shred

The sum total of my (limited) shotgunning experience is at bowling pins or steel. I have an 11-87 set up for that and whenever 3-gun comes back to town. But, a while ago a friend needed money and I ended up with a nice Browning Sporting Clays O/U. It's been languishing in the safe so I've decided it's time I learn to shoot those flying frisbee-things, and that sporting-clays stuff looks like fun. What's a good way to do that? Grab a case of clays and visit the nearest vacant lot? Pop down to the local range and say "Pull"? or is some sort of personal instruction called-for at this point? Skeets? Traps? Clays? Do I need to specify what I want?

Wierd.. I love shooting Open, but I also believe that shooting Limited or Revo or Production well is probably harder than an easy-triggered, dot-scoped, no-reload Open blaster.

I think we discussed this elsewhere, but super-speedy draws aren't as big a deal as we usually make them out to be. I'm usually in the 1.3 range for IPSC-type draws and I'm doing OK in A-open.

Midland, TX-- Oct 5-6. They may still have slots. I think http://www.actionmasters.com is their web site, but it hasn't been working much lately.

Around here Benny's guns have a reputation for running well, but not being works of art to look at. He shoots with us occasionally and is an inspiration to old, round guys everywhere.

As regards the story, I'd suspect "Toss it three feet into the air and catch it again", although I'd be tempted to drop it into three feet of water.

A long long while ago, somebody was blathering on about how they could draw and kick out one of those "Glock Blocks" in some unbelievable time. After a bit of mucking about I sorted out how they did it-- they redefine "draw" to "start with a full grip on the gun". At the timer, yank it out and go to town. Point-shot 0.5's aren't hard like that.

Once upon a time this was the place to be in October. All the big dogs shot the then Coors Paper & Iron-- Robbie & Doug hold most of the stage records. Sorta combination between Bianchi, Steel Challenge and IPSC. It's a carnival match Brian, you'd love it.

My selection method was two-fold. I picked a lot of USPSA numbers at random (there was some bias towards shooters that had shot a lot-- for example I didn't go above A40000), and batch-added numbers from online match results that showed they'd shot an "interesting" classifier) Then the scrapers looked up the %'s on the uspsa web and mashed the data. While some classifiers are more popular than others, there are ~80 datapoints in the least popular one here. USPSA.org doesn't say how often each classifier has been shot, so who knows how many more scores are out there, but I believe the sample is fairly random, maybe biased a bit towards higher-classified shooters. As for 99-59, a while back somebody searched all the GM's and M's they could find and found Ron Avery's 83% was the best, and only, score above 80%. If USPSA would let me at the raw data, I'd love to do these right.. as it is now, there's enough manual work to do that I'm stopping. After all, it started as a web-scraper exercise, and I think they work. (Edited by shred at 10:22 pm on Sep. 18, 2002)

I've been taking a look at some classifier data, just for the heck of it (note to USPSA HQ-- these do not reveal HHF or anything else that can't be directly obtained from the public web site, but if you want 'em yanked, let me know) So, there's been talk of 'easy' and 'hard' classifiers... Here's three graphs to check out. The purplish bars are the actual scores a whole bunch of random open shooters shot the classifier in. The blue line is the national % of open shooters in each class. Call this line "about where the scores should be" Here's one of SG's favorites . The distribution at the low end is probably caused by 'screwup' runs, and there are a few too many GM runs, but the rest looks ok, so I'm going to call this one "HHF about right". About 15% shot M or GM scores and there are about 12% M's & GM's: And here's what I'll call "HHF too low" (no kidding, almost 40% of the shooters shot M or GM scores) And here's "HHF way too high" (check this out.. no GM scores, no M scores and only a few A's-- from another source, I hear the highest score of any GM is 83%). Remember all three graphs are approximately the same set of shooters: So what can we do about it? You'd think USPSA HQ would raise the HHF on "HHF too low" by now-- existing scores won't change, which could be problematic, but the policy has been in place for years. For "HHF too High" (which I'll reveal is 99-59), they have to revisit the HHF.. If none of the top GM's can beat 83%, something's wrong with it. These vary a bit Open to Limited (and L-10, Prod & revo), but the summary's the same.

Ok you AZ folks, where are good places to stay for the match? Some of us are thinking about a winter road-trip.

Random capitalist trivia: the cost (to HP) of the retail packaging for an HP printer cartridge is more than the manufacturing cost of the cartridge and the ink combined. mm... margin... (Edited by shred at 6:56 pm on Sep. 16, 2002)

Cool post.. I had the same problem with setting goals based on external things-- for example, if you said you wanted to finish 30th, what if 30 GM's decided to shoot the match? Nothing you can do about that, but it'll hose your goal and mess with your mind. Match percentage is a better way of measuring performance, but can still be affected by who shoots the top scores.

Been there, done that... For some reason, the BE lines about "Trust" come to mind. I still need practice with that.

I shot that one long ago and probably suppressed the memory for good reason. (Edited by shred at 12:08 pm on Sep. 16, 2002)

My favorite pants are the Royal Robbins 5.11 pants (as used by Todd J when he's not wearing those hideous bright green things). They're tough, easy to move in and fit all your other criteria (except the no-pocket, but they've got slash pockets that don't get in my way). Kinda pricy, but can be found on sale occasionally. The 5.11 shorts aren't as good, but I use them also. For you IDPA-gamers, 5.11's even have a hidden interior knee-pad pocket.

To elaborate on Flex's post-- you don't need to crush a glock in your grip, but you do need to stop your wrists from flopping around when you fire. Here's a "How to grip a Glock" set of pictures

The 'ribs' on a 45 mag are smaller, resulting in more interior space in the magazine. The trouble there is once the rounds get side-by-side, they tend to lock up. Playing with some math, a Super case is about .385" dia at the back (not including rim). Dividing 170mm by that is 17.4, so a true double-stack with no "neck" and no spring or follower could hold 34-35 rounds theoretical max. Since our mags have springs, followers and neck down, either they figured out how to double-stack-plus a magazine or have one that extends when full...

Ah, we're sneaky that way. Really we're mostly ordinary A-B-C folks, but we got here sooner, so our "How the heck do I get out of C class?" posts are buried so deep only Flex can find them (answer: "practice&quot Actually, there are also an amazing number of really good shooters that pop by. More than I've seen anywhere else, but they aren't usually the 'regulars'-- they spend too much time at the range! (Edited by shred at 8:22 pm on Sep. 15, 2002)

Shot this one yesterday.. I should have looked here first (I was the MD). Fun stage. I had to make up the last popper and thought 2.66, 29pts Open might be on the edge of M.. not even close. This is the highest HHF classifier I know of ('sides the fixed-time ones, of course). Any others break 14?

We use the squad RO plan all the time-- the squad signup sheet has slots for at least 2 RO-qualified people on each squad and they trade off RO-ing as needed to stay reasonably rested. Any disputes get sent to the MD.

Assuming the number of hi-cap shooters grows, eventually there will be less and less magazines to go around. Also assuming ATF won't allow "conversion" of say, preban sten or AR-15 mags into STI mags (this is in dispute). From informal chats, STI, SV & co produced multiple tens of thousands of magazines before the ban (one customer ordered six thousand) and were running production lines 24x7 up until the last minute. My guess is that the number of hicap shooters isn't growing all that fast, and as you only need 3 or 4 hicaps, since they last pretty much forever there will be 'enough' for quite a while. I believe Mr Bane had some things to say about 'replacement' parts-- as in, y'all don't think you're getting away with it forever. Probably individuals won't get whacked, but the mfg's might. I'll also guess that if the ban gets extended indefinately, you'll see a lot more push for Open 10 or something. (Edited by shred at 7:45 pm on Sep. 15, 2002)

There's at least one reason I have an Aimpoint on my blaster.. I think tube sights are underrated for the 'ordinary' shooter-- the big dogs have the experience to see the dot from wherever and whenever, but people that get a C-more to be like the big dogs may not.. But, back to the topic, when I shot a C-more, I learned that if I stuck the brightness knob just at the bottom of the glass, the dot would be in view (as seen from the back of the gun-- I didn't move any parts around or anything freaky..) (Edited by shred at 8:34 pm on Sep. 15, 2002)

I thought I threw my 2 cents in earlier, but I don't see it (which means it'll turn up in the next thread or something), so I'll toss out some random thoughts.. I think this is an area to explore temperment types-- In general I tend to favor "get it cheap and I'll figure out" as opposed to "pay a higher price and get better support". Other people have different ideas. Assuming Dillon can't be convinced to fix their shipping wierdness, could "BE splits the (actual) shipping" work? Also, it seems like successful retailers are either the mass-volume-low-margin places like Midway or higher-margin-service-is-everything places like Dillon. Trouble is Dillon's already there, so you need to differentiate somehow to convince people to shop with you. "Being BE and all-around cool, plus full of good advice" works well for this board denizens (lower volume, higher margin), but doesn't so well for people that hangout on seedier sites like, say, Glocktalk , who might need some sort of discount-push to get them ordering, but there's lots more of them. If I have it right, you've got a 'virtual store' where you take the orders and Dillon fulfills them. In that case since you're not shoving 1050's around a shipping dock all day, I'd be inclined a bit more towards a lower-margin higher volume setup-- assuming you want to deal with lots of order volume. Merchant fees could get bad though. (Edited by shred at 3:33 pm on Sep. 14, 2002)

Natural Born Killers-- came reeel close to walking out and ditching the people I'd driven to the theater (who seemed to like it for no reason I could see)