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Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune Sight

Sight

By Bill Krenz

Sometimes things just come together, and the result is magic.

Viper Archery Products has long produced superb archery sights. Mathews Inc. has long produced superb compound bows. And now, Viper offers exceptional sights designed specifically for the very latest and hottest Mathews bows. It’s simple, really—good things coming together. 

Brand new from Viper Archery Products for 2011 is the Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune Sight. This is a sight specifically designed to perfectly match the entire family of 2011 Mathews Z7 and Z9 bows. It’s shaped, aggressively machined and even finished to match those hot-moving bows. But even more important is the fact that this

is a sight that offers today’s serious bowhunters everything they want in a dedicated hunting sight.

The Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune Sight, above all else, is a tough and reliable sight that is also lightweight, compact, convenient to adjust, precise to adjust, vibration dampening, has ultra-bright pins and will actually help you shoot better.

At times bowhunting can get rough and tumble, and a serious hunting sight isn’t much good if it can’t take some abuse. The Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune is one of the most reliable sights on the market. Its ³/8-inch-thick fixed plate mounts solidly to any bow. And its beefy-and-yet-compact adjustment systems and pin housing could probably drive nails. Each sight pin is made from stainless steel and is designed to support and protect the fiber optics. In addition, all lock-down screws on this sight are also stainless steel with brawny capheads. I can’t begin to tell you how many too-small, too-soft sight screws I’ve stripped over the years trying to get them tight and then loose and then tight again. I like Viper’s stainless-steel caphead approach a whole lot better. These are reliable screws––bowhunter screws.

In spite of all that inherent toughness, the Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune is also reasonably lightweight. My sample weighed just 7.8 ounces. I like that. There’s no need to put a brick of a sight on a bow. This Viper Diamondback is also nicely compact. The pin-guard housing measures approximately 2 inches in diameter, and the sight’s overall length is under 7 inches. 

How well and how precisely a sight adjusts is also tremendously important. The Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune, as the name suggests, gang adjusts with an easy and precise micro-tune action. Individual sight pins are first set for the speed of the bow/arrow combination. Stout stainless-steel caphead screws make those adjustments trouble-free. Once the individual pins are set, then all of the pins can be adjusted as a gang for precise windage and elevation. As an added bonus, the lock-down screws on those gang adjustments are tool-less. I found that the pry-bar knobs on the Viper gang adjustments were easily loosened and snugged back down. That made them wonderfully convenient to use when setting up and tuning a bow. And even with lots of shooting, nothing worked loose. 

Integrated right into the fixed-plate mounting bar of the Viper Diamondback Sight is a Mathews Harmonic Damper. Within that special damper a weight floats inside of a soft elastomer wheel to absorb shot vibration. On Mathews bows, and on this unique sight, it’s a most effective way to quiet and dampen every shot.

Bowhunters want and need bright sight pins, and the fiber-optic pins on the Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune are ultra-bright. Each Diamondback pin is fed by over 7 inches of extended fiber-optic cable securely protected inside of a clear polymer tube that extends the length of the sight’s mounting plate. The five fiber-optic pins in this sight are available in either .010, .019 or .029 diameters and in green, red and orange fiber colors.

On top of all that, the Viper Diamond-back Fixed Plate MicroTune Sight includes at least three more advanced features that will help you shoot better. First is a red level that can be easily positioned either below or above the sight pins, whichever you would prefer. Most archers have a bad tendency to tip their top bow limb down the slope on sidehill shots, and that can cause significant misses. This sight’s level can help you fight that tendency and instead make those shots.

Next is a red alignment ring located on the archer-side of the sight’s pin housing. That circular ring is designed to naturally line up inside of the circular field of view you see through your peep sight at full draw. That circle-to-circle alignment helps significantly to ensure a consistent anchor point and head angle, and those things clearly boost shooting accuracy.  

Lastly, the far side of the sight-pin housing of the Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune is threaded for Zeiss coated lenses. Why a lens? The addition of a high-quality Zeiss lens can turn a first-class hunting sight into a first-class competition sight. It can also help any eyes, and especially aging eyes, clearly focus on any target. Viper Zeiss lenses are available in 2, 3, 4 and 6 power.

The Viper Diamondback Fixed Plate MicroTune is quite a sight. It’s tough and reliable, lightweight, compact and easy and precise to adjust, and it dampens shot vibration, has super-bright pins and enables you to shoot better. It’s also a perfect match for any Mathews Z7 or Z9 bow, and it’s available finished in Black, Mathews Lost Camo, Realtree AP, Realtree APG and even the new Mathews Lost AT Camo. 

Viper Archery Products is working hard to bring good things together. For additional information, log onto viperarcheryproducts.com.

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