shred

Also if you have crappy PC speakers, they may not be able to generate a reasonable quantity of 8KHz, no matter how good your ears are.

Mine get marked by intended use most of the time "steel", "ipsc", "gssf", whatever. As I'm loading each 100 primers, I rip one side off the now-empty primer box and write the powder charge, bullet weight and OAL on it and drop it in the loaded round bin. Those cards get moved with the loads to ammo boxes or bags as appropriate. As I test loads, I'll make notes on the card ("didn't work G27", "big flash", "173 pf", "3-in group", etc). Every so often, especially after a chrono session, I'll dump the load data, chrono data and comments into an excel spreadsheet that calculates PF, KE and such. As for scientifically figuring out which is the 'best' load for any gun-- only change one thing at a time and see if it helps or hurts.

Good post.. I like to think "Am I a better shooter than I was last month?". Occasionally I relapse into "I want to beat this guy" though..

In open you need to be right around 2 flat to get 100%

Powder Valley frequently has surplus powders. http://www.powdervalleyinc.com/

Ow. This weekend I was helping do some trail building.. and managed to smash my finger between two big chunks of granite... now my fingernail is a passable imitation of the french flag.. and I have a 3-day shooting class next week.

Well, though few people call me 'shred' in person, for whatever reason, I've been using it online since before Al Gore invented the internet. While it's super-easy for anybody to figure out (or ask) what my name is, it keeps my employers happy since they know I'm not representing them and it also keeps the average GT yahoo from phoning me up or whatever. What with everybody and their brother doing searches for jobs, loans and whatever, the less they have to look through the better.. Besides.. how do you know John Smith really is?

...as soon as you get a stable, consistent clock to drive the strobes.. If that's out of calibration, then you're right back in the 'hosed' box. I'm thinking maybe a GPS timebase might work though.

I'm happy with SG#1 on my comp guns. They've got that great closing-a-bank-vault action, but SG mixed with FP-10 in the rails works great. I also SG the lugs, link and barrel.

Yeah, with lab testing, it's easy-- we used to run the club chrono by Oehler (they're in town) every so often. Them: "It's 12 fps slow at ten thousand feet per second" Us: "We can live with that". The LCD shutter arrangement would work, except that the timebase for whatever's driving the shutters has to be extremely accurate and invariant or it'll suffer the same calibration problems as the chronos.

Something else you can do (since I have trouble with exactly visualizing the location of invisible targets) is pick a knothole or burn mark or whatever on the barricade during your walk-through, and 'index' the first target off that. As in 'coming into this port, see that paint splat, and the target comes into view just below it..'

Dang.. I bitched out their customer-service guy at baggage-claims-central and he kept saying "It was the Transportation Security Agency that did it, we would call you if we had to get in..". He had no good explanation why the envelope said "America West" on it in big letters, and denied that X-ing out the barcodes and adding a big green tag that the check-in person did was firearms related. He also claimed "regulations changed daily" even on weekends. Funny, the TSA went home promptly at 5 today when I tried to call them. The ticket was cheap, but maybe next time I'll suffer Southwest.

There has got to be a way in general to calibrate chronos better than shooting some load through them and seeing if it stays about the same. I don't know what that is, but I'm thinking about it. How about flipping the chrono vertical and dropping a big ball bearing through it from a measured height? Acceleration-due-to-gravity is pretty consistent and likewise for air-resistance of spherical objects. Measured FPS would be low, but that would catch a slow or fast running clock better. Except for jumping about with the chrono, it might even work.

I came to another realization this morning-- there's a couple different kinds of excess movement, which, for lack of better terms, I'm calling 'extra movement' and 'inefficient movement'. (Getting the right stage plan and order of engagement is separate for the purposes of this discussion.) Extra movement is the totally unnecessary junk that lots of beginning shooters have-- dipping the gun way down Miami-Vice style between targets in an array, for example. Big time wasters, easy to see and fairly easy to eliminate. These kinds of things can save seconds per stage. Inefficient movement is that last 50% that separates the B's and A's from the M's and GM's-- getting in and out of position exactly right, moving the gun only as much as necessary, and instantly indexing. It's only a few tenths here and there but takes much longer to acquire and requires more work to get right. So, from the point of view of 'Value to shooter', seconds are definately worth working on early, but until you're hitting your A's, tenths are less important than accuracy.

So there I am at A2-- Just met BE himself and was all set to shoot the OK Corral stage-- jump out of an outhouse, shoot some bobbers, run up a ramp, hose 3 close targets, sharp left turn, down a ramp, shoot some more targets, reload, and finish out with 3 static targets, a popper and swinger. So I come charging out the door, hit the bobbers exactly how I wanted to-- called the shots and hauled butt for the ramp. Got up the ramp, turned and shot the statics on my way by. As I'm turning, I see/feel/hear a magazine fall out of my belt. "crap-- but I've got a spare..", I think and keep going. I get to the reload and I'm grabbing air.. both of my spare magazines are gone. Oh shi... Grab the old mag off the ground and try to finish up.. Double tap a couple more targets and I'm out.. 6 mikes and 2 FTE's. 1.7 HF. Dropped me 25 places in the match. Lessons here: 1- I'm a lefty and run my first two magazines laying down pretty far (ala Matt Burkett). The sharp left turn (righties watch for right turns) and slightly-too-low tension on the pouches combined to slide 'em right out. Never happaned before, but next time I'm going to put one of my spare mags in the vertical pouch in back. 2- When you have to pick up a used mag and know it's not enough, shoot at each remaining target _once_ to save on FTE's. I wasn't thinking that much at that point.

NuSkin is one brand. Works great, hurts like heck. Less adhesive than super glue. (Edited by shred at 11:07 am on Dec. 1, 2002)

While I'm not a vet, I do use this day as a reason to bring my Nov '44 M1 Garand out to the range. Most of the young guys there have never shot one and it gives them a whole lot more respect for the old WWII and Korea vets. The old guys reminisce for a long while. Thanks to all the veterans out there.

On the flip side, every patent comes from somebody's dissatisfaction with the way things are..

Same thing happened to me too. America West as well. I told the lady I had firearms to check, she X-ed out the bag tag and put a green label in it. (none of this happened on the way _in_ to PHX) I said "You're not allowed to mark gun bags" and she said "I'm not, this is for the bomb-X-ray thing". When I got home the outside lock was gone and there were 2 new locks in AmW envelopes that were printed with (roughly) "Sorry, here's a new lock, the FAA made us do it". Wierd thing was the gun case was still locked up tight, and the other bag with leftover ammo in it wasn't touched. I'll ask one guy I know that flew Southwest.

Yeah, it was fun. We left saying "I'll be back next year.." And we had a 60+ second faceplant, a DQ and zeroed stage amongst the three of us. Erik gets the win on me this time, but only 'cause he's sandbagging in A and I had the zero (ok, it wasn't _quite_ a zero-- more on that in the 'what I screwed up' forum) Meeting BE was cool as well, though I missed the shindig. The stages were fun, but definately RUN-n-gun. Enough hard cover to make you work. - (kept trying to think of a 'Confucious Say..' for Brian's head..)

In my case, loaded-rounds-per-hour is from a pile of ready-to-load brass, a stack of primer boxes, bottle of powder and a box of bullets, until the last cartridge comes out of the press. After a few years and a few tricks (see this forum for them), I can reach the Dillon numbers without problem. The casefeeder is a huge timesaver since one hand is continuously working the operating handle while the other hand feeds bullets. Likewise the automatic primer-filler-- first it seemed like such a luxury, but now I'd be hating life without it. I'm not one of those 'pride in each handcrafted cartridge' reloaders you read about in the NRA magazine carefully hand polishing each finished round-- I want ammo, lots of it and I want it now. (Edited by shred at 7:05 pm on Nov. 11, 2002)

Agreed on the benefit of classes-- 5 seconds of observation by any of the top guys can save you weeks of work. BUT.. don't go into a class thinking you'll be kicking major butt the next weekend-- In my experience, I've got so much to think about that my shooting level goes down until the class lessons are ingrained. Todd even says he doesn't want to see you in his class again for another 6 months after you get done.

I'm not sure what's best taught when, and it probably varies by individual (any pro-teachers want to chime in?), but as TJ says "There's a whole lot going on..", and since you can't focus on all of it, you need solid experience with the fundamentals before you can start seeing what else there is going on. I liken it to driving a car-- when you're 16 and just learning, everything is zooming everywhere and you're bombarded with what's going on, working the clutch and gears and you aren't even out of the driveway yet. A few years later and you're doing 80 at night in the rain, drinking coffee and fiddling with the radio. In my experience with some local shooters, winning C class means cutting out the no-shoots and not throwing so many misses. Winning B takes seeing the sights on every shot, no matter what. After that it's time to work on consistency and only shooting A's.

FYI-- I know of at least a couple last-minute cancellations, so it might be worth checking in if you're on the waiting list.

[Travis posted a more reasonable answer while I was writing some speculation, so I edited it out of existance] (Edited by shred at 4:43 pm on Nov. 6, 2002)