MemphisMechanic

Stick the DAA on eBay and buy a Hundo. Yes $100 is a lot for a case gauge. But without exaggeration, you can comfortably have 500 rounds (enough for an entire match) neatly packaged in plastic 100rd ammo boxes in about 10 minutes. Worth. Every. Penny. I actually gauge my local match ammo now, not just majors. About 10% of my ammo fails the Hundo since it's tight, but not ridiculously so. That gets tossed into a bucket labeled "PRACTICE" and perhaps 1/100 will fail to feed while I'm using it for drills. Match ammo is boringly reliable, as long as you do your part checking the primers.

The best step by step I found was actually on the Tanfo's brother, a CZ Shadow. It's posted in here somewhere: http://forums.brianenos.com/index.php?showtopic=234968

Factory ammo doesn't require anything special. You can't go as light on the hammer spring as someone willing to slave their gun to federal match primers... But most of us want our guns to run CCI, Tula, or S&B primers as well. Search through this forum and you'll find plenty of discussions on this. While compiling the shopping list for my Stock III, I ran across plenty of tips on setting one up with a sub-6 DA and sub-2.5 SA trigger pull.

Wednesday, June 20 Physical condition: I can tell this is definitely helping. Aside from a pretty shitty physical activity at work giving me some aches and pains to look forward to for the next three days, I'm all but certain that the evening after this Saturday's match will be far less painful than I'm used to. As I type this, my left elbow and wrist feel terrific. No pain at all unless they're really really pushed, and I'm lefthanded so this was the bad side when I started! I'd say a 50-75% improvement after just six days. My right elbow is throbbing pretty badly at the moment, but I'm pounding this out on my phone after wrenching on a breaker bar with a 36" pipe on the handle for 90 minutes straight. So I'm hardly surprised. Exercise: All exercises done with 15-lb weights for all three sets. (later tonight)

Friday June 15 Exercise: Repeat exercises, as above, with 10 lb weights at all times. ---------------------------- Saturday June 16 Exercise: Repeat exercises, as above, with 10 lb weights on first two sets and 15lb on final set. Easing into doing this with more and more weight. Physical condition: I can feel a difference in how much grip strength I have. It's small, but I think I feel it. Or want to. ---------------------------- Sunday June 17 Exercise: All exercises done with 15-lb weights for all three sets. Physical condition: At a pool party over at a friends house, I estimate that my elbows hurt about 2/3s as much as I started at. ---------------------------- Monday, June 18 Exercise: None. Rest day. ---------------------------- Tuesday, June 19 Exercise: All exercises done with 15-lb weights for all three sets. Physical condition: Deteriorating. I'm replacing the sprockets that drive the tracks on a Cat D5H dozer. This involves torquing more than 45 bolts to 280+ ft/lbs. By hand. Curled halfway in a ball under the top edge of the tracks so that you can't straighten your spine and simply lift with your legs. We'll see how long this job takes to recover from. I shudder to think were I'd be if I hadn't been working on my arms for the past week before starting this job.

Thursday, June 14 (Day Zero) Physical condition: This condition has slowly appeared over the past year. I'm 36. Just old enough that I notice aches and pains that didn't bother me when I took this job at age 30. I find myself locking my left elbow in a half-bent position and pushing downward from my shoulder just to flush the toilet at work without pain. Hanging either arm down at my side and locking the elbow joint out totally? That causes me to grit my teeth from the pain. My left wrist has been tender for more than a year and a half. Your normal push-up position is a no-go for me. I do those on my fists at the gym, when I do them at all. Exercise: I find Chris's article, read it, and decide to go out and purchase a set of dumb bells for the house. I make the trip to Academy and do his four recommended exercises with 10lb weights. Starting myself out easy.

Most of the range diaries here center around shooting. I thought it could be helpful to start one that focuses on physical therapy to get yourself in shape to shoot without pain. Two weeks ago I ran across a link to Chad Reilly's advice on treating tendonitis in the elbow, which we refer to as shooters / golfers / tennis elbow. Hmm... a guy who finished 12th at Nationals and is a physical therapist who has fixed himself, Shannon Smith, and Rob Leatham? I think I'll give this a try. About me: Shooting IDPA and USPSA since 2007. I'm a heavy equipment mechanic at my day job. Dozers, Excavators, bucket trucks... (My job probably does far more damage to wrists and elbows than your range time does. They never fully heal.) Currently returning from a 3 year hiatus from shooting, looking to make M in Production within a year. I dryfire 4 nights a week on average. So my shooting habit doesn't let my arms rest either. The day after I found Chad's article, I went out and bought a set of dumbells from Academy sporting goods. The kind with the thread-on collars and an assortment of 2.5/5/10 lb weights. I intended to take Chad's advice to do these exercises every night, and I already skip the gym far too often. So lets begin.

You have large hands and CZs have a very small grip size. Enough so, that some guys have switched to the Tanfoglios for the longer / wider grip and increase in trigger reach. You'll notice this with nearly every shooter and gun to some extent, however. Dryfire yourself silly learning to mash the trigger back hard in DA until you can do it without disturbing the sights. Change finger position on trigger and the like until you find what works best. Then continue until that's natural to you. Don't worry about a "slanted" trigger finger.

SILENCE! <Resumes bludgeoning the deceased horse with a club>

Why is your charge under the 124 lower than the ones beneath the 147s? The lighter the bullet, the more powder you need to drop for an equivalent power factor. Not less.

It made a large difference in my M&P - about 1" smaller group at 25yd. It made no difference to my girlfriend's M&P. Same day. Same ammo. Have to try it with your gun and see. They are all unique little snowflakes.

I am about to switch to a Tanfoglio. When I figure out my preferred "lefty flip" technique for a slide-in-frame gun like the CZs/Tanfos, I'll get back to you.

Someone with nothing better to do always finds a 180 violation in every video on YouTube. Even though it's two dimensional footage of a three dimensional sport shot from well behind the view the RO had. Personally, I'm never looking for it. They'd have to be pushing the 230* before I'd notice - I just wanna watch you shoot!

If you were going to do a gun for use in matches down here in the100* south for USPSA with hands coated in sweat and sunscreen, I'd suggest going coarser on the stipple pattern. Think uglier and grittier... Otherwise that is a DAMN good job.

Each miss or no-shoot is a total disaster. It's true for C class and only gets to be a bigger and bigger deal as you improve.

That's the problem. The burn rate on Solo varied widely from lot to lot. My data for a 3.6gr load wouldn't work for many on here. They'd need up to 4.1-4.3 gr to make the same PF. You really really do need to start at the book minimum and work your way up on this powder.

Yep! Flare as little as needed to get bullets into the case easily. Crimp just enough to remove that belling, and you'll have much more consistent ammo. To check crimp, pull a bullet and ensure there is no more than a faint line where the case mouth closed around the bullet. I was crimping FMJs pretty aggressively with a Lee factory crimp, which resulted in issues when shooting coated bullets because I was undersizing the bullet and cutting through the coating with the case mouth. A lighter crimp turns out to work better everywhere. I don't even use the FCD anymore - I switched back to Dillon. Over-flaring and over-crimping are mistakes almost all new reloaders make on handgun rounds.

"If you are finished, unload and show clear." The Range Officer is responsible for keeping everyone there safe. The command he's issuing has the word "show" in there. In addition, many of the top guys flip and catch. But every one of them that I've seen shows the RO a clear chamber before they drop the hammer and holster. When the men and women with the most experience are doing something it's either because 1) they got in trouble by not doing so and learned their lesson or 2) It's something courteous / expected / required. I feel the same way when I'm in your position. (IDPA certified S.O., but not a USPSA R.O. yet)

The short answer is that your malfunction simply changes the stage into 5 rounds from your fist magazine, and 7 from the second magazine. It also relocates your reload. Let's say that the gun died on the fourth shot. Fastest legal procedure is: Two rounds into T1. One round into T2... then the gun goes click on your follow-up. Rack the round out of the gun and fire your second shot on T2. Fire one round into T3. Slide lock. Perform your reload and fire the missing round into T3. Now, you simply fire two rounds into each target to complete the second pass, to finish the stage. Yes, that means you can fire three rounds boomboomboom into T3 after the load,transition back to T2 for two, and T1 for two. This is entirely legal and it's the only logical way to handle putting four holes into each target with limited capacity AND a FTF malfunction. This is the correct, legal, and fastest way to complete such a stage. I know this because I SO'd a standards stage very, very similar to this at a major match a couple of years back. I was walked through exactly what type of recovery is and is not legal after a malfunction at length, because our AC and the MD were both very competent and very much on the ball over such things, and wanted myself and the other SO to be able to answer questions and treat shooters fairly. It's also exactly how I'd previously handled this type of situation as a shooter at previous majors without any SO ever saying anything other than some variation of "well, that sucks, but you sure recovered quickly."

Clays makes some people... uncomfortable... in 9mm. I loaded long, didn't push past 130 power factor, and didn't load anything requiring more powder than a 135gr bullet. That was a soft shooting load.

If the KKM doesn't show much improvement, spend an evening fitting the apex semi-drop-in to your gun. With heavier bullets (I shoot 135s almost exclusively) the gun went from 6+" at 25yd to two inches. Probably less, but I'm not a terrific group shooter to be quite honest. Even given that limitation, the improvement is dramatic.

You won't be able to find it. Personally I've found that clays, WST, and most recently Ramshot Competition are very very suitable replacements. In the case of Comp, I think it's an improvement. I need to shoot a few more K and see how I still feel about it.

Chamber and eject a half dozen times as suggested. If it holds OAL that way, don't worry about it. Also, the measuring methods typically used (calipers, not a micrometer) held in your hands? That isn't sufficient to repeatably measure 7 thousandths accurately. A machinist would laugh at us if we tried to tell them we're doing such things.

It's you. Trigger freeze happens when you tense up trying to go fast. Stay loose. Use you're weak hand to bear down hard on the gun and leave the trigger hand more relaxed underneath it. Shake your hands out and roll your shoulders loose before the beep if you know you're shredding close targets that stage. Do the Bruce Lee thing. You know. "Be Water."

Run a 13. The gun behaved better in timing drills for me, and with an 11 it wore out really really quickly and liked to have feeding issues when it wasn't somewhat clean. Lighter isn't better. Heavier isn't worse. There's an optimal spring for each shooter with their personal pet load, in my opinion.