MemphisMechanic

Can you confirm it isn’t stepped on the inside? You have more than enough left to verify.

Do you have enough of the rim left to see what the headstamp was?

@J_Allen: This is true. All safeties must continue to function as designed to be legal in USPSA CO/Production divisions. (Or, for that matter, to be drop-safe enough that anyone responsible would want to own & operate these guns.)

So weird that you guys do it alphabetically. Never heard of that. Moving on... Two important things to keep in mind: (1) Get to that stage early, walk it, and plan it. Plan it twice as hard as anything else you shoot that day. Until you can close your eyes and run it flawlessly. Then two more times. Do at least three walkthroughs at full speed once you’ve done that. I find the “bring 100% of the hustle” speed walkthroughs to really help on stage one. (2) Execute that speed in your stage run, but really focus on seeing your sight(s) in the A-zone crisply. Push for a bit of the lacking speed, but don’t forget that racking up penalty points is the biggest way to dig yourself into a hole on stage 1.

Exactly this. Any trigger or grip stipple and undercut or slide or mag release is legal as of March 2018. Hot pink, gigantic, and aftermarket? Good to go

It’s refreshing to see someone who seems to own a micrometer and knows how to use it. It’s amusing when guys here are using calipers for critical measurements in discussions. ”Go ahead and measure your crimp with those chinese $35 digital calipers which are +/- .002” and get right back to us, buddy.”

If you’re good enough that you stand a chance at winning the division, you have enough experience to know the answer to this question intimately. As someone starting out dabbling in Limited? Show up, shoot 9mm, and have fun. See if it’s for you. The vast majority of guys shot their first couple of matches in Limited minor with a 9mm gun.

Of course. Blow it out of the barrel or flip it out of the chamber, doesn’t matter much. The gun is clear either way.

It’s like gripping a pistol though; you see the gun move too much (or in this case the dot bounces up and to the side) and you remember to bear down on the gun before shooting the next target. For myself, I learned to drive the gun this way in matches first. Fixing it on the fly and making it a conscious act for the rest of the stage. Eventually I did it consciously at the beep, and finally it just became fulltime normal.

It’s faster to just pull the trigger two steps early, and place that round into the dirt at 1,000 fps. It startles the RO’s at first... but they get used to it. Unless you have a whiny one who is strict about that rulebook nonsense.

What’s wrong with a lefty flip and catch? Never been an issue with anything that I’ve shot in matches.

I do it. But only in dire circumstances. It feels like wearing your wife’s underwear. Theoretically it does the same thing as yours, but it still just doesn’t feel right. I mean. Um. Or so I’ve heard.

Lies. Flip it, click it, and stab it. We have places to go and things to do!

And in addition to what @rowdyb said, the main advantage is not a huge increase in cost. It’s quality and feel. You can load ammo to match your personal preference in feel and tune your gun to behave a certain way, in combination with your recoil and/or hammer spring. After running 10k of a pet load dialed in for accuracy through your particular gun, running factory ammo through it just feels wrong.

If you have a 1050 you simply load several thousand of one caliber before switching to make life easier; 2,000 rounds isn’t an overly taxing evening if you have a sufficient number of primer tubes. If you have a 650, load 500+ before switching. If you have a 550, you can hopscotch around 100 rounds at time because caliber changes are quick! I loaded for 10+ years on a 650 and switched to a 1050 in 2018. I wish I’d done it long ago, if for no other reason than the fact that the handle requires half the effort to pull!

You won’t regret it. Drive the gun hard into your shoulder and control it, don’t let it control you. If your offhand bicep (from pulling back on the HG) and strong side shoulder don’t feel the strain from clamping the gun between them like a vise, you’re giving up more there than some handguard can ever give you.

Every time we have this dicussion the same two conclusions are reached. 1. Flip & catch is fine - but keep your weakhand away from the muzzle, and let the round go if you eject it oddly. Show an empty chamber to your RO after you retrieve the round. 2. Don’t cup the ejection port. See you in a month, when it gets posted again.

The case walls of 9mm brass are a consistent thickness for the first .300” in the headstamps we favor. After than, the walls grow thicker as you head down toward the case rim: If you shove a really long bullet back into it too deeply, you’ll have more frequent failures because the walls of the case will buckle or bulge under this load. This means guys wanting to load 147s cannot load as shortly as guys shooting short 115gr bullets and see the same percentage of sucessfully loaded rounds. Additionally, if you keep the powder charge and bullet weight unchanged and push the bullet deeper and deeper, the pressure curve will look something ROUGHLY like this when loading with a fast powder: This means that from 1.110” all the way out to 1.150” with this random powder (based on my experience, we’ll call it “hypothetical TG” or perhaps “Solo 3000” ) you see very little difference in pressure or velocity. So you’re free to experiment with OAL to dial in max accuracy with very little change in power factor. Nor will your gun blow up on you. But if you happen to be working with something like Clays or N310 and a 147, you’re already playing with fire out at 1.140”+ and need all the case volume you can get!

Do it. And tell me where to go to come shoot it. Kindly make that target weakhand only, too, please.

I’m not the only one?

Watch the interview with Mike Valentine so that you can make an informed decision: Personally I detest the way the current administration quietly removed the restriction against modifying the rules as they see fit on a continual basis... where it used to mandate 2 years between rule changes. (With the full Board of Directors reviewing them in a meeting, allowing you to voice your views to them prior to the meeting.) They pulled that move so smoothly that most of you aren’t aware of it. Along with Troy’s ‘rules clarification of the week’ it’s allowed Production to be modified on a nearly weekly basis. I’m simply not okay with that. Nor with how Ben Berry was singlehandedly banned by Foley, then Ben Stoeger caught a matching ban for nothing more than sharing the very hotheaded PMs from our President on social media. Whatever you think about Stoeger, that particular act was in no way deserving of a ban, even if it had been done the right way through an act by the full board of directors as it’s supposed to. I’m a huge fan of the growth, the overhaul to the website and the USPSA app, and classifiers being run more than once a month. A lot of great things have happened. But some end-runs around all of us getting a voice in the process happened, too. That’s where I’m hesitant to vote for Foley again.

I spent 12 years in production, and switched to carryoptics last year. With 24 rounds at the beep, I’d find myself: (1) firing makeup shots at paper much more often - It’s just natural to push more agressively when you first shoot with hicaps: ”My gun has ten spare rounds in it! Time to shoot aggressively on the move without fear.” I didn’t train myself out of this bad habit for months. (2) not being meticulous about knowing my spare number of rounds, nor planning a contingency. “I have 24 in the gun and the front half of the stage is only 17 rounds before the load. I’m good.” Put those two together? You have seven steel and paper you take on the move - and wind up firing four extra shots there because you’re being a pinch too aggressive. Through two other ports, you also fire a couple more makeups on tight hardcover. Next thing you know, you get the dreaded slide-lock on the last shot before your planned mag change. 20-22 in 40, or 22-24 rounds in 9? This is something an ex-production guy has to maintain focus on. Just because your gun holds so many rounds DOES NOT mean poor ammo management cannot screw you over. If anything, I think about it more now than I did in Production.

The doubles drill is what you want to practice. Skip the 50/50 one for this. It‘s going to be a combination of grip and trigger control that you need to sort out, and that drill is the best for it. A lot of guys misunderstand this one. Ben breaks down the actual intent and procedure in this episode of his podcast:

Do it. You’ll be happy.

I’d rather do that than give everyone their own special cuddly little match. If you shoot in Production as an Aclass or Bclass, your goal is to do as well as you can against the other 47 production shooters. That is fun. Much more fun than comparing yourself to five other guys who aren’t that good in the grand scheme of things.