MemphisMechanic

Okay. First, tell us what powder you’re going to be using. Huge factor. Second, here’s my typical 650 load procedure with a new bullet and/or gun: Run one piece of brass through all the other stations, so it’s sized and belled when it gets to your seating station. Break seating die loose, back lockring off, and leave it free to spin by hand. Run it in slowly, checking the OAL with calipers, until you hit 1.160” or so. Something very long. Give it a light kiss with the crimp die so it’ll chamber, and drop it into the barrel of every gun you wish to shoot it through. Gen5 glocks tend to have much shorter chambers than 3 & 4s did. If it won’t drop in, spin, and fall out freely, drive it back to 1.150-1.155”ish and try again. Continue to shorten it slowly until it does - this goes much faster with the sizing die easily turned by hand. Keep shortening it up. With JHP you may have to load shorter than you expect, because many of them havea wide square ogive, which is that forward edge of the bearing surface you alluded to. That’s okay. Loading to 1.090” to get a fat nosed bullet into a CZ’s chamber isn’t gonna hurt us - not if you follow proper procedure in choosing the powder charge. Keep shorening until you find your longest possible OAL. Let’s say that’s 1.135” hypothetically. A 650 is always going to have some variation in length - I would often see .010” of difference... so I would set this load up so that when I’m cranking out ammo it’s all in the range of 1.120” to 1.130” This way your longest round will have .005” of room to ensure it chambers flawlessly. Remember that if you lock the die down now, the OAL will shift when the shellplate is full and the sizing and belling dies are pressing down on the opposite side. I find rounds usually end up around .005” longer on my particular press. This means you’ll need to adjust the shellplate again after loading a half dozen rounds on the fly, and adjust til you hit your range. Now load those bad boys up **at the minumum charge** for any FMJ or JHP bullet with the same powder and weight, and go run them over a chronograph. Many of us will load a ladder, so if your minimum charge is 3.6gr in a reloading manual, we’ll load some at 3.6, 3.8, 4.0, and 4.2... and shoot them over the chrono to see what charge weight is going to get us the velocity we desire.

Broke 3 E-clips in 20k or so. Replaced entire die with a Lee die, with the hardened “SquirrelDaddy” brand decapping pin. No issues since.

Henning developed the cone-fit rod to fix peening issues with the frame. Shortly thereafter the Tanfoglio Xtreme knockoff of it came out. Patriot’s version is at least more than a cloning; it’s lightened to help the lim pro make weight in IDPA... or perhaps if you turn a stock II into a carry optics gun. For all other divisons in USPSA, run a henning.

Dawsons’s setscrew setup is lacking severely, and they come loose. Xtreme sights don’t. A .140 Dawson was pretty much at the bottom of my rear sight’s range; not sure you can go much lower.

I do not beleieve titan hammer and bolo are necessary, and I prefer a tanfo trigger without them. A lot of guys love their feel, and it certainly is shorter & cleaner. Guide rod front sight from Xtreme single piece sear Hammer, trigger, sear, and firing pin return springs from patriot. Xtreme firing pin block, if needed. Polish. Done.

That depends entirely upon which press you’re using. I just upgraded from a 650 to a 1050. I wish I’d had this machine when shooting Tanfo; even CCIs from something with a bombproof mechanical primer depth adjustment probably run through a Tanfo with a 13-14 pound spring just fine.

You don’t call the shot before the shot is fired. It doesn’t happen after the bullet is downrange, either. Where the sight(s) were located as you built the final 10% worth of pressure on the trigger doesn’t matter. It’s where your gun was aimed as the bullet passed down the barrel that matters. Shot calling takes place during the gun’s firing cycle. We’re human. The gun will always have the potential to shift as your muscles fire it. Whether the gun stayed on target when it lifted in recoil, or shifted two inches high left? If you don’t know that information before the bullet has landed, you’re not calling your shot.

You’ll get faster and more accurate when you actually learn to call your shots, as opposed to aiming really hard.

This. Dryfire. Not live fire. Strip it down to focusing on one skill. Start with the gun up on one target, run down your longest hallway at home, and take a sight picture at another. Confirm your finger is straight along the frame, push off, then pump the arms agressively - don’t be afraid to swing the hand with the gun in it. Prop your cellphone up to record your movement and review it. The video is important; It will feel like youre running when you’re trotting. It’ll feel like you’re at breakneck speed before you’re actually moving fast. Most of us haven’t run at more than 50% of our maximum possible speed since high school P.E. class. Your literally have no what fast movement feels like. The only thing I focused on in this stage was my foot speed, and I know I’m only at 80% of what I should be:

In 9mm on my 650 and now my 1050, I’m able to find a sweet spot where the dropper won’t even drop two bullets when the first one is upside down. That’s a huge boon to productivity because you just flip over the (very rare) inverted bullet and go. I loaded for a year with it dropping a second bullet I had to chase down each time an upside down bullet snuck through. Try this on the rubber band:

@stick 500?! You think the post bumping problem is bad now? They’d be carrying on conversations with themselves.

No one NEEDS to. It just makes 9mm brass glide through the machine like butter. After 500 reps, the lack of any tennis elbow is appreciated.

Too bad there’s no way to set it up to immediately ban someone who bumps three threads in a row which are all 6+ months old, @stick.

Then why are you giving him the finger? ?

Stop there. My brass gets 30 mins in walnut, then fed to the press. It’s sometimes still dull, and always has stains remaining... but it’s smooth. I’m after function, not form. As soon as the worst looking brass has been polished enough to glide through the dies with some OneShot on them, we’re done here.

It’s always rewarding to pop into a thread like this and see how many guys those videos have helped. I think they’re up around 30-40k views now, combined. I’m glad it was worth taking the time to do.

I’m happier and happier than the CMMG Guard uses a 5.56 style firing pin as this thread grows longer. But if I ever break one, I’ll be sure to post in here with a mouthful of my own foot.

@Guy Neill

No kidding. That thing is pure sex.

The big thing I do when I’m shooting fast, dirty splits at close targets... is to quit using the reset in any fashion. Try it. Come all the way off the trigger and punch it twice like it’s a staple gun. You don’t triggerfreeze, and you will actually split faster with the longer finger movement Seems crazy. Try it anyway. See the first position in this video for one of my earlier experiments with ditching the highly overrated reset technique:

My carry guns never get parts interchanged or replaced or upgraded; they’re left alone and shot 1/20th as often as any comp gun. I don’t see any way that would be a factor for me. There is no Tanfoglio product made that I would want to carry day in and day out, personally.

Magpul K2 here.

Just be aware the cheaper way to get a lefthanded AR is to run a gun with colt mags instead of Glock. It uses the standard AR-15 5.56 magazine release, so you just drop an ambi mag catch and safety into the gun. Boom. An AR perfectly set up for a lefthanded shooter. That’s the route I took. (This photo shows the ami release I stole out of an MPX. I swapped a Troy into it later on, which is the best option in my opinion.)

I’m a lefty. Shot. Tanfoglio for two years. If you adapt Mike Seeklander’s “palm heel behind thebackstrap” weakhand grip... or Bob Vogel’s “wrist extremely locked forward” grip... You’ll find that either of those will probably relocate your thumb and increase your recoil control. (Both can be found on youtube if you search their names and ‘grip’) I’ve never had a dirty thumb from a handgun’s ejection port.