Glock26Toter

@clw42 Fill out the contact from on the Shooterstoolbox.com website with your info and I'll send you a replacement belt clip. The magnets you are describing were from the gen1 clip and now with the gen4 clip they are screwed in and the clip is made from better plastic that shouldn't warp.

I'm an Axiom shooter. I've been shooting them for a few years now and can tell you that I honestly believe they are the finest open gun there is. Every time I've had the opportunity to shoot another top brand gun, I always get back on my Axiom and breathe a sigh of relief that I made the right choice. Art is extremely meticulous with his fit and finish. The guns are extremely accurate and reliable. I have two, and my wife has one and of the very few malfunctions we've had they were all ammo related or something broke as all guns will do at some point. When that something does break the service from Axiom is top notch. If you already shoot open you know that you just can't go changing ammo or getting sloppy with your ammo parameters or you will pay the price in reliability. Axiom is no different in that respect, but as long as you keep high quality and consistency in your ammo you can reliably shoot 9 Major and enjoy the most consistent dot tracking and best shooting 9 major out there. If you are just getting into open, then you are jumping straight into the gun you'll shoot for the rest of your life.

Another reason for two guns is when you want to change something. Try a new sight, trigger, thumb rest, whatever it may be. You can change one gun and shoot it for a bit to see if you like it. Your primary stays in match mode until you know for sure.

To my knowledge, there is no OEM belt clip. It only comes with a silicone skin & lanyard. Also, 3 colors available.

Whoa. Been a while since my last entry. Since then I've been concentrating on keeping the training going. Dry fire daily is a key component. One thing I've added into my dry fire is that I NEVER do it standing still now. All of my dry fire is on the move shooting and reloading on the move. No standing still drills. Also, I've been using a big stick and a 140 for dry fire. Something I've been doing for a long time actually. However, now I feel like that's really paying off. I don't use a 140 during matches, but in dry fire I constantly trade the two back and forth. I never really know what mag is in my pouch. I think this has really helped to even out my loads and not develop a preference. During a match, if I get a less than desirable load it's always been quickly recovered at a minimal loss of time. I think it's a solid technique. I'm going to keep doing that one. I've also sold my last RHF Open gun. It's on to let someone else enjoy for a while and I can pay off my 2nd Axiom Ethos. Can't wait to get it! I'm seeing some improvement in steel scores. Although slight it's at least something. Moving into a new Everglades holster has helped a bunch. I'm not sure what the scoop is on that holster, but I've heard that Everglades is currently the manufacturer and has made some improvements on it. Maybe it's the same as it's been for years, maybe not. Either way I wish I would have ditched my DAA and moved into this one a long time ago. This thing is ultra free. When you grab that gun, it's like it was never even there. No extreme punishment for coming out slightly crooked. The DAA was like a hungry gator on a one winged swan if you got just a tad bit off on your draw! So my new training has been to increase speed in my shooting while maintaining accuracy. I got off track a while back with that extreme accuracy practice. After several repetitions of that, I decided that I was getting slower, and more careful. It was having the opposite affect I wanted. I've switched gears and I'm now running a "fast and on the move" game. Trying to optimize every position for movement, and increasing speed at the easy targets. The far targets I'm still slowing down enough to call some careful shots. Overall, I think I'm seeing more improvement this way than practicing only accuracy. It's made me really understand and execute the different shooting speeds required throughout a stage. My big, aggressive transitions and movements in and out of positions has become noticeably better and this puts me on target faster. This allows me more aiming time without getting uptight on the careful shots. Basically, a bigger delta between attack and control targets has made me see it better, and execute it more effectively. This week is a BUG match at Hansen on the 4th of July. I've never shot one and I'm looking forward to it. "Back Up Gun" is the only kind allowed. So I'll be shooting it with my Glock 26 (Sub compact 9mm) out of my concealed carry holster. This should be a riot!

I did a lot of shooting this past week. 5 Days in a row and I think I paid the price by day 5. I shot Wednesday night steel, Thursday night USPSA, practiced Friday morning. Then shot a full steel match on Saturday and USPSA on Saturday. I was going strong and shooing pretty good by Saturday. Had an improvement in steel scoring a 114 overall. That's a couple of seconds faster than last time as I recall. But the Steel Challenge results page really sucks and I can't find my last scores. I'll just have to see how my classification changes, if at all. I'm fully aware it's only a marginal improvement and I won't be getting out of A class, but for the first time a while I scored some stages in A class. But then came Sunday. I really fell apart. Like worse than I think I ever have. I was simply going through the motions. I remember the gun just not tracking well, and I was just like. Pulling trigger knowing damn well I hadn't properly lined things up. Moving out of positions well before the shooting was done... it was a mess. By stage 4 I had racked up 5 mikes, and 2 noshoots and some pretty slow times to boot. I almost went home, but decided to just go into practice mode and try to shoot all alphas on the next stage. Get my gun handling under control, and just shoot. It went well, and even on a 20 yard head shot I was able to reign in the gun and score 2 charlies. Not too shabby for a bad shooting day. The net was 25 alphas 7 charlies. An above average points stage for me. It was at the cost of speed and the stage had a lot of movement so that was not the time for full on accuracy mode. So I still only got 3rd place on it. But it was still a victory for me to have brought gun under control and stayed in the game when I was so close to throwing in the towel. It was a humbling match. A reminder that at none of our skills can be taken for granted and if you aren't paying attention and thinking about all the s#!t you have to think about it can go badly in a hurry. It was practice for mental toughness. We can't let these things get to us or it will taint our enjoyment. It's just a game, and it's a fun one. I'll do it all over again after a few days off and this match will be nothing but a lesson.

Thanks. That's way better.

Heck yeah. Can you send me the JPGs? You know my email yes? Thanks!

Since my last entry I've been able to execute and refine all 4 of the drills. I had to skip a week for work due to travel, but have got baseline performance recorded for all 4 drills. I've got them setup to where I shoot one drill, then move the targets or rearrange them a bit for a different drill. This makes for some efficient use of time and targets. When I'm done with the shooting only drills I use the same targets and do some random movement drills with the remaining time/ammo. Another thing I've noticed recently is my level of physical fitness is really getting good. I'm down to 181 lbs consistently and often, I'm hitting 180. That's from 204 about 5 months ago. I've noticed that tracking my weight almost daily there's a fluctuation of about 3 lbs. Probably hydration, also, but surely seems like the gluten, or dairy always add instant weight. At any rate, I'm running at a decent pace now and feel invigorated by running and not tired. My knees don't ever hurt anymore and neither do my elbows. I think this is helping a LOT with my ability to move through stages and maintain accuracy. I also, just plain feel good. The diet program we have adapted to is simple. NONE of: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, dairy, gluten. Less of: meat, processed foods. A LOT more of: Vegetables, natural foods. Alcohol was easy, I pretty much didn't drink anymore anyways. We are practical about the "None" group. We just don't make it daily. If we decide we want a hamburger (with bun) one day, we get it. We just don't do that again for several days. If we want a hamburger in the next day or two we do it with lettuce instead of a bun. Alright, enough about food. I just wanted to lay it out there and re-affirm that although we've changed our daily diet we aren't on some extreme diet that makes people cringe every time they want to go to dinner. We are just a lot more conscious about making healthy choices and I'm find it easy and don't miss any of the food from convenience stores. We've coupled that with a decent routine at the gym and have been challenging each other to up the weight and running routines. It's been good, and it's all been motivated (at least for me) by shooting.

It's been a while since my last entry. I've been slacking on my journal, but not on training and shooting. I also shot the Area 6 match this past weekend. It was a heck of a fun and challenging match. Just like the last Manny Bragg involved match it has humbled me, and motivated me to update my training plan. In recent practice sessions and local matches I've become aware of something. Through keeping track of some of my bad shots I've found that I have a tendency to throw more detltas and mikes when transitioning right to left. I setup some drills recently where I shot an attack - control - attack scenario. This is in 2 open papers at about 10', a steel plate at about 20' and another paper at about 10' I also did another similar drill with different distance and found the same thing. I've done it enough now, that I'm pretty sure I have a weakness in my right to left shooting. I also have seen this in my Steel Challenge performance. So the evidence is mounting that I'm better in one direction. Today, in dry fire I did some work and found that it may be because my weak hand grip seems to lighten up and not be nearly as aggressive when moving that direction. Makes sense. Moving into the hand that is gripping harder would be easier than moving against it. In dry fire, if I concentrate on maintaining the same grip structure in both directions it's much easier to equal the transitions going both ways. To digress a bit, I've also become aware that my weak hand grip has been historically flawed. I've previously thought that a strong but equal grip was important. I spent a lot of training hours trying to reach a point where both hands are equal in strength. I'm very close to that goal, but it was not getting me the results I thought. In recent months, it seems the harder I grip with my weak hand, the better my control is, and especially the better my trigger control is. When I get done with a very aggressive and accurate array I almost always look down at my hands and can read every line of the texture in my left palm and right 3 fingers. Not so much in the right palm. Also, when shooting I notice that I'm crushing my right fingers. I know many people have expressed this same thing and it's nothing new. For me though, it's a discovery of what works for ME. Most importantly I now know exactly what it feels like to get a grip that will result in accurate and aggressive shooting. I'm still convinced that training for grip strength as equal as possible is a good idea. This way, feeling and obtaining the proper ratio of left - right grip force is much easier. So, did that help me this weekend at Area 6? Looking at the Area 6 video I like what I see (mostly) from a movement perspective. I'm smoother than I've been before, and I see a decent amount of acceleration control when it comes to switching between attack and control targets. As recently as 6 months ago, looking at my video you would not be able to really tell whether I was shooting a 35 yard partial, or a 20 yard open target. I've gained a lot more control recently. On one particular stage that did, in fact have 35 yard partial targets, some 20 yard zebra targets and involved a ton of in-and-out foot work I was very happy with most of the shooting. It's not in the vid, but I made sure to squeeze very hard with my left hand. On 2 of the targets I shot 4 alphas. On the third one... not so much. A delta/mike-noshoot was the result. The bad news is, I was unable to successfully call those hits. The good news is, out of 7 partial targets that were well over 20 yards out, I shot all alphas. The other stage with that type of challenge yielded the same results. An uncalled mike-noshoot, but a bunch of good shooting on all the other targets. I was pretty bummed at that when it first happened, but later when reviewing the entire match I focused on the fact that I only lost my s#!t on those two targets on the hardest stages of the match. Now, the rest of the match went the same way. Mostly successes, but did manage to blast 2 more close noshoots and hang up on a steel array for like 5 extra shots. All in all, it was not a good showing, but a match full of lessons and motivation to train more. So now, I'm going to create a new training plan with some measurable drills that I'll hit 10 times before moving on. I usually do a drill once, maybe twice before moving onto something else. (speaking of times repeating the same drill in different training sessions, not of repetitions of the drill.) So really, until now I have had a training "direction" but not a documented plan. The plan: I've got a list of 4 drills and will work to repeat them each 10 times over the next 20 training sessions. 2 drills per session. They will be repeated 6 times. 3 Left to right and 3 right to left. This will be to test if I'm correct about my weakness, and maybe correct my weakness also. It will require some serious patience, but I really want to measure my performance and progress. Not just guess at it. We shall see.

I've had some time off with a mini vacation to Texas so no matches this past weekend. However, I did make it out to a practice session last Wed morning and shot a steel match last night. My primary focus for the practice session was to feel the prep and break the shot with accuracy. After a couple of fairly poor runs on a 25 yard plate rack, I sighted in. I found that the gun was about 4" low at 25 yards. This is definitely a tad concerning since I thought I had it all sighted in only a couple weeks ago. I did mess with it far beyond my normal conservative routine of only adjusting the sight 3 times before moving on. This time, in 2 adjustments I had a 3" group that was only about 1" high at 25 yards and all within a paster at 15 yards. After that, I hit the plate rack again at 25 yards. While 4" low should not cause a super poor performance I did find that I was trigger mashing so anything that should have made a below center hit was a miss. Even when consciously feeling the prep I had a tendency to break the shot with too much force on the trigger. After making sure I was careful to "just" break the shot my accuracy was pretty darn sweet and I was easily able to clear the 25 yard rack in the 5 second neighborhood. Not blistering fast, but I reinforced the conscious pause at that prep, the instant the previous shot broke. Each run that I was able to get back to prep BEFORE getting to the next plate was a success. This was reinforced when moving on to some partial, and head shots at the same distance with the same success. It felt good to show myself I can be an accurate shooter as long as I enter "trigger mode." I had a break of several days transporting artwork from Heather's Santa Fe gallery to her Fredricksburg gallery and a weekend with friends in San Antonio. Last night was a mini steel match (4 stages) and I reminded myself that it was just an organized practice session. No concern for time, and no concern for steel strategy. Prep and transition were top priority. It was a pretty successful run and although I did have some rough plates, overall it was one of my best times. On one stage in particular I had 3 runs that were the best I've shot since starting steel. As expected, no concern for score resulted in my best score to date of 51.6. Had I kept that pace up for another 4 stages it could have put me in the low 100's. Maybe I'm learning something. Tonight is the Thursday night, hoser match so I'll be able to REALLY put my trigger work to the test and see if I can maintain a heightened level of accuracy with wide open, drive-by targets tempting my double-tap habit. Goals: Call EVERY shot. Conscious trigger prep. Transition the instant the final shot breaks. Take notes on any bad/missed shots.

I would not say it was consistently the second shot, but I've been working on decreasing my double tapping habit and my transition speed. You aren't the first one to point this out. While there are plenty of deltas and mikes from various scenarios the majority must be from not calling the second hit. This is for sure a major issue I've been working on. So to take this a bit further, my shooting goal list should look something like this. 1. Call EACH shot. #1 will work better having fully called all the shots on the target. 2. Work on transitioning off of the target by seeing the "transitional dot track" after the second shot. 3. On long, accurate shots allow time to feel the prep of the trigger before breaking the shot. (i.e., do all the work needed to call that shot.) You are correct though. In order to attain these three goals I need to take some notes during the match to ensure I capture EACH poor shot and the circumstances around it. 4. Take notes on EACH bad shot. Thanks Cha-Lee!

I've been keeping up my dry fire and shooting routine pretty nicely with a steel match, Thursday night match, and USPSA match on Sunday. The new tweaks to the gun are spot on. The trigger feels awesome and the shock buffs are a keeper. I wasn't shooting particularly well on Sunday, but that sure wasn't the gun's fault. I wound up with about 3 mikes, and probably 10 deltas. The shooting required some decent accuracy and I'm still just not dialed in enough to really get a 25 yard plate rack with authority in a match. On the stage that had said plate rack, I got a crappy grip and didn't really realize it until the end. I had plenty of opportunity to fix it and just let it go throughout the entire stage. Need to work on my ability to adjust things as needed. I may have been more successful had I concentrated on that instead of all the other elements of the shooting. From a movement perspective I feel like I'm smoothing out quite a bit. In situations where I want to make aggressive, harsh movements I'm keeping the gun up, and making smooth movements. The latter causing the the gun to get running much sooner than the former. This was proven to everyone on my squad when one match had a 3 box stage where you engaged 3 targets from each box. Pretty much an extended, paper version of Outer Limits. Everyone broke down their shooting platform, moved aggressively and then started shooting again in the next box. I just shot, kept the gun raised (almost still looking through the sight) and moved quickly to the next box, breaking the first shot the instant my trailing foot touched inside. My time was 9.5 seconds with decent hits. The next fastest shooter who tried that same technique, but not as well, was maybe 12 second. My running is also noticeably faster. Something that has always throttled my running in the past was limited arm movement due to exaggerated muzzle discipline. I've been concentrating on getting more comfortable running, and allowing my arms to really swing while allowing a narrower margin of muzzle discipline. So, the bottom line is. I've got my gun dialed in to where I really like it. Now I just need to see about making some real improvements in my shooting.

In the last couple of weeks I've had a fairly slow match attendance. Busy with work on the weekdays, and last weekend was a match at WAC that was full. I've practiced a couple of times and continued my dry fire routine. I went for a training session Tuesday morning and found that I had not properly sighted it in last time. I've realized just how much play there is within the close range to allow adjustments at the farther ranges. My experience on Tuesday was that when I got onto the paster at 10 yds, I could still move the sight an additional 8 clicks before I was consistently shooting the bottom portion of the paster. That equated to bringing an 8" high group into a 1" high group at 36 yds. (the farthest I could get on that berm.) This may be a duh for some, but for me it was an eye opener on just how well an accurate gun can be adjusted. Obviously, at 36 yds with a 6MOA dot it's not possible to get a super tight group. I was shooting about a 4"-5" group, but that's not bad. After that I blasted a plate rack with pretty decent success at 30 yds. Maybe 7-8 shots to clear it. I only ran it about 3-4 time as I ran out of time. But this is some accuracy I can work with. I also added some shock buffs and saw a slight difference in the dot travel. The gun is stroked, as I understand it to where I can put 3 buffs in and that's just what I did. I'm going to run it for this weeks' matches and see how it goes.

It's been a while since I wrote in my journal! Been having a ton of fun shooting the new Axiom Ethos, and getting used to it. I think I made a very wise decision to try the ntro fxn thumb rest and have not even felt like looking back for an instant. I lightened the trigger a touch so it's sitting at 1lb 2oz and have really increased my ability to shoot fast. Still lacking on live fire, I did start working the trigger with much more finesse during dry fire and feel that has helped a lot. One thing I like to do, is to just press against the wall during drills without actually letting the hammer drop. If I accidentally drop the hammer, it better have been on a target if I was doing it right. Then, sometimes I'll let that accidental hammer drop be a "reload alarm." So I'll be working the take up during the drill and if I go "click" then BAM, do a reload and keep going with the drill. I've also been really having fun at the steel matches. I've shown myself on so many occasions that if I can just get the prep done BEFORE I get on the next target the hit, is always good, and very fast. I'v found that if I don't prep, then the likelihood of a miss is high. Then, I can get in this ridiculous cycle of trying the makeup shot before I've prepped the trigger, but have brought the gun back on target. This causes the same mistake. Like, when people over correct when their car breaks loose on the ice. Over correct, it swings the other way, over correct the other way..... you will never straighten out the car like that! My video from the Mark 7 steel match shows a few instances of that! I feel like I'm on a steady path of increasing ability at very tiny increments. Need to continue to work on trigger prep and be patient with it. My movement is smoothing out considerably also. I just need to keep doing what I'm doing!