MemphisMechanic

It depends. While grand bagging is almost universally frowned upon, I'm an avid practitioner of it. I found it to be the one thing that makes me agressively improve, because I hate finishing in the bottom half of my class. If I manage to eek my way out of A into M? You'll see a sudden flurry of practice at my house.

Hey. I don't mind if he practices with bullets. He can even add primers and powder just to keep things interesting. It's not my living room that he'll be dry live firing in.

It really is amazing how much it helps to avoid feeling hungry during a match. Small meals and snacks help me a lot. Staying hydrated is the only thing that helps more, and is more under valued.

You guys are spending many hours a week searching for information on this one specific model. They sell hundreds of different models of guns in dozens of brands for 40 hours a week... and then they go home and spend zero hours that night glued to this forum, or all the SIG-centric Facebook profiles. It's pretty typical for a dealer or distributor to learn they can get something when a knowledgeable customer comes in and tells them who and how to ask.

(It should look like the left side of John's picture, not the right side.)

Just remember to focus on being safe in your first match pretty much exclusively. If you forget a target, fine. You'll fit in with everyone else in match #1! Just have fun and learn how things work as safely as possible.

Also, one of the trickier things is when half the targets can be viewed from two or three places - but not the same two or three - and the other half are visible at one position only. This invites you mix things up: To shoot target A twice, and leave target B totally unengaged. Step 1 is knowing how many paper targets are in the stage. Circling around behind the stage is often helpful here. Step 2 is ... knowing what to shoot from where. Make sure you have "airgunned" the correct number of shots, and look for ways to identify each target so that you know you have accounted for every target. Color of it's target stand, a particular plaster placement on it, or the way one of the sticks is warped... those things help. Only after that's complete do you even begin to think about reloads. And this is coming from a Production shooter. Once you know where ad I need what order, it becomes obvious where you need to change mags. Nothing makes me shake my head more than watching a guy on his first walkthrough trying to decide to load before or after target #4 when he hasn't even seen the middle portion of the stage yet.

That is very much allowed, yes. Personally I do that mentally. Sketch it in my mind as if viewed from directly overhead.

The BOSS hanger is to be a dozen times preferred over the floppy plastic Blade-Tech DOH. I was saying that 1) the BOSS is an incredible improvement over the BT hanger. 2) The RHT double thick holster body is stiffer than a normal body. Not a total overhaul in rock-solid feellike a BOSS hanger is... but still a definite improvement.

You realize you just told all of us what you should be spending 15-20 minutes a day practicing in dryfire, right?

My recommendations: Spent primer chute. Tape empty 12ga hulls under the debris outlet holes on casefeeder. Shellplate bearing and low mass detent ball. Done. (Also keep a small box of resized and deprimed brass handy next to the press. Anytime something fails to run through station 1, you can insert one in station 2 after it indexes and press that waiting primer into it. Keeps you from needing any kind of chute to catch live primers.)

It's just another stage. Shoot it like any other stage: don't fall into the "all A's or it's death!" trap, either. The last M classifier I shot was 8A, 1B, 3C. Fast. Push for the best combination of points and time just like any other stage. And practice draws and reload and one handed shooting in dryfire each night until Saturday, or whenever your match is.

Pick the simplest possible stage plan. No no, I mean the simplest. Even if you have to leave a port, shoot something, then run right back to that port or past it... do it. Pick the insanely slow path through the stage that makes execution half as challenging. Do that. Then go back to being smart about things in the next bay.

Walter pays the best. But you have to not suck in order to actually get a few hundred $$$ for winnning a major with one.

Pull weights will go up a little bit in DA and SA. Not much, but you'll feel it. Yes. Thats why so many people lighten the plunger spring even though everything the trigger does becomes less crisp, and you sometimes run into issues with the hammer falling early in DA.

What Johnbu said. Start there. That spring is pushing the trigger bar upward and 'clicking' the disconnector/trigger bar back into alignment when the trigger resets. The weaker your trigger bar / plunger spring is, the softer the trigger resets.

http://i1343.photobucket.com/albums/o786/slayersixty1/20170422_1513111_zps9wmywgeu.jpg

For it to be an accurate baseline, I'd want to make sure you run every drill several times and take an average of the times. And score the targets in aggregate, instead of after each string or run.

It depends what your goal is. If you're a C-class determined to make it to A within a certain number of months? Pick a division and a gun and practice that one platform. If your goal is to shoot what you enjoy and have fun? Switch away.

Splits are the very last thing that gets fast. They're also the thing which matters least in your match placement. (vs transitions reloads movement etc...) And they're the thing that novice shooters want to do superfast right off the bat. You're hardly the first. I was 'that guy' too at one point.

Prop you phone up and film yourself. You'll be surprised how slow the hands are actually going down to the mag and back up. Then watch GMs on YouTube and feel horrible. And use it as determination to practice. Reloads are all about ninja-fast hands and no wasted motion. I prefer to practice reloading in dryfire by returning to a sight picture but NOT dropping the shot. So I'm not learning to stuffthemagmissthetarget really fast - instead I'm rushing to return to aiming the gun as quickly as I can.

Grip the gun harder. Watch the beginning of the "the pleasure is all mine" stage. Your weak hand & thumb float in space while the right wrist soaks up the recoil and then the gun settles back into the left hand. Grip the gun as hard as you can without shaking using the offhand. It doesn't have a trigger to pull, so it can be used as the vise to clamp the gun in place. Go to the range and dump a mag into a 3 yard target with your current grip. Then repeat, holding the gun in your left hand like you're trying to crush your buddies hand during a handshake. Watch the differences in stability and sight tracking and how much less flip the gun has. Once you're a believer, go home and train yourself to grip twice as hard with L as with R in dryfire. You'll never learn to hold it that way otherwise.

My personal belief that a sub-one-second draw and reload are desireable stems from what you just touched on. Consistency. He who executes the best over the course of the entire match, wins. We all agree that our match pace will not be our aggressive "balls to the wall, risk throwing your gun or mag across the room" practice pace. A man who has practiced a 0.8 second reload endlessly is someone who can drill 1.2sec loads with boring consistency on match day, and that's something that is definitely desireable. Most of us fumble a mag change or two during the course of a match. I know I'd love to gain back those 2 lost seconds.

That's not a bad mindset. Most newcomers rush the second shot (throwing double taps at everything and hoping round #2 connects) then take a full second to swing over to their next target. Shooting followups no faster than you can reaquire your sights and saving time with excellent transitions is a better way to begin in the sport. You get good hits consistently. Your split times will come down on their own, when your eyes learn to see the gun cycle at a higher rate of speed. Focus on learning to grip the gun hard - I mean HARD - and they'll speed up noticeably shortly thereafter.

There are at least two guys in this forum who have two Stock 2's in 9mm. A gun they shoot in matches, and a backup one. They cannot swap the slides between these two guns due to the wide variation in manufacturing tolerances found in the Tanfoglio platform. Others may chime in with their direct experiences with the Limited guns, but I would personally be cautious about planning to swap uppers around.