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CHA-LEE's Tale


CHA-LEE

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I'd really love to see Nationals at a weather neutral place - Utah, Colorado etc, it was the same mess at Prod Nationals the last 2 years.

Really doesn't decide the matches on shooters abilities currently - it's more about luck and missing rain, humidity, crappy light, etc.

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This past weekend I attended the High Desert Classic in Albuquerque New Mexico. This is a 10 stage match that are all large field courses and a lot of fun to shoot. This year was no different as the stages had a good mixture of running and gunning along with everything else. When we checked the stages out on Friday the weather was fantastic with no clouds in the sky. This all changed over the weekend as a small cold front rolled in and produced overcast skies and small bouts of light rain. The rain really didn’t amount to much at all and didn’t even make the range muddy so that was good. But the overcast skies made for difficult lighting conditions to shoot in. Even though the weather and lighting conditions were not the best it was WAY better than the Limited Nationals. Even though it was a little chilly and wet I could maintain dry hands and grip the gun properly, unlike what happened at the nationals. My shooting was a little slower than normal given the lighting but I was able to shoot a clean match with only 4 D’s. This is a stark contrast to the 12 mikes and 3 no shoots I had at the nationals.

I was able to perform fairly solid on most of the stages and get decent hits. I had a few mistakes here or there when I stopped aiming hard on steel. The two things that hurt me the most were both gun handling situations. The first was on our first stage of the match, stage 10, which was an unloaded start. When I made ready and racked the slide it was super lethargic due to the grease I was using instead of oil. I tried racking it a bunch of times right before the start of the stage but it still lead to a failure to feed jam at the start of the stage when I inserted the mag and racked the first round into the gun. This cost me time in needing to rack it twice, not a lot of time, but still a time donation. The second issue happened at the end of the first day on Stage 6. During the reload I failed to seat the magazine hard and it didn’t latch into place and fell from the gun. I had to do a standing reload to recover and finish the stage which cost me about 2.5 seconds and donated about 25 match points for that error. Without these two errors I would have had a very solid match and it would have been a very close race for the win in Limited. But with these errors I had to settle for Second place to Glenn Shelby who won with a very solid performance. Congrats to Glenn for a well deserved win!!!

Even though I had a few mistakes that lead to my second place finish I still had a bunch of fun shooting this match. We had a great squad, the stages were really fun to shoot, and I was able to perform solidly on most of the stages. I really needed this after the horrible grind of a match the Nationals ended up being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4J_vsIV-ok

I am glad that this is my final major match of the season as well. I have been able to attend 11 major matches this year with four of them all packed into this last month and a half which has been pretty taxing. It will be nice to settle back into the local club match scene along with fiddling on my gear. I have several gun and gear projects that I need to get done now that the majors are over so that is going to be fun. I also need to put some serious time behind the reloading press to get my ammo stash restocked. It’s going to be a busy off season getting everything ready to rumble for next year.    

 

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I was able to sight in the new .160 tall front sight on my #2 Limited blaster last night at the indoor range. I measured the placement of the old sight and did by best to put the new sight in the same location and it worked out great. I didn’t have to do any windage adjustments while double checking the POA/POI in live fire. The shorter front sight produced a perfect POA/POI at 10 & 15 Yards and it was only about an inch low at 25 yards. I am going to run it like this for a little while to see if there is much of a difference in match conditions. There is some extra “meat” on the top of the sight that I can take down more if I need to bring it up the POI some more. But I don’t want to do that until I think it’s really needed. I also want to do some more group shooting outdoors to see how it turns out as shooting indoors for accuracy is really difficult given the lighting.

I am also testing out a new mag pouch from Long’s Shadow Holster. I have some more fiddling to do on it along with a lot of dry fire practice to see how it goes. If I can get it ironed out this week in dry fire I will try it at the match this Saturday.

I have a few more fiddle projects to dig into and am looking forward to getting it figured out over the winter months.

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This past weekend I hosted the HPPS match on Saturday. For this match we decided to do something a little different. We had 5 large field course stages that were all 40 – 50 rounds. Then we had a Team Challenge stage that the whole squad participated on. We called this the Halloween Mega Match to call it something different but the entry fee was the same as a normal match. It was a lot of work setting it all up but it was also a lot of fun.

I shot my #2 Limited blaster that I recently put a .160 tall front sight on it. This match had a lot of steel plates in it and I was able to shoot the majority of them one for one. It has a slightly different sight picture because I can see the top of the slide a little bit in the bottom of the rear notch. It will take a little bit to get use to that. I shot the match fairly solid even though I didn’t have time to figure out stage plans on any of the stages before the start of the match. Every stage required at least 2 reloads due to the round count so that was another variable to deal with. I know I could have shot a couple of stages better if I had more time to polish my stage plans, but it is what it is when you are running the match. I ended up with one miss for the match that was on a partial target at a fair distance. I called it marginal and it ended up nicking the edge of the target but didn’t break the perf.

It was a lot of work running the match but we got it done and everyone had fun so it was worth the effort. My front sight stayed put so that is a good thing as well. I need to keep an eye on it for several matches to make sure it’s not going to move. I am always leery of front sights drifting after I install them.

On Sunday I decided to skip the Weld match and go on a Motorcycle ride instead. I went with my buddy Matt and we took a trip up into the mountains. It was a fun ride and I was able to put my new KTM 1190 through its paces on some forest roads and dirt trails. We took a really rocky trail up the side of a mountain that dead ended at a little over 11,000 feet in elevation. All told it was about a 200 mile round trip for me and I was BEAT by the time I got home. I am still sore today from the ride so I need some more practice riding in those conditions before I can do a multi day trip on a bike. Listed below is a picture of my bike on the peak of the trail. Hopefully I can get a chance to do some more rides like this before winter hits.

 

Peak.JPG

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Last night I was able to start on another one of my fiddling projects. I am going to try the Manny Mini Dot sight setup on my #1 Limited blaster to see how that works out. This sight setup is a .070 wide front with a .100 wide rear notch with is a lot smaller than my current .100 / .140 setup. The front sight is .180 tall so I had Rick weld up the notch on one of my old rear sights,  then raise up the rear blade height a little and cut the .100 x .100 notch. I got the sights installed last night but I still need to sight it in to see if the POA/POI is going to be good from an elevation perspective. I might have to cut the rear blade down to get the elevation correct. I am planning on going to the indoor range tomorrow evening to get it sighted in and do some live fire testing to see how it looks when shooting at normal speeds. If I can get it sighted in I might give it a go at the club matches this weekend.

This iron sight project may be a waste of time but I wanted to see how it turned out now that I am using the prescription shooting glasses. My major matches are over with until spring of next year so I have some time to try stuff out like this. I want to get this stuff figured out now so I can hit the 2017 shooting season running.  

 

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25 minutes ago, CHA-LEE said:

I am going to try the Manny Mini Dot sight setup on my #1 Limited blaster to see how that works out. This sight setup is a .070 wide front with a .100 wide rear notch with is a lot smaller than my current .100 / .140 setup.

What are you hoping to achieve by going to a thinner front and notch? Are you looking for a potentially more precise sight picture? There's not a significant change in the ratio of front blade width to rear sight notch

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It would be nice to have an smaller overall sight picture so the front sight isn't consuming as much of the target. With my current .100 wide front sight setup the width of the front sight almost consumes a whole 6 inch plate or head shot at 25 yards. With the front sight consuming so much of the target its difficult to pick a specific place on the target to aim at.

Before I got LASIK done I preferred a .090 / .120 sight setup because I could see it easily when I wore glasses. After getting LASIK done I had a lot harder time forcing my focus back to the sights, especially in less than optimal lighting conditions so I had to switch to bigger overall sights (.100 / .140) so I could see them half way decent without corrective lenses. Now that I am using corrective lenses I can see the sights really well and want to try the smaller sight picture setup to see if its doable or not. If I can see the smaller sight picture setup well then it should be a benefit in being able to aim at specific places on targets better verses the bigger sight setup.

It all comes down to being able to see the smaller sight picture setup effectively, especially in crappy lighting conditions. If I can't see it properly while shooting at speed then its obviously not better than my current setup.

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46 minutes ago, CHA-LEE said:

It would be nice to have an smaller overall sight picture so the front sight isn't consuming as much of the target. With my current .100 wide front sight setup the width of the front sight almost consumes a whole 6 inch plate or head shot at 25 yards. With the front sight consuming so much of the target its difficult to pick a specific place on the target to aim at.

Before I got LASIK done I preferred a .090 / .120 sight setup because I could see it easily when I wore glasses. After getting LASIK done I had a lot harder time forcing my focus back to the sights, especially in less than optimal lighting conditions so I had to switch to bigger overall sights (.100 / .140) so I could see them half way decent without corrective lenses. Now that I am using corrective lenses I can see the sights really well and want to try the smaller sight picture setup to see if its doable or not. If I can see the smaller sight picture setup well then it should be a benefit in being able to aim at specific places on targets better verses the bigger sight setup.

It all comes down to being able to see the smaller sight picture setup effectively, especially in crappy lighting conditions. If I can't see it properly while shooting at speed then its obviously not better than my current setup.

Thanks for the reply. I also have less than perfect vision and am running a .100 front sight. Just curious as to the theory, especially coming from someone who has taken the time to put in the work testing. I'm interested in what you think after testing.

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I was able to try the new Manny Mini Dot sight setup last night at the indoor range. The POI is way too high with the current rear sight height. Its hitting about 5 inches high at 10 yards. I am going to lower the rear sight height by .020 to see if its enough to bring the POI down to where it should be. I am keeping the rear notch as it is so the new rear notch will be .100 wide by .080 deep after the height is lowered. This will actually be good because the .100 deep notch allowed me to see the base of the sight which is wider than the top and that was strange.

Even though the POI was off I did some back to back blasting testing using my #2 blaster with my old sight setup and the #1 blaster with the new sight setup. The new sight setup was harder to see indoors and that isn't a surprise given the indoor lighting conditions. The one thing that was really noticeable is the narrow rear notch keeping me from seeing the front sight though the whole slide cycling process. The post shot muzzle bounce/wobble as the slide snaps forward would make the front sight disappear for a short amount of time until the bounce settled. On my old setup I could see the fiber in the front sight the whole time. I am not sure if this is a show stopper or not and I also know that testing high speed blasting indoors is pretty useless due to the lighting conditions. So I am going to reserve my judgement on this new setup until I can do some shooting with it outdoors in normal lighting. 

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Saturday I was able to attend a local club match at the Aurora Gun Club. I wanted to try the new Manny Dot setup on the #1 blaster but the rear blade height was still too high. It had a POI that was 4 inches too high at 10 Yards so I shot my #2 Limited blaster instead. I had a fairly solid match but had one really novice mistake that lead to a miss. I engaged a swinger that was going away and I got sucked into looking for holes on it as it showed again but at the time I was engaging another target. Shooting at one target but looking at another is retarded and it’s been a really long time since I have done that. It’s funny how we can make mistakes like this no matter how long we play this game.

One cool thing about this match is that I recently added some storage boxes to my motorcycle and used it to go to this match. My goal is to leverage my motorcycle to travel to more of the local matches and this new storage box setup will help me do that. The only bummer is that with winter coming my chances to ride to matches will be limited as I don’t want to freeze my butt on just so I can ride to matches.

After the match Rick was able to get the rear sight on the #1 blaster lowered another .020 and I sighted it in. The POI is now the same as my #2 blaster but the rear notch is now really shallow. The rear notch is now .100 wide by .060 deep. In an aligned sight picture I can see the whole fiber dot but if I point the front sight down at all the dot starts to get obscured by the bottom of the notch. I knew this was going to be too shallow of a notch but I figured I would give it a try anyway since I am testing out a new sight setup.

On Sunday I attended the Clear Creek match up in the mountains. This is probably the last match of the year for this match as winter is coming and it will be too cold and snowy up there to host matches. It was cold in the morning but quickly warmed up to the mid 60’s by the time we got to the second stage. Bob Krogh was able to come over the mountains to shoot with us and we got to shoot the match together. The target lighting was pretty crappy at the match today as most of the targets were in heavy shadow. I was able to shoot the paper target fairly well but slower than normal but struggled on the steel. I had way too many make up shots on steel for the match and that allowed Bob to stay ahead of me for most of the match. I shot a clean match but that wasn’t good enough to beat Bob. I ended up about 3% behind Bob for this match which is fine given that I shot steel like crap.

After the match I was able to reshoot our last stage for fun with my #1 Limited blaster that has the Manny sight setup. I chose to see what would happen if I only used the fiber rod in the front sight. As expected the rear notch was too shallow and the fiber would disappear every shot as the slide snapped forward. But it would eventually come back and then I could break the next shot. I basically shot it like a red dot on an open gun and for the most part it worked out great. I was able to shoot the steel one for one and very aggressively. It was interesting to shoot the new sight setup at full speed but I know that the rear notch needs to be deeper. I am going to have Rick increase the depth of the rear notch to .080. That should give it enough downward error to keep the fiber dot in the notch during recoil. I am planning on getting some real live fire testing of this new sight setup this coming weekend. There are actually several different things that I need to test and tune in live fire so it will be nice to get that done this coming weekend.  

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The nice weather is still holding out here in Colorado and I am doing my best to take advantage of it. On Saturday I got some live fire practice in with some friends. I was testing the new Manny Mini Dot setup with the wider and deeper rear notch. Right now the rear notch is .110 wide and .080 deep. The width is a little too much for the narrow front sight but the depth is good. We setup a stage with some difficult steel and paper shots to start off with and it was interesting to say the least. We used 6 inch plates at about 15 yards and the narrow front sight allowed me to easily pick a place within the plate to aim at verses the old sight setup where I had to obscure the majority of the plate with the front sight. The Manny Mini dot also has the fiber right at the very top of the sight so you can’t make out the top of the iron easily. It’s basically setup so you leverage the FO dot to aim instead of the iron of the front sight. With the rear notch too wide there was excessively wide light bars so that was distracting because it felt like the sight was swimming in a huge notch. But I was able to pick a specific place to aim at on the harder shots a lot easier because the overall sight picture was smaller. For the practice the new sight picture worked out fairly well. The only bummer is that the front sight started to walk to the left during the practice so I had to remove it and reinstall it afterwards. I am going to try a .100 wide rear notch next to see if that is the correct width for the narrow front sight.

 

On Sunday I was able to get the #1 limited blaster sighted in again after reinstalling the front sight. Then I attended the indoor evening match at CGC. The lighting at CGC is marginal at best and it’s always hard to see the sights in that place regardless of their size, but I figured I would give the Manny Dot setup a try. On the first stage of the match one of the shooting positions didn’t have much lighting at all and I couldn’t see the FO rod in the front sight and couldn’t even make out the iron outline. I had to use the “Force” to try and will hits on the targets in that array and ended up with a miss. I am actually surprised I only had one miss on that array given that they were pretty difficult shots and I couldn’t see my sights at all. The rest of the stages had “ok” lighting in the shooting positions so I could see the FO rod and call my shots, but it was far from optimal. I think that indoor shooting requires the larger sight setup that is on my other guns because I can at least see the iron on that setup when the lighting is bad enough that the FO rod does not shine. I didn’t bring my other blaster so I was forced to use the Manny Mini dot setup for the match. Lucky for me the majority of the shooting was up close and personal blasting that didn’t require much seeing of the sights to get the shooting done. It was a fun match, but the Manny Mini dot is not the proper setup for that range.

 

I still have a lot more testing to do with the Manny Mini dot setup so I hope that the weather continues to hold out over the next couple of weeks. Winter is coming though and it won’t be long before the snow or really cold weather starts to put a damper on the local shooting scene.     

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  • 2 weeks later...

Last week I was able to get a new rear sight made with a .100 wide and .080 deep notch. I got the sight installed and sighted it in on Saturday during practice. Since there wasn’t a match on Saturday I went out to practice instead. The weather was kind of cold, windy and overcast so I didn’t get to test the sight out in “Normal” range conditions. But the overcast lighting did give me a chance to try it out in those lighting conditions. It was overcast just enough that making out the iron sides and top of the sight was difficult while shooting at speed. I could see the fiber in the front sight the whole time though and worked on using just that to shoot the practice stages.

This Manny Mini Dot setup takes some getting used to because you basically have to use the Fiber dot within the front sight as your only front sight aiming device. If you keep the fiber fully contained anywhere within the rear notch it will produce A-zone hits out to 20 yards. The other oddity is how much more of the target I can see while aiming at difficult shots because the front sight is so skinny. I can pick specific places on small targets to aim at now where my old sight setup would be obscuring the majority of the target. A good example would be the small 6 inch square plates that we have. With the Manny Mini Dot I can put the fiber in the middle of the plate at 15 yards and see the plate around the dot. With my old sight setup my front sight obscures most of the plate from Left to Right and I only can see the plate that is above the top of the sight.

Since I have shot many years with using the fiber to only pull my attention to the front sight and leverage the iron outline to aim and call my shots, it’s going to take a lot of shooting to get use to only leveraging the fiber to aim and call shots. I am going to stick with this sight setup for at least 5000 rounds to give it a long term test.

On Sunday I attended the AGC match using the new sight setup. Since we just had daylight savings happen the match started 1 hour later than normal and this put most of the targets in heavy shadows. Me and Shadow Targets usually don’t get along but I was able to shoot them fairly well with only using the Fiber dot as my aiming device. I shot this match at a slower pace than normal because I feel like I am commanding and deciding to break every shot. But that is to be expected with such a different sight picture. It’s going to take a while to get use to the new sight picture and breaking shots with only seeing the fiber. I have only shot it in “crappy” lighting conditions so far and its working out so that can’t be a bad thing. Hopefully next weekend I will get a chance to use it in some normal lighting conditions.

On Monday night I attended the indoor match at Whistling Pines and it was another good test of the sight setup. The lighting at this indoor range is actually really good so I was able to see my sights fairly well all night. Kept having minor screw ups on each stage though which was frustrating. I missed my grip on a couple of stages and this lead to slow shooting and not being able to reach the mag release button with my thumb. My hands were slightly sticky and this was causing the issue. Other than that it was fun. I am looking forward to doing some dry fire with the new sight setup this week so I can help burn in the new sight picture.

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The winter weather missed us this weekend so I was able to get some practice in on Saturday and attend a local match on Sunday. On Saturday I did some stage based practice with a few friends and it was a good practice session. We setup a large field course with lots of running around and tricky positions to get into and out of. We also incorporated a Texas star to get some practice in on that thing. I shot about 250 rounds and it was nice to get some more live fire practice with the new sight setup. I tried a few different sight picture clarity setups while shooting the stages to see what kind of hits I would yield using each. I can’t have a hard target focus but I can have a pretty relaxed sight focus and still be able to call my shots using the Fiber only. I basically need just enough sight focus to determine if the whole fiber is contained within the rear notch. If I can do that it allows me to shoot aggressively while calling my shots and capturing a lot of A zone hits. I still need to do a lot more shooting with this new sight setup to get use to it, but I am making progress.

The Pueblo match on Sunday was a lot of fun and the temp was in the low 70’s which is crazy for November but I will take it. I started out the match on a short course of fire that had two activators and 9 poppers. I shot the steel like a complete idiot as I was 100% target focused and missing like crazy. I even caught myself shooting at one popper while looking at another. I am not sure why I did that on the first stage of the match but it was obviously not the right thing to do. Then I noticed after the stage run that my pinned grip safety had failed and the beaver tail was flopping around a lot. I didn’t bring a backup gun so I had to use some duct tape to tape down the grip safety to keep it in the correct position. This fixed the issue but it also covered up a good chunk of grip tape on the left side of the grip and I could feel the gun squirming around within my left hand while shooting because of the reduced traction on the side of the gun. I tried to grip the gun harder and not allow it to bother me, but it still did bother me because I could feel it and see an increased amount of muzzle flip due to it.

The rest of the stages I shot pretty solid and I found myself experimenting visually with what sight picture to use for a given target. I only had one major mistake in the match and that was hitting my mag release with my support hand and dropping the magazine out during an aggressive left to right transition. I am not sure if this failure was due to the duct tape on the grip and me consciously gripping the gun harder to try and compensate for it or not. But I had to eat a standing reload + rack to recover from the failure mid stage run. Even though I was distracted by the tape on the grip I still had fun and rocked a couple of stages. The weather was great and the stages were fun to shoot so I can’t bitch too much about my match experience.

When I got home I was able to fix the grip safety issue with a torch and silver solder. This fix should work long enough for Rick to make me a new grip safety. This #1 Blaster is the oldest Limited gun in my fleet with lots of miles on it so stuff breaking is to be expected. This week I am going to put the Manny Mini Dot sight setup on my #3 Limited blaster so I can start getting that dude ready to use as a viable backup.  

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The Colorado winter weather tried to dash our match shooting hopes this weekend but we pushed through. On Saturday I hosted the local club match at HPPS and it was a brisk 18 degrees when I got to the range and it only heated up to about 50 degrees by the time we got done. Luckily we didn’t have much wind that day so even though it was cold it was not miserable. As always I am running around with my head cutoff in the morning trying to get everything setup and sorted for the match and didn’t get a chance to look at any of the stages from a stage plan perspective. I had to figure them out on the fly as I got to them while shooting the match. Most of the stages were pretty straight forward in stage planning so it wasn’t a big deal until we got to my stage. The stage I setup had a bunch of different ways to shoot it and I really didn’t have enough time to figure out the best stage plan. I had to pick an easy to remember plan so I could program it in the little time I had before I had to shoot it. It’s funny how I can be the one setting up the stage and then have no clue in how to shoot it. When I set it up I was only looking for it to be legal, have safe angles of fire, and not be able to shoot everything from only a few shooting positions. It’s cool to have a stage turn out as good as it did which literally zero concept in how it should be shot. Since that stage had many different options in how to shoot it I wish that I could have left it setup and shoot it a bunch of times after the match or the next day. But that didn’t work with my schedule this weekend so I will have to file it away for something to do the next time I setup a practice stage.

I shot the match ok but I was running out of steam by the time we got to the second to last stage. This really showed on that stage because I got lazy in seeing the sights. I was using the FO dot in the front sight to aim but all of my on target hits were really high on the targets. I ended up with 3 misses on that stage because my shots were going over the targets on the partial targets. I realized after the run that I had no recollection of seeing the FO dot within the rear notch and I suspect that I had the gun pointed high where the FO dot was outside of the notch above it. I had a chance to give the last section of that stage a reshoot for fun and when I mounted the gun on the first target, sure enough the FO dot was above the notch. I forced myself to keep the FO in the notch for the reshoot and had solid hits on all of the targets again so not paying attention to the rear notch was the culprit. This is part of the ebb and flow of relearning how to shoot with this new sight setup. Even though I primarily use only the FO dot in the front sight for aiming, I still need to be diligent about keeping the FO dot in the rear notch.

On Sunday I attended the club match up north in Weld county. It was a little cold in the morning but by the second stage it warmed up enough that I could shed all of my cold weather gear. I shot this match fairly solid and my only goal for the match was to keep the FO dot in the rear notch for all shots. This worked out really well for all but one target where I had a bump fire on and hoped that I would have my hits but ended up with a miss. There was a lot of steel in this match and I was able to shoot it all down aggressively with very few makeups. The steel shooting is where this new sight setup really shines for me as I can now pick a very specific place on the target to aim at. Verses putting a huge front sight somewhere in the middle of the steel and hoping that it’s centered enough to get the hit. For this match I didn’t end up with any D zone hits and what I called a marginal D zone hit I made up instantly. I was also making up steel misses instantly so the shot calling process is starting to soak in with these new sights. I still need a lot of shooting time with these new sights to fully burn it in, but I am progressing in relearning the shot calling process a lot faster than I expected.

After the Weld match I was able to stop by Long’s Shadow Holster and pickup my new Open gun holster. Josh at Long’ Shadow Holsters was able to knock this thing out of the park. It retains the gun solidly with no flopping around but it is also “free” when it comes to drawing. The draw friction and motion is just like my Limited gun setup so it feels exactly the same which is awesome. Now I can put some more attention on this Open gun setup to get all of the little things tuned up over the winter.  

Open Holster.jpg

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Since I had the day off today I decided to go out to the range and get a bunch of testing done along with some live fire practice. I started off with some chrono testing of some new .40 Major loads. I have been using Winchester Super Target for a long time now but its inverse temperature sensitive and it would be nice to not need to account for that variance while traveling to majors. I decided to give Aliant American Select a try as it was a recommendation from a friend. I tried 4.6gr, 4.7gr, and 4.8gr loads and the 4.8gr produced a consistent 950fps. The 4.7gr produced an average of 925fps and the 4.6gr was 900fps so it’s looking like every tenth of a grain is worth about 25fps. The 4.8gr loads had the same felt recoil as my WST ammo going the same velocity so that was really nice. I then did some extreme temperature variance testing of the ammo by putting some rounds in the snow then others on my defroster heater in the car. The really cold ammo lost about 15fps but the really hot ammo didn’t gain or lose any velocity compared to the room temperature ammo. I inspected the primer strikes and flatness of both the WST and American Select ammo and they both looked the same with flatness and no over pressure signs. I still need to do some dedicated accuracy testing between the two powders but so far the American Select powder is looking like a viable replacement for WST that feels exactly the same while shooting.

After that I was able to do some spring testing with my Open gun using slow motion video to analyze the results. I started out with a 17lb hammer spring and a 7lb recoil spring and tried a bunch of spring combinations . After a lot of swapping around I ended up back at a 17lb hammer spring but an 8lb recoil spring. This new setup has slightly less muzzle flip due to the slide smacking into the frame slower and it also seemed to produce a more consistent tracking of the dot.

After that I setup targets at 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards to do some sighting in and POI vertical offset testing. I zeroed the gun to have a perfect POA/POI at 15 yards and this produced a POI that was about 1.5 inches low at 5 Yards and about 2.5 inches high at 25 yards. This seems to be a decent tradeoff in POI from close to far. I then did some aggressive shooting on the same target array putting 2 shots on each in rapid succession. I was shooting high teens & low twenty splits across all targets and the dot was staying within the lens the whole time only consuming about half of the glass. I was surprised at how good the hits were while shooting at that pace on the further targets. If I simply kept the vertical streak of the dot in the center of targets it would produce really good hits. I did a fair amount of shooting on this drill trying different shooting speeds to see what type of hits it would produce and it was interesting to say the least. One strange thing that I noticed is that if I gripped the gun really hard the dot would track in a half moon fashion like a faint “C” shape. I am not sure if this is due to how I was gripping the gun or if the scope mount it self was wobbling during recoil due to the shock. Either way I still have a crap ton of practice to do with it before it feels “normal”. The cool part is that I got to put the new Long’s Shadow Holster for the open gun to the test and it worked great.

After I was done playing with the Open gun I strapped on my Limited gun and tried the same drills. If I kept the fiber dot within the notch it produced solid hits out to 20 yards while shooting at an aggressive pace with splits in the low 20’s. The 25 yard target was proving to be difficult though. I couldn’t produce solid second shot hits on it at the same aggressive pace. I tried slowing down to high 20’s and it still produced inconsistent second shot hits. It wasn’t until I slowed down to mid 30’s that the second shot started getting consistent at 25 yards. I need to put some more live fire time into this drill to figure out the proper sight picture and shooting pace for the further targets. The good thing is that any targets within 15 yards were a lot easier to shoot aggressively by simply keeping the fiber dot anywhere within the rear notch.

After that I setup a small stage with three shooting positions that had a good mixture of fast shooting and hard aiming. I was struggling on this stage to get my hits on the steel plates. I was mashing the crap out of the trigger and all of my hits were going low. At this point in the day I had probably shot about 600 rounds and I was pretty worn out so I packed it in. When I get tired I start to mash the trigger really bad and I was in full trigger mashing mode so it was time to pack it up and call it a day. This was a really productive range session from a fiddling and testing perspective. Not so much from a practice perspective though because I was too warn out by the time I tried to do some stage based practice.

Tomorrow I am going to attend a local USPSA match in Aurora. Hopefully I am rested up and ready to rumble by then.  

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On Saturday I was able to attend a local USPSA match at the Aurora Gun Club. The match had a good mixture of shooting and running around challenges and the weather was great. We are getting spoiled with this nice weekend weather but I think that will be coming to an end soon.

I shot the match with my #1 Limited blaster as I still need to get use to the Manny Mini Dot sight setup. Using this sight setup is starting to feel more normal but I still need a lot of time with it to make it 100% normal. The only thing I need to be careful about is when the lighting gets poor enough that I can’t see the fiber dot well. When that happens I tend to point the front sight up looking for the dot and I end up with really high hits or shots going over the target. I need to revert to a standard iron sight Post & Notch sight picture in those scenarios. I didn’t have any issues with seeing the Fiber dot at this match but it has happened in the past.

I shot the match fairly solid with only one mistake. My mistake was involved with pulling a rope to activate a swinger. The rope was secured to a wall and it had a plastic tube on the end that you could use to pull. When I first reached for the tube to grab it my pinky finger got cut by something and I instinctively pulled my hand back because it hurt. I had to reach for it again to grab onto the tube and pull the rope back. This cost me about a second on the stage screwing around with the rope pull. When I looked at the wall and rope after shooting the stage I noticed that there were a lot of staples hanging half way out of the wall right around where the pipe was hanging. I must have cut my finger on one of the staples hanging out of the wall. Other than that I shot the match pretty solid. I didn’t have any shooting penalties and was able to run the gun at an aggressive pace with the new sight setup.

There wasn’t a match on Sunday and the weather was too rainy and cold to shoot so I focused on getting some more ammo reloaded. I loaded up 1000 rounds with the American Select powder so I can give that stuff a decent long term test. It will be interesting to see how dirty it makes the gun verses the WST powder.

This past weekend will be my last chance to shoot for a couple of weekends. The wife and I are going on a cruise starting this Friday and will be gone for a week. It’s time for a little break from shooting anyway and it will be nice to get a week of “Summer” in the middle of winter while on the cruise.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This past week I was on a Cruise Ship taking a southern caribbean cruise. The weather was awesome in the low to mid 80’s with very little rain. It’s nice to get away from it all for a week with my little lady and do nothing but take it easy and relax. We got back Saturday evening and I decided to attend the Pueblo match on Sunday.

On Sunday morning I woke up with a little bit of a sore throat. I decided to go to the match anyway since I was eager to do some shooting. I wasn’t feeling so well about 2 stages into the match and by the end I was feeling horrible.  I was really thinking about packing it in and quitting about half way through the match, but I rode down to the match with another guy so I would be stuck at the range until the match was over anyway. So I pushed thought the suck and got the match done. I could tell that I was not on point with my shooting performances due to being sick, but I did my best to pull it together and get it done the best I could. I was able to shoot a clean match but I did rack up 4 D zone hits through the match. It was nice to shoot a match after not shooting for about 2 weeks. But shooting while you are sick is not so much fun.

By the time I got home I was going through the Cold/Hot fever cycle and had a 102 degree temp. Sunday evening and all through the night it really sucked. I am feeling better today as I am at least past the fever cycles but I am still feeling under the weather. I am sure this is going to last for several more days. Hopefully I get over this soon so I can get back to normal. I hate being sick!!!

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No shooting for me this past weekend. We got an arctic cold front over the weekend and the high temp on Saturday was 3 degrees with snow. It got up to 12 degrees on Sunday so it didn’t warm up much. Needless to say all of the outdoor matches were canceled due to the weather. Not being able to shoot was actually a good thing because this sickness I am battling really had my number over the weekend. I was down for the count most of the weekend trying to recover from this sickness and the super cold weather made it easy to simply stay inside and rest.

I was able to get a little bit of gun wrenching done between fits of hacking up a lung. A few weeks ago I converted the sights on the #3 Limited blaster over to the Manny Mini Dot setup. When I tried sighting it in a few weeks ago I noticed that it was stringing shots vertically about an inch at 10 yards. I got it over to Rick and we tried a bunch of different stuff to try and resolve the stringing issue but no matter what we did it remained the same. Everything looked and felt good in how the barrel was locking up so it was a head scratcher on why it was stringing shots. We decided to replace the barrel with a new one. Rick got the barrel replaced and now it’s back to shooting 1 hole as it should be. It was a real head scratcher as to why that other barrel was stringing. Sometimes you just get a bad barrel I guess.

Since the bad barrel still functions fine mechanically I am thinking about using it for a 1000 round shooting challenge. I remember watching a video of Todd Jarrett shooting 1000 rounds through a single stack in 10 minutes and then there was a team of guys trying to beat his 10 minutes shooting a Glock. It may be fun to try a 1000 round challenge out to see if I can actually do it within 10 minutes without wearing out my trigger finger. I would need to borrow some mags from others and have a team of guys loading mags but that is doable. I think the number one challenge would be the heat of the gun its self. Shooting 1000 rounds in one go would get the whole gun really hot, especially since I have metal grips on all of my guns. It may get too hot to continue shooting without burning my hands. Either way I want to give it a try sometime this winter as something fun to do.

The weather is suppose to be in the 50’s this coming Saturday so hopefully we will have a local match. If not I am thinking about going out to practice. We will see how it goes.

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Last night I was able to attend an indoor match at the Bristolcone range. This was a 4 stage match with two classifiers and two field courses. I decided to shoot my Limited gun at this match since I am still trying to get my Open belt setup finalized. I need a couple more mag pouches to get my Open shooting belt ready to rumble. I also wanted to give the Manny Mini Dot sight setup a try at this indoor range to see how it worked out.

I shot the match fairly solid, except for the first classifier. The first classifier was Pucker Factor which I have shot many times in the past. This classifier requires some pretty aggressive shooting on four targets that get progressively further away. I shot it right to left as I normally have and on my second shot I called it a miss and sure enough it was a miss. I was also aiming too high on all of the targets and was down a lot of points on the other targets. I shot it in 2.64 seconds and even with being down a lot of points on the down range targets, if I would have had my hits on the first target, it would have been a 107% run. The second classifier was Disaster Factor which is a simple six rounds, reload, six rounds. I missed my reload and caught my pinky in between the base pad and mag well. This ripped off a strip of skin on the top of my pinky which was bleeding pretty good. I shot the last stage of the match pretty good so I finished the match strong.

I was surprised at how well the Manny Mini Dot sight setup worked in the less than optimal lighting. For most of the stages I was only able to see the FO dot in the front sight but that was good enough to get the job done. I am feeling more comfortable with using only the FO dot while calling shots but I still need a lot more range time with it to make it second nature.

Its looking like I am not going to get to shoot this coming weekend. I forgot that Saturday was Christmas eve and I had already planned on visiting family that day. I might be able to sneak in some shooting in the morning on Saturday, but I am not counting on it.

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