One of the nice things about Williams and Lyman and, I think, old Redfield reciever sights is that they all use the same screw size and spacing. Your 52b is undoubtedly tapped for this standard screw arrangement. Therefore, you can get any of these that happen to be available or within your pocket book limits, use it and upgrade later if your want to do so.
As far as the shooting goes, they all boil down to a little hole that you look through and they all shoot the same, no matter what the cost.
The target types extend futher back towards your eye, which is a little more accurate, especially when fitted with a very small aperture disk. However, the further back they extend and the smaller the aperture, the harder they become to use on anthing besides fixed targets. Probably more delicate too. You don't want these unless you intend to shoot targets competitively, in which case, the 52b sporter was not the right rifle to buy (should have got an Anschutz Target model, no doubt).
Despite the fact that they all shoot the same, there is an enormous varatiation in the quality of the sight. The cheapest adjust with just dinky little screws to hold them. Its a pain to have to always carry around a little set of screw drivers to adjust your sight in the field. Adjustments are not so fine and positive either.
Then you have ones with click adjuxtments, but the cheaper ones do not lock and unlock with as great an ease and they do not have engraved little arrows to tell you what way is up or down or left or right so that you just have to guess in the field or work out a little mechanical engineering analysis to to figure out which way to turn the thing.
The original Winchester 52 sporters came with the Lyman 48F. This was undoubttedly the finest "all around" reciever sight ever made for this rifle. It had every feature one could want in a receiver sight. All the of the parts were serial numbered because they were hand fitted and "went together" perfectly. It is long out of production, of course, and if made today to the same standard would be outraguosly expensive. If you want the very best, try to find one of these. In the meantime, however, you can use any of the modern ones that take your fancy, and try another if that does not satisfy you. When you find the Lyman 48F, it should fit in the holes in your rifle, no problem.
The only potential problem, however, is that these sights often require a little cut in the stock to fit. If the cut gets too big for the sight you finally settle upon, you would have to fit a small wood patch if you wanted a neat appearance.
As far as the front sight goes, I have come to appreciate a rather thin front blade on a rifle like this. The blade can be intentionally installed high and filed down after you figure out by shooting how high it should actually be. Gunsmiths can really mess up installing aperture sights. There is really very little room for error in the installation of these sights. Too high or too low and the receiver sight will not be adjustable to the middle part of its range for normal shooting distances. It may not zero properly, even worse, it may not even go up or down far enough to zero the rifle or as you want. Don't underestimate this problem, I have learned all of this in the School of Hard Knocks. Sights with beads, complicated inserts, etc. are sure to be botched by the average gunsmith. So keep it simple and fixable in the worst case senario.
If you get a front ramp, be sure to get it checkered, grooved or stippled to cut glare right from the beginning. The banded ramps, which I like, cannot be removed and reblued without marring the barrel if you decide you would like this feature later.
Banded ramps just seem more substantial to me as compared with screw in ramps. Maybe this is wrong. I cannot imagine milling a barrel to fit on a front sight, as this might somehow induce a stress that would affect accuracy, or so I would imagine.
Oh, and don't worry too much about the size of the aperture on the disk that may be available on the sight you wind up with. For general shooting, a large size aperture is desirable, as it gives a wider field of view. If you find that your aperture is too small, you can just drill it out to a larger size later, no trouble.
