shred

This. Find a pistol you can use with a regular old STI grip and install that. Most 2011s will, and I'm pretty sure you can swap one directly onto a Prodigy. Used to be they were ~$100, but have gone up lately. Your other option is a SV grip which has an ambi release.

You wouldn't believe some of the "gunsmithing" and "light polishing" I've seen

Worse than an early factory Girsan 2311 would be an epic fail...

Not really. Plated and Jacketed bullets are quite different, and plated is the poor cousin. FMJ's with a covered base usually have a gas-check like thing, not plating. Barrel life is probably at least twice as good with coated although they are a tad dirtier. Precision Bullets is the original 'black bullet', out of Texas. Closed up shop a couple years ago IIRC. Good bullets. The owner used to do a demo where he'd cut into the base and hit the bullet with a propane torch and all the lead would run out the cut, leaving the coating shell intact behind.

That's a cool way to do it. We have a trailer with everything on it for steel, but it just sits out in the weather between matches.

This. Closed base means less vaporized lead deposits in the comp (and air) and they are generally more accurate-- bearing surface, tail-bias to the weight, care in manufacture, less inconsistency in the core, whatever it takes. You can get closed-base FMJ designs as well, but the cost is similar. Some places don't like JHPs though, so you have to use them or other alternatives like MGs IFP.

Most coated bullets these days aren't hard-cast (or not very), which is not a bad thing. There's no need to be if the coating is any good and they obturate better and are cheaper to make. Plated bullets used to have a reputation for being inaccurate because they were plated over hard-cast and wouldn't swage to the rifling as well. Bottom line is if you shoot Open, the vast majority of serious competitors shoot JHP or similar closed-back bullets for the low-gunk and accuracy factors. Plated and coated are sub-optimal in Open although some people do shoot them. The barrel is probably going to last maybe 50-70K rounds with jacketed, but that's a tiny cost all-up. PD JHPs are under $100/K in quantity. For other divisions, coated works fine and barrels will last nearly forever. I know a guy that put 180K Precision Bullets coated through his Limited gun on one barrel and it still shoots well.

I wouldn't be sanding in there unless you know exactly what you're doing, and from the current posts, it doesn't seem so. It's unlikely to be the problem and it's easy to take off too much there and wipe .005 or .010" off your lockup. It's pretty common to see marks there and impossible to tell if it's a little or a lot from a picture. Find where it feels rough one piece at a time. Start with just a bare slide on the frame and slide that back and forth and see, then work up, adding one thing at a time--barrel, then recoil system and find out where the 'grit' feel is coming from, then decide what to do about it, rather than blindly filing and sanding and polishing on things. Also, those are usually called "slide lugs", not "locks" if you've not hit that term before.

Yeah, somebody like Stoeger can get away with it out to 15+ yards because he's done a million reps, but for normies, that's going to get sub-optimal results. Try setting up a target at 3-5 yards and do pseudo-bill drills or doubles on it. Do a string or two, using one confirmation, tape and check times, do it again with the next confirmation type, tape and compare times and hits, do it again with the third, tape and compare times and hits. Then move the target back to 7, 10, 15 yards and compare

Yeah, if it was just a timer and a simple no-login app to set settings and record shots, that would probably increase sales tremendously.

"What are you in for?" "handling a snapcap in the safety area".

You may want to try looking at this from a different angle-- Always pick out a small spot on the target. THEN... you have several options for 'acceptable sight picture' (aka "confirmation" or "type"), ranging from 'any red anywhere and mash the trigger' on a close, wide-open target to 'dot somewhere in the vicinity of my spot' to 'dot stopped solidly on my spot and a smooth trigger press' on a hard partial. Choose which of those to use based on the difficulty of the shot. Sort out what works for you with lots of experimentation in live and dry fire.

Mine just seems to keep trucking along offline or not. I'd rather not go through that account rigmarole though since it seems somewhere between pointless and intrusive.

That's weird.. I make setting changes with no internet connection.

Hmm.. I've not noticed any significant OAL shifts in about 180,000 rounds of 9 loaded on mixed range pickup brass, but maybe I haven't found the right brass yet.

it has it... but I haven't been able to make it work the few times I messed with it-- it acts like it's doing it, but never triggers.

Yeah, unless you're having setback or compressed loads OAL should be set by the seater consistently to whatever it's set to.

[copied and expanded from another thread, here's my quick review. Anyone else have experience with it?] TLDR: it works well enough as a timer, requires app. I've had this one a couple weeks now and been using it for practice almost exclusively. The size is conveniently small, the display large, it's only got two buttons and works as a timer pretty well, which is Job #1 in my book. The size and display on the end make it handy to clip to your belt for practice and reviewing shots and splits is straightforward (it does them only reverse-order which I'd rather be switchable, but it's not a huge thing). It's nice the splits are displayed in a column offset half a space from the shot times so you can see where they go. Because my belt is pretty full around front, and the sold-separately clip was OOS, I had to fab up a pocket clip for it versus the belt mount it comes with. The included velcro quick-release belt mount works ok, if you've got a convenient belt space for it. You need the app to change most of the settings and the timer could use a bit of maturity in spots (selectable order for splits, selectable delay times, pick something besides 'best split' as the additional data, and it makes loud beeps when it auto-poweroffs which can be disconcerting in the car on the way home, plus maybe a couple more minor nice-to-haves), but the app will push firmware updates to the timer if they are available. The beep is adjustable and plenty loud enough at max volume. The app also has a ton of social media features that I could care less about (OK, nearly-boomer). You need to sign up an account. Maybe if you're into that or spent more time with the Drills stuff you could get something cool out of it, but curmudgeonly-me doesn't care what Rodrigo T. or whoever just posted. It looks like it might be able to be used as a mini-scoring app. Being able to go back in the calendar and review my strings and round counts can be useful at times. Supposedly it can pick up the hammer fall in dry-fire mode although I found that spotty. I didn't try airsoft. It has bluetooth, and maybe someday Practiscore will support it. It's already sending times and splits and all to the SG app. It charges an internal battery off USB-C which is nice. Battery life seems long. I've not recharged it yet. Most of the documentation is online, although there's a quickstart manual in the box. You'll want to look through the documentation to see the difference between modes and so on. It's supposed to be able to 'spy' on other timers and pick up the time from a shooter on a stage-- using the other timers beep as it's start, I'd guess. I couldn't get that to work the few times I tried it, so I haven't tried overlaying times on videos yet which it can also do. I think spy mode would be the most useful when videoing friends runs.

I just picked up the Shooters Global Go timer to play with. edit: moved the review to it's own thread:

Even when you could get .40 cal 1911s you had to look carefully for bushing barrels. The Tisas / Girsan Turkish guns probably have them and there were some now-discontinued SIGs that did. USPSA should reconsider that (especially since they allow non-JMB-spec super-thin bushings), but it'll likely get the old guard up in arms...

Belt-and-suspenders, minus rimfire shooters complaining about dry-firing (is that even a real thing anymore?) In the old days the different firearm types never shot at the same time, so it was not a big deal (there were separate side-matches for rimfire pistol, rimfire rifle and maybe even PCCs), but once USPSA bought it, they kind of jammed things together any old way that would fit. Seen lots of people throw weedeater line down the magwell and call it good for flagging PCCs, even though not allowed in the rules.

Yes, it's much more of a thing in DA. In SA if you tried, you could probably tell, but during a match, likely not.

The clouds parted just in time where we were to see it in the middle of Texas, but the phone cameras were useless at capturing it. Super amazing to see totality. 4 minutes went by in a flash. A tiny crescent of sun is cool, but totality is a completely different thing. Two things that surprised me were the 'diamond ring' being only a couple seconds and how large the corona was.

I use whatever (except stepped, brass plated steel & tiny-hole Norma because they all wad up in my press) for local matches and new brass for big matches. Works for me.

1911 slide stop pins are sized in .001" increments from about .196" to .203" and it's quite common for good gunsmiths to sand/file/polish them down a little in between for a perfect fit with the lower lugs and full lockup. See Cha-lee's barrel fitting thread from a few days ago for a bit more info. If you don't care about maximum accuracy or reliability you can throw in whatever "fits".