shred

I run 125-135 PF usually. It's not nearly as noticeable at the match as in practice, but it's much comfier to shoot lots of.

A lot depends on how much experience you have at tweaking those parts. A bunch of other parts have to be working and fit just right to get down to the lowest levels. Of course you gain that level of experience by having things not work and needing to fix them constantly. That can be frustrating.

I'd say "the shooter committed enough to the sport to buy an Open gun (or full-house Limited gun) most likely has shooting matches as a priority, and thus goes more to major matches". The cost of the gun is about zero compared to the travel, fees, ammo and time cost in the long run-- it's those they have to afford.

Friendly Moderator Pre-Reminder: Please remember the forum rules and minimize the 'real-life-defensive-action-with-kung-fu-grip', while focusing on the pros and cons of lasers and SW 1911's as-such. Thanks.

The base STI patent (shared with SV-- it's here if you want to read some legalese) is only valid in the US. An oversight left them with (almost) no IP protection in Europe or the rest of the world. This may not be the case with deriviative patents by either STI or SV, and either/both may have trade-dress (trademarks, copyrights, etc, etc) in other countries as well. I believe the magazines aren't specifically patented and could be copied / imported if somebody were truly motivated.

One Target, 50 yards, 2 second par time

We were in the same boat until recently. Until we got the IPSC club to put up some $ for steel (4 stages worth to begin with) and went from there... we've been doing them for almost a year now and have probably almost paid off the whole 7 stages worth of steel, plus some. Steel is super easy to set up and run, MD and attract new shooters to. One or two people can get it going and run a match if they've got the motivation. Find a club with some empty bays and get cracking!

http://www.realguns.com had a recent set of articles on cleaning and refinishing old military rifles. Worth a look.

Half and inch short of chambering or half of a tenth of an inch? The latter is likely crud in the chamber. The former could be a lot of stuff, but crud on the slide rails is also a possibility.

From shooting it the 'right' way a month or so ago, I'd say that the HHF is about right as-is. A few shooters may have some artificially high scores on file, but one or two of those isn't usually a problem.

Maybe we have to do the unusual enough times that it becomes usual.

Flex has it right-- every time I've used par for SC practice, the goal is not to beat the par time, but to shoot right at it. Thus you can quickly learn what you need to do and see on the targets to make a nice consistent time. Every extra shot is another place down the final results, so consistency is key. SC is cool this way; you can do a few runs on each stage to get a baseline and a desired total time and work on the stages separately.

I still say the best bet is to have a friendly gun store ship it for you if you can find one. They have a UPS driver that's used to moving ammo around, they've got piles of spare ORM-D boxes and the driver doesn't care what's in the outgoing boxes.

Par times are good for practicing steel if you are trying to figure out what you need to see and do to make a certain overall score and be consistent about it. Pars can also be useful in breaking down stages like Outer Limits.

Not really in .45 ACP (more of a column-and-a-half) and the Wilson thing is even closer to 'single-stack'. I agree they aren't in the spirit of the mission statement, but we all know if it's not written down, it's not a rule in USPSA. Anyway, I'm not trying to bash the division, just trying to settle some of the issues before they become issues. I'm a little concerned about the required mission count and lack of classifier scores. The mission count will probably push clubs to put shooters into one of the more traditional divisions and the lack of classifier scores could be a problem; to wit: Newbie shows up with a 1911, shoots classifiers for six months and is still a 'U'. Goes to a big match and gets nothing since the MD doesn't recognize U's. Clever sandbagger moves to 1911-division prior to moving up in L-10 or Limited and remains a 'C' (the C is for 'C-sandbag) forever.

So what keeps a Caspian widebody out of this division? Metal frame, fits the box. Also looks like bull barrels are OK, but coned and flanged are not?

Um, what was the point of soliciting comments beforehand then? I still think it's funny that the highly-touted ultimate-pistol 1911 needs to have protected places to compete carved out for it in IDPA and IPSC. I'm against fragmentation of competition, but I'll see how it goes.

If you reload, you can crank out primer and powderless dummy rounds in no time. You have to take extra extra care to verify no live ones get mixed in

Occasionally BE's been heard to mention "I can practice all day on one target at 15 yards"...

<Pedantic Mode> Rockets work by throwing mass out the back end, most easily demonstrated with the child- and parent-soaking toy known as the water rocket. The supersonic flow and expansion fruferall is icing on the cake. </Pedantic> The remaining explanation is excellent, thanks

Honestly, I think what a C or D shooter can learn by watching a GM shoot a stage in 'real time' is more limited in value than it appears. Sure you'll learn the best path through a stage.. for a GM with that GM's skills, and no doubt the 'smooth is fast' mantra will be hammered home, but.. compare, say, Max and Eric. One tries to shoot set up in one position as much as possible, while the other shoots non-stop on the move. What you learn from that depends greatly on where you are along the skill and experience curves. ObSuperSquads: These guys ask and expect to be squadded together. They do it almost every weekend, they know each other, most of them get along. Random other shooters are an unknown quantity. Minimizing the unknown is usually a good thing for top performance. Sucks for the rest of us, but it's true.

I've not used the keeper in years. My belt fell off once during a match when the tail got hooked on a chair. The reload was fun.

IMHO the original BBC radio shows are still the best HHGTG, but I have no idea if they're available anywhere at retail. I'll have to go dig out my cassettes sometime

Hop a boat for Cozumel or go down the coast to the cenotes and get some diving in. You can practice indexing on parrotfish and speculate on how awesome a range Chichen Itza would make.

E-mail's still new to lots of places (pedants may object only if they supply a functional UUCP address). I bet a lot of them got a 'web site package' because somebody told them they needed one. What's a reasonable time to answer? 1 day? 3 days? 3 weeks? That ought to be included with the contact-us info. I suspect a lot of us have inflated expectations for e-mail delivery and response times.. Somewhere I have instructions from our large corporate IT department telling us that in order to be efficient, we should only check our e-mail first thing in the morning, right after lunch and right before going home. Ha.