MemphisMechanic

I'm glad you guys like my "changing platforms" diary. I did it because information on exactly where I'd struggle with the switch was hard to come by. And I'm far from done. At roughly 1% short of A-class I might as well keep this up - at least until my gun handling improves enough to get me there. For a 5.5 DA you're looking at a 12 or 13 pound hammer spring, which might mean you're going to need to run Win or Fed primers and anything not fully seated is going to go click on the first strike. (Although the upcoming PD heavy firing pin might certainly change that) Also, if you played with my gun I think you'd guesstimate the trigger to be about 5-5.5 lbs.

The other benefit to doing it in two passes (gun has roughly 800-900 rounds through it now) is that you can see exactly what is rubbing what. So you spend the bulk of your time on things that matter. Getting the engagement surfaces slick as ice.

A 13lb ISMI spring on the stock guide rod is by far the most common weight for USPSA use in Production at 130PF. To get the sights back down more quickly, grip the gun harder. You should be squeezing absolutely as hard as you can without shaking with the support hand while the strong hand is just loose enough not to clamp down on the trigger (trigger freeze) at speed. Getting your weak hand grip up to par will greatly increase your ability to shoot fast: inside 7 yards you should be able to shoot A's as fast as you can pull the trigger.

Pull weights currently are 3.4lbs and 6.5lbs and it's exactly what I want: It should prove to be reliable with any primer and the trigger is incredibly smooth with no stacking. I'll be burning up a stockpile of 15,000 CCI magnum small pistol primers in this gun, so I need the relatively heavy 14lb spring. I spent the most time polishing the hammer/strut/spring/pins area. Anything that affects how hard the firing pin hits the primer when the hammer falls. I left those rough before, because I couldn't do anything to the pins holes and springs except by hand. Last time my drill was at work, and I didn't have dremel attachments that would polish small areas. This time chucking a Q-tip in a drill (or rolled up 2,000 grit sandpaper) and running through these areas with polish on it should help the ignition issues I've been having. Everything is smooth as wet glass now. Provided this gun runs 100% from now on, I couldn't possibly be happier with my decision to switch to it.

Tore it down and went crazy with the polishing tonight. No parts changes. Before - light polish on everything except the plunger head the first time: Rolling 2,000 grit sandpaper, coating it with Flitz polish, then running it through the inside of the springs and the holes in the hammer and sear works really well, when you use a drill. Thanks for that tip. Seen below: That tip plus trigger bow with a "light" polishing... Finished chrome-like products: I deliberately didn't polish everything like crazy on the first pass. I didn't want the trigger terribly light while getting used to running around with a SA trigger, plus the first time you tear one down it takes the whole evening just to swap parts and learn how thing fit together.

Okay. The barrel is back from Grams and I can't say enough good things about them. Answered my voicemail within a could of hours before I shipped, then called my cell (I left my number on the note in the package) to tell me it was ready. One day turnaround. Note: I sent him a 4.25" M&P barrel too and he wasn't able to ream that. They are hardened just like Springy XD barrels. Love his return packaging: Not only will those long (1.160") dummy rounds I sent along with the barrel plunk and spin, but they have a few thousandths more play in the chamber. Gauged-good rounds barely slid into the chamber before. Now they fall in and rattle like it's a Glock barrel. I reinstalled the 8lb recoil spring to see if it'll feed ammo into the more generous chamber next time I shoot it. I shot my last match with the factory recoil spring minus a couple of coils because the 8 pounder would sometimes fail to chamber ammo I that had checked in the gun's barrel.

Procedure I went with: Polish and install it. Dryfired it a few dozen times. Pulled the pin out, and found peening beginning to appear on it from striking the block. Okay. So now I looked at how it works. Okay. This is the opposite of an M&P Glock or most striker guns: They block when down, and are lifted up to clear via the trigger bar. The Tanfo blocks when up, and is held there by the sear. When you pull the trigger the sear leg lowers, and the block drops so that the firing pin can hit the round in the chamber. So... Cock the hammer and poke it with a punch, and find the pin won't pass the block without trigger pulled. It goes in 1/2" and stops cold. Okay. Safety works. (This fact needs to remain when youre finished.) Find the position where the hammer will barely fall, then hold the hammer back and keep your trigger in that spot. If your gun is like mine, you'll now feel a noticeable catch when attempting to poke the firing pin forward past the block. This means that the block is up too high when the trigger breaks and the pin is hitting it when you fire. To fit the block, you have two choices on where to remove material: I chose to fit the tab that engages the block, not the bottom where the sear lifts it. Reducing either spot will allow the pin to bypass the block earlier in the trigger pull, by placing less of the block in front of the pin. It's important to keep either surface square, and to be very patient. A thousandth or two is a big change, and you don't want to disable the safety. Mine disengages completely 2/3s of the way through the trigger pull now, after a couple of hours of filing and double checking.

...Says the guy who finished as roughly the 50th best Production shooter at Nationals. What would you know?

You're way more skilled than I, Jake. I suppose I adopted that because my load sucks and I haven't worked often and hard enough to fix it. So I compensate by performing it in the way that least slows down 2.5 seconds worth of movement while tying to get the mag seated. Hmm. (Yet more motivation for learning to crush standing loads in dryfire. Along with making that last .80% I need for A class rather easy to achieve.)

For whatever reason I find those the only moving loads that are easy to stick. Will try to describe what goes on for me as best I can with text (I'm a lefty but will use the right version of it) Fire your last shot and rotate your entire body 90* to the side, rotating to face the direction you're about to run toward. The strong arm swung around with your torso: the gun is up high in front of your face and naturally indexed in a very convenient position to feed a mag into. Maybe think of it as "running toward/into the magwell" ... Then stuff a mag into it and get going I think the key is not to try to keep arm out in front of your body in the 12 o'clock position if you were staying square to the back of the berm, but to bring it around toward 2 or 3 o'clock when you break position and run. (Muzzle still indexed square downrange, obviously)

Are you sure about that? Most righties want to load during left-to-right (moving toward strong side) lateral movement rather than the opposite way. As a lefty, I seek out stage plans that will let me load moving to my left over ones that require moving the way the righties want to do it. Were you mistaken or can you explain the issue?

Listen to the GM. Crush it with your weak hand. No, harder that that. Oh, and stop pulling the trigger with your whole hand. Low & right for a lefty shooter is a trigger control issue. Money spent on springs won't fix. Time spent in dryfire and money spent on ammo... will.

It depends on your goal. If you want to get out of B class then perfecting your standing load is where you want to invents your time. Exiting B is done by shooting classifiers. If you want to be able to beat the other B class scrubs at major matches, then you want to figure out how to shoot medium and long courses better. Movements, entires and exits, and maybe cleaning up your moving loads some. But as Jake said, moving and static loads have a very close relationship. My moving reloads hurt me... because I can't perform beyond a 1.48s standing 7-yard load with any consistency. I don't think static and sprinting are all that different. I've never seen someone who could crush .85-90 loads on classifiers with long-course reloads that weren't strong.

Definitely send your Tanfo barrel to a Grams Engineering. Not only will it let you load longer, mine came back generously loose like a Glock's. Properly sized rounds drop in and rattle enough to let you know this is going to be a reliable gun from now on - a thousandth of extra play in what was formerly an insanely tight chamber made a big difference. Somewhere between 3.7 and 4.0 grains of TG works for a 124 FMJ really well, depending on barrel length and whether or not you want to skirt 126 PF or load for a more reliable 133-135.

Unless Patriot Defense comes out with helium-filled titanium grips... You never know with those guys.

1. The true answer for the Tanfos here is to ship your barrel off to a Grams Engineering along with a dummy round at the length of your choice - my Stock 3 now accepts any fat difficult bullet profile out to 1.150" and the chamber has a noticeable bit more slop around case-gauged brass than it did before. The gun eats anything. But in general you want to drop a round into the barrel loaded to, say 1.140 or whatever length you choose. If it won't drop in all the way or won't spin freely then the bullet nose is caught in the rifling. Load shorter and shorter until they drop in and spin freely. Then play with OALs shorter than that to find an accurate load which will feed 100% of the time. 2. Not usually. My Ramshot Competition and Titegroup loads see no detectable velocity difference for a 135gr bullet at 1.070" vs 1.150" - you should always back down and carefully work back up, but a huge velocity swing isn't common with the typically recommended powders. It also isn't unheard of. Play it safe. 3. Faster burning powders will feel softer, yes! Clays behind a 147gr 9mm is almost hilariously soft at 130PF. (Note that this is fast enough some people aren't going to recommend it) 4. Pull a bullet and look at it and measure it. Does it have a sharp lip at the case mouth and was it resized below that? In 9mm you want to just barely de-bell the case rim and wind up with a straight wall. You do not want to crimp it inward at all and cut into the bullet. 5. Spring your gun for the power factor that you're shooting and **chronograph your ammo.** I prefer a slightly hotter load (132-136 PF) because it cycles the gun a bit more vigorously and is often more accurate than super low velocity mousefarts at a hair over 125 power factor. Soft ammo or soft ammo and factory springs are common causes, aside from things like extraction/ejector issues or the shooter gripping too loosely.

Nip the safety leg of the sear? You know the objective is to clearance the bottom of that leg so that the safety can slide underneath it and prevent the sear from rocking, right? Just making sure you're not shortening the tip instead.

That was the problem, Jack. Bullets aren't supposed to fly upward in USPSA.

Steve Anderson's podcast would tell you that you need to do it in dryfire the same way for a few weeks, until it becomes the new normal, and from there on out your subconscious mind will automatically put that grip pressure into play anytime you present a handgun to a target. Once it becomes the normal way for you to handle the gun.

I re-oil everything anytime it's going to be fired. But I'm not a fan of keeping guns spotless unless I have a major match that weekend. Then it gets detail stripped and worked for two hours until its absolutely spotless. I just can't stop at "field strip and clean halfway." If the gun is getting cleaned, everything is coming out. I'm too OCD to pretend a field-stripped-only wipedown with junk left in the bottom of the sear housing is a 'clean' gun. I believe that was about 4,000 to 5,000 rounds without cleaning.

When fitting the one piece sear to my gun, I noticed that I needed to remove the least material to engage the safety in single action. Another pass from the dremel and the half-cock position allowed you to safe the gun. The DA position required the most material removal, but as long as you aren't a hack and are patient, it will still operate correctly in the previous two positions. I believe you just need to remove a couple more thousandths if you want the safety to work correctly in all hammer positions.

8,000 flawless rounds, after fitting the barrel so that it won't quite go into battery when cycled slowly. As per their instructions. (500 rounds later it loosened up and will slip right into battery just like the factory barrel) I run a 13lb ISMI spring on the factory guide rod - I have no idea why anyone would replace the perfectly worthy steel factory guide rod in Production. It has run flawlessly with quality controlled match ammo, and was only cleaned twice in that time. The gun still runs when dirty (see below)... it just shoots where you point it.

SDI in my case.

The sear isn't hardened beyond its surface. So don't polish the bejeezus out of it, or it will wear excessively.

Glocks run great until you try to tighten them up and fit them with ultra-match-grade triggers. Gotta embrace the differences between the sloppy Glock and the 2011. Try to turn it into an STI and you're tiptoeing through a minefield.