dchang0

If the TA31 is one of the mini ACOGs like the TA33, yes, the base is reversible. I am 99% sure the larger ones are also reversible but cannot attest to this because I don't own one. Alternately, replace the mount with a lighter and lower-profile Larue mount, which is what I did to address this problem.

IIRC, the PRI Gas Buster has an aluminum body. The latch itself might be steel. At any rate, yes, it is definitely a common enough occurrence of breaking the charging handle that it may be worthwhile to consider a steel one. Usually, the break occurs at the roll pin where the latch hinges; often, a new pin will solve the problem, but sometimes, the hole itself breaks open. The other most common failure is up at the front, where the handle fits over the gas key. It can crack under heat and stress. You might consider the BCM charging handle, which addresses the roll pin issue very effectively.

Try the Ares Gear Ranger belt. http://www.aresgear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=33&products_id=6&zenid=10bufmmhq9vnhcffa73vf4fp05

I like African carry, but I also bring a 1-point sling just in case the RO won't allow it. Yes, the rifle will be slapping you in the crotch as you run, but it keeps the butt under your chin and out of the way of your shooting shoulder.

This doesn't work for everyone, but if you have a short stock, you can keep both hands on the rifle (left on foregrip or grabbing front of magwell, right on fire control). The rifle will be roughly parallel to your left arm and the stock will float somewhere around your left armpit (or left hip, if you have a longer stock). You don't have to hold the rifle perfectly perpendicular to your direction of travel, just far enough away from the 180 that there's no question you're safe.

I do both, but I run waaaaaaaaay faster if I focus on the target and trust that my cheekweld has the shotgun lined up for me. It's a gamble though, because sometimes it comes up as a string of misses (until I stop and readjust). Taking time to line up the sights on target (focusing on the front bead) ends up being faster more often just because I'm not missing (and therefore not incurring slow extra reloads). So, let the stage decide for you. Lots of flying clays? Probably want to point-shoot that one. Lots of small steel targets or awkward positions or no-shoots? Probably want to aim.

The pocket is more secure, as there's less motion due to blood flow and breathing, but I prefer to shoot squared-up because I use the nose-to-charging handle method to reduce parallax and eye relief/field of view problems. When I used to shoot more bladed and with a longer stock, I occasionally would mount the gun slightly off and wonder why all my impacts were off. Nose-to-charging handle makes it easier to get the proper view down the scope in a hurry. It's also easier to deal with a short stock when trying to get the same view from all the awkward positions we 3-gunners have to deal with. Sometimes, I'm shooting where my nose is on the charging handle and the stock isn't even touching me at all, but I'm still making my hits. Other times, I'm taking shots where only a short stock would allow the proper view down the scope, and the guys running an A2 would have to contort themselves around their long stocks. Short stocks do suffer in prone, though. I could shoot a lot better if I popped my stock in and out to match the stage, but to run featureless California-legal rifles, you have to pin your collapsible stock to a fixed position.

I'm actually preferring equidistant stadia lines like mildot or MOA over a BDC. The reason is that the mental estimation is a bit faster, such as rounding off 1.8 mil to 2.0 mil versus rounding your 270yd target off when you know that the nearest BDC lines are at 200 and 300yds. Basically, it's linear estimation versus parabolic/quadratic. Makes it easier to visually estimate the exact holds on the target.

I've got an idea. How about cutting out some of the carpet in the middle so that the areas where the safeties are most likely to be will be suspended by the surrounding carpet over the bare wood underneath? Yes, you can't cut it so that ALL guns will land with their safeties in the cutout, but you can probably get 90% of the 1911s laid flat on either side (for those with ambi safeties). --- I agree with you on personal responsibility and how the 1911 safety issue is a matter of personal choice and corresponding responsibilities, but there's another way to look at this that doesn't have to do with blame in either direction (towards the competitors or towards the match officials). When I first moved to Orange County about 15 years ago, the 405 North Freeway exit at Brookhurst was pile-up central. EVERY Saturday morning, there would be an accident there. Yes, EVERY Saturday. Traffic on Saturday morning is light, so people would fly down the freeway at 75-80mph, even through the small hills (blind spots) at Harbor and Brookhurst. Like clockwork, some poor soul would come busting down the main lanes and have to stand on their brakes when surprised by the slowly-merging traffic trickling in from the freeway on-ramp on the right. Yes, we could all say, "Oh, it's those drivers' responsibility to watch their speed, etc., etc., etc." But the fact remained that this was a recurring problem. I could set up a lawn chair at Brookhurst and gleefully yell at the accident victims, "SEE, I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO SO FAST!" and "WATCH YOUR SPEED, IDIOTS!" but that wouldn't stop the accidents from happening. Statistics told the truth: something had to change at that on-ramp. So the gov't actually did what it is commissioned to do: improve public safety. They redesigned the freeway on-ramp to encourage merging traffic to merge at a higher speed and at a further point down the freeway from the blind spot. Accidents stopped happening there. Is it the government's fault for designing a crappy on-ramp in the first place, or is it the drivers' for driving way above the speed limit? Who cares? The accidents stopped happening. A friend of mine told me that in 2010, 10% of the SMM3G entrants got DQed. Now, I don't know if that is correct or not, but I'm sure we can do something about reducing that number. Of course, the real number we care about is 0% of all the people at SMM3G got hurt, but it sure would be nice to reduce the DQs to 0% too. I think it's possible to engineer this so that DQs are reduced while the safety of the participants goes up.

That may have been true for SMM3G 2011, but there are other matches that might have lots more pistol. We'd like a solution that the entire sport can adopt that will increase safety while reducing DQs. I like the vertical or near-vertical drop box idea, though one guy in our squad was DQed when he struck the muzzle of his shotgun on the edge of the dump barrel, which caused the shotgun to fly from his hands. We'd have to come up with a better way to cut the barrels so that it's easy to insert and retrieve the rifle/shotgun safely, yet the gun is held securely vertical. Perhaps a large funnel inside of the dump barrel or a similar shape... A good dump-barrel or dump-bucket design combined with careful stage design could make unsafe dumps a thing of the past.

This might be an opportunity for an enterprising company to make a more secure safety lever, perhaps by making it harder to disengage or modifying the profile so that it doesn't snag on the box/carpet while still being easy to operate. Would be interesting to see a safety lever that has a built-in lock.

Thanks--I guess it's normal then. I'll polish the edges off myself...

Flight control buck left contiguous holes about 1" to 4" in diameter. It was a royal pain to tape with just the 1/2" strips (up to 8 strips side-by-side per target), and the RO's were mildly annoyed at having to try to determine whether the 1" holes were wad holes or the entire load. After seeing that, I ran the stage with regular low recoil buck. Easier to tape and score. The no-shoots weren't so close that flight control buck would've been required. In fact, some of the guys who did run it used regular buck for the last swinger to get the wider pattern to ensure a hit.

Thanks--are the top inside edges of your carriers sharp too?

My squadmates call them the "hand slicers." I've cut myself on them twice now, once really, really badly, bleeding all over the place. Is this normal for Mark Otto shotshell carriers? I see that the outer corners of the aluminum body are heavily beveled, but the inner edges of the lip and especially the sides of the steel retainer are still sharp.

What I'm saying is that the penalty system IS part of the stage design. There are going to be situations where the two are inseparable. For instance, at the Pala monthly matches, there are frequently MGM spinners that have to be spun 360-degrees. The penalty for not doing so is +60 seconds--larger than the total time it would take to run the rest of the stage. If the FTN penalty were, say, only +5 sec, it would make perfect sense for gamers to take one shot at the spinner and then hightail it out of there. No amount of "stage design" could fix this short of removing the spinner entirely, as it simply takes longer than +5 sec to flip it, even with full-power buckshot (which takes most shooters 2-3 hits to spin it with from a safe distance of about 15 yds). Considering that we like to shoot the MGM spinner, we're happy to have the higher-than-standard penalty there to make sure we stay within the intent of the stage designers.

Yeah, that's a matter of improper weighting of short stages against long ones. A 5-second penalty in a stage that on average was run in 18.7 seconds will hurt like a 30-second penalty in a stage that was run in an average of 108.2 seconds. The rules organizations need to start experimenting with either weighting stages against each other with simple high-school statistics OR playing with stage-appropriate penalties. For instance, the whole fiasco with Stage 8 could've been averted with this hypothetical penalty system: Unhit Targets = +10 seconds * n factorial. (Middle school math, remember?) So if you had 1 UHT, it would be +10 sec * 1 = a total of a +10 second penalty. And if you had 2 UHTs, it would be +10 sec * 2 * 1 = +20 seconds 3 UHTs would be +10 * 3 * 2 * 1 = +60 sec 4 UHTs would be +10 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = +240 sec 5 UHTs would be +10 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = +1200 sec and so on... OBVIOUSLY, the penalties are too great for anyone to want to game this stage. NOBODY would just take one pot-shot at each of the 9 targets and call it a day. It would forgive at most 2 UHTs, but not much more than that. We'd all have been forced to shoot Stage 8 with a good faith effort. The scoring system matters--it incentivizes and rewards certain behaviors and players. Right now, the weighting of the stages means that people who can perform short stages flawlessly have a giant advantage over people who can perform long stages flawlessly (in other words, it favors "hoser" stages). Does this mean that it's right or wrong, no. I include no judgment about the way SMM3G 2011 was scored. Math is math. All I'm saying is that MDs and Stage Designers are going to have to take into full account the scoring/penalty system while designing stages.

Oops. Thanks for the correction! That rules that barrel out. The DPMS is also ruled out if it is heavy profile.

I'd rather go with premade name-brand barrels. It's mainly about having a bunch of people out there that have "beta tested" the same barrel already and helped the manufacturer work out the kinks. For instance, I went with the MSTN 17" rifle-gas knowing that Taran Butler and dozens of Butler-fanbois had tested it already. What's the right twist, the right gas hole diameter, the right buffer weight, etc.? They had already figured it out and written a body of knowledge about it, available on the net. It is an even greater risk to take the even-shorter 16" barrel and try to make the rifle-length-gas work. If I were to custom order this length from any maker, I'd be the guinea pig and might have to suffer many matches full of cycling problems, etc., before getting it right. Of course, one could argue that I should simply go with a 16" midlength, since that has definitely had its kinks worked out, but rifle-gas has around 5000psi less gas port pressure than a midlength (according to the first chart on this site: http://www.ar15barrels.com/prod/operation.shtml) which of course results in much less violent cycling. I was so impressed by the rifle-gas on my 17" that I consider it a must-have on all my future barrels. But I've always liked the lower weight of most 16" barrels (and JP's ultralight 18") and consider my 17" to be a pig. Why not combine the two: light weight+long gas? If only the Dissipator barrels were available in a consistently 1MOA construction...

sabre. Thanks--do you happen to know the SKU? Sabre's website catalog doesn't list the gas-lengths on any of their barrels. Google's not turning up anything on it either. To anyone else looking, CMMG makes a 16" rifle-length barrel, but it's probably not better than 3MOA. http://cmmginc.secure-mall.com/item/CMMG-16-inch-MedCon-Rifle-5.56-Barrel-1194

I wish! But this one is midlength-gas.

Who makes 16" rifle-length light profile barrels? If we're talking about the Dissipator barrels, aren't these typically 3-4MOA at best? --- Would love to see the return of the JP 18" rifle-length ultralight-profile barrel (29oz). Last time I called them (about July 2010), they said they'd never make it again. Am currently running a 17" rifle-length medium-contour MSTN/Noveske (34 oz) and love it, but if that JP ever goes into production again, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

Thanks, Scott-- I gave the diopter adjustment a try. It hits 1X just fine. I assumed it was set at 1X out of the box, but it occurred to me that that's not possible, since everybody's vision is different--my bad! Eye relief doesn't change all that much, but I'm not complaining. I like it where it is, because I can't mount the scope any further forward and don't wish to increase the length of pull.

Got mine today too. rc2125 is correct, it is not daylight visible outdoors. It was heavily overcast today, with a white pallor over everything, and the reticle was only barely illuminated at 10. In brighter sunlight, it would be a black reticle. Overall impressions: 1) It's 1.25X, not true 1X, by my estimation. But it's a very clear, sharp 1.25X, with no fishbowling or occlusion. 2) The glass is outstandingly good for this price range. Very, very clean at 4X with a nice, large field of view. 3) Turrets seem kinda large, but with the upcoming HS version, that'll be solved. I'd love them to be 5mm shorter--still enough to grab with gloves on, not tall enough to knock into things as easily. 4) The zoom ring is blocked somewhat by the brightness knob. Makes it hard to rapidly switch magnifications without a cat tail. But a cat tail might not do much, as it the zoom ring is very stiff. 5) The reticle is super clean and very easy to use both up-close and far out. I love how fine and sharp the stadia lines and crosshairs are. The outer, broken circle is just about the right size and thickness so that it never gets in the way of the target but draws the eye quickly. 6) Eye relief is phenomenally generous. I have mine mounted all the way forward in a Larue SPR-E, and I shoot nose-to-charging-handle. It seems to have about 3" of eye relief--almost as nice as my TA33. 7) Turret operation/features are very nice for a scope in this price range. The little accoutrements like the fiber optic markers, etc., are especially sweet.

jaredr: There will almost certainly be some cannibalism of sales between the Viper PST and the Razor HD. The biggest difference is probably the quality of glass--the Razor HD is supposed to be much, much better. Second biggest would be the price difference, and third would be the FFP on the Razor. Fourth would be the special BDC reticle available only on the Razor. The other differences were pretty minor.