the XD sights can be tough, and they’re often pressed in from the manufacturer.

After some rotating, you will see the sight will start to move. So, so no matter what you hear, XD sites can be changed.

Working On A Glock With Angled Sights

So far, I’ve shown you the flat slide of a 1911 and the step slide of an XD. Now, I want to show you a Glock with the angled sights so that you can get an idea of how a universal sight works.

Most sight pushers that are universal will come with a pusher blade. So, we’re going to wrap the slide in a business card again, slide the slide in place, and once again, we will tighten up our block once we’ve done alignment.

Tighten up the jam nut to eliminate any movement. And you’ll notice we’ve got an angled sight here, and Glock aren’t the only manufacturer that has an angled sight.

However, the degree is pretty much the same on all the sights, so it’s about 55 degrees. Once you got an alignment, you can tighten the jam nut and go ahead and remove the sight. You will notice the sight pushing up against the business card, showing that it is coming out.

Final Words

The concept behind a site pusher is that it gently pushes the rear sights out and gently pushes them back in—most of the sight pusher tools on the market work on a similar concept.

You lock your slide into the piece, and when you use the device to rotate the pusher, it will give you some leverage to push the sights out. A site pusher allows you to exert more pressure and be more exact in fine-tuning the positioning than a mallet.

The Glock, in particular, is fairly easy to work with, but some other guns like SIGs in particular or XDs are very difficult to change the sights. Gunsmiths hate them for this reason. With a good sight pusher tool, you can remove the Glock sights in 15 minutes or 10 minutes.

If you want a detailed explanation, here is a video you should definitely check out.