Vlad

It is not cheap and so far it is still vapor though it was announced 2 years ago. We might actually see some in stores before the end of the year.

There are two reasons. First, it is supposed to be production. A 2lb trigger is nowhere near. Secondly, what practical method can you think of to test for all geometry changes on all guns on the production list? That can not be done. However setting a trigger pull limit to a number that can easily be achived without drilling the frame eliminates the need for such testing.

Not at all. Please show me a production gun, from the factory, which is striker fired and comes with a trigger lighter then 3lb. Heck, most good bolt action rifles, technicaly striker fired, have triggers heavier then that. Hell, show me a single action 1911 which has a trigger that light from the factory. If single action only guns don't have triggers that light, what sense does it make to have them in the non single action division?

It depends, if you mean how many people activily shoot at each club every match, that gets hard to tell. If you want to know how many people are classified in what classes and what divisions, check out the USPSA classification stage, they have all those break downs.

Gee ... everyone always says we should mail the BOD to speak out minds. Seeing the how the BOD itself is sometimes being bypassed (see L10 being removed without discussion) I wonder what the point would be.

The cheap way is to shoot a few indoor matches, and the corners will bend from droping on the cement floor a handfull of times.

Well, you might be right, but there is a difference between static and trying to see what really happens when you aproach the speed of light. A balance might be nice. I would suggest that we should make a serious effort to keep the same rules for at least a couple of years in a row.

Oh for the love of Pete! Look folks, USPSA IS A RACE GAME!!. We run, we shoot for score and the difference between the winner and the looser is often a fraction of a second or point (leaving Jerry and revolver aside). EVERYTHING about USPSA shooting is a race. We look for the smallest advantages, we tune the most insignificant parts, we polish small bit of metal until you can use them as reflectors for the Hubble. Please don't consider this as an insult Gary, but what you want almost doesn't matter. The USPSA shooters race. This is why IDPA broke away, this is why we have some problems with IPSC rules, this is why USPSA shooters are called gamers. We are gamers. USPSA is the Indy circuit to IDPA's NASCAR. Yes the history of USPSA blah blah blah. We all know about the roots but we are growing from the leaf and branch end, not from the roots. From my cheap seats I keep on seeing people trying to make the game match some view they had of it 10 or 20 years ago, all the while everyone trying to shoot their own game has to deal with constant changes and upwards presure to shoot a game they are not interested in. What exactly do you think that will lead to? Personally I could care less how many divisions you choose to add and how restrictive those divisions are as long as we don't start making decisions about the rest of the game based on those new divisions. Fell free to create a blackpowder division which requires people to use red sash as a belt, but folks, that doesn't mean that we can kill revolver now or reduce the stage round count to 6 rounds. Oh and while we are talking about interesting rules, can someone describe to me where the fronstrap begins and ends? I have a DOH I use for my CZ, I don't have one for the 1911 platform, but on my CZ version the fronstrap from about 1/2 down is above the belt line. So .... would that be ok, assuming it fits a 1911 the same way? Or does the ENTIRE frontstrap need to be above the belt. And how do measure that? And what do you do about women for whom those dastardly DOH type holsters where designed for to begin with, and for good reason?

I think we all have a few things places we hold dear. There is more to them then just physical beauty, they also do something for our soul as we associate them with something we care about. For me it is the mountains around the village I spent a lot of my youth in. My grandparents had a house there, and I spent a lot of my vacations with them. I don't even have a good picture of place, but they mean a lot to me. I found a picture of them, but not the angle I would have chosen: http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/b1b48/

My local building superstore had this "pre-painted" moulding in various finishes and patterns. I figured .. what the hell, I have enough to do refinishing the entire upstairs of my house, and the wife wants white mouldings anyway, so I might as well buy the finished stuff and skip a step. This stuff is basically plastic. The good things about it are you can't scratch it, it cleans easy, and it bends a bit with the lines of my 80 year old house, which was well built but sometimes with a sin curve shaped "square". Silicone caulk blends in very well for filling the joints and gaps. However ... How the heck are you supposed to cut this thing???? Any use of a power tool is an exercise in frustration as a low speed tool shreds it and a high speed tool makes it melt. So far the only viable option is hand cutting with a fine hack saw or a hobbie saw. Anything bigger fills up quickly with plastic. It takes for friking ever and cutting odd angles is a cast iron bitch. I assume these guys didn't expect everyone to have a water jet cutter at home so how do they expect you to cut it?

Yeah the buddy system works great. If you have a friend you regularly shoot with or can practice with, you will get quite a bit of insight from him/her. Someone who sees you shooting day in and day out, will notice subtle things that you only do sometimes, or notice what mood you were in when you shot a good stage, or notice that your grip gets sloppy on cold days, but only if tape a lot. Things like that.

I think you are on to something. I've gone back and forth a few times (back to FO now). However I think it is more then a trick of the day type deal. Whenever I switch I learn something new about front sight movement, and I don't really forget it when I switch back. I find that I get better whenever I switch back and forth. That aside, I'll my opinion on what makes a good FO sight. I think that .040 is a must. Nothing thicker should even be considered. The ability to make the dot small is also critical. The micto-dot idea is cool, but also learing to install your normal FO sigth without making a huge mushroom helps as well. I'm also on board with the idea that a lot of FO's don't leave enough of the top visible, and that leads to shooting over your rear sight. If the top of the front sight is visible, I don't aim with the FO, I aim with the top of the sight, and I use the FO to find the front sight. Seration don't do much for me, so I'll take them or leave them, as they don't bother me either.

I keep on putting it off but I plan on sending my Milspec Springfield to EGW for their Ultimate Tactical package.

Hmm .. so he is the future King of the United Kingdom. Couldn't he make the argument that it really is HIS rifle, I mean really his, so really .. why should anyone chew him out for disposing of it? Yeah I know they don't really own the place, but I think there is an argument to me made there.

Fog machines are fun (my wife bought one for her Halloween props). I've thought of bringing one out to matches but I think despite the cool factor it would be a bad idea as it would not present the same challenge to each shooter. The fog is fairly hard to control and without a fog chiller it goes every which way. A fog chiller is not hard to build but it adds a new more complications, and then the fog lays on the ground, but then whats the point, as it wouldn't do anything to obscure the targets?

Actually don't remove it. Removing it will make your reloads harder as sometimes you will catch the screw posts. You need to either straighthen it or buy the replacement on. CZ makes the drop free spring which you can order from them for like $8. I recommend buying a new one, as the do it yourself job sometimes loses its shape after a while. To replace it, remove your grips, and on the rear of the frame you will see the flat spring which makes the up rear of the magwell. It is held in place by two pins which where hidden behind the grip panels. The top one should pretty much drop free. The bottom one is held in place by pressure from the main spring. Decock your gun, then place the gun vertical on a table with the magwell opening pointing down. Press the spring plug in the rear of the magwell against the surface of the table to compress the main spring a bit. Push out the bottom pin while maintaing pressure on the spring plug. Continue maintaining that pressure as you remove the actual flat spring which is now the only thing keeping the plug in. Re-assemble in reverse with the new spring or a with a flattened old spring. This takes less time to do then it took me to type it.

My Streamlight Scorpion costs about $30, has better throw then most, and it comes with a built in spare bulb that doesn't cost as much as half the flashlight. I'm on my second one because I lost the first one, and they have lifetime warranties. If you don't want to shop around, you can get it on sale at Cabelas for $35 right now.

Hmm .. how is it political exactly?

I never shot IDPA in my life but i have seen the same show you did. If I'm not mistaken, the stages on which they where not wearing a vest were those on which the starts had the gun NOT on the body, such as in a drawer and so on. I have no idea about IDPA rules but I would say it doesn't make sense to force concealment if the gun doesn't start concealed to begin with.

I don't know how other clubs run, and what their group dynamics are like, but we have some wiered stuff around my club. We have the best people you can imagine, from the match directors to all the volunteer helpers. Today we where setting up for our annual 3 gun match and had 10 people or more come out and help. We had even one of the more casual shooters come out and help and bring us coffee and dounughts. We built 9 stages in about 9 hours, including trucks (fuctional), missle launchers (complete with real practice rockets), doors to be opened with battering rams, door to be blown open with your shotgun, a shotgun run through the woods, and countless other cool bits. Hopefully the overnite weather wont destroy to much of it. So what am I bitching about? Without fail people will get on each others nerves, blood presure will rise, a few people will throw their hand up in their air and walk away to help with a different stage, someone will leave cursing at themselves or muttering about some problem or another, and people who have been friends for years will in one way or another get really pissed at each other. At the end of the day the job will be done, and the next morning friends will be friends again. Nevertheless, it drives me nuts when people start arguing over the most meaningless details of a stage. We pleanty of people who are really out to get us out there, foreign or domestic, we choose to take our frustration out on those we have chosen to hang out with over silly details of a hobby we have chosen to participate in. Some of us do it more often, some less. I know I get on peoples nerves every now and then. I guess it says something that we keep on coming back for more weekend after weekend, and the end of the match we still all go out for dinner and laugh and BS like nothing ever happened, but I sure do hate it when we get on each others nerves.

Or maybe they only have one cool gun handy for some dumb reason.

You may be out of luck. I get mine from CZ and I ALWAYS keep a spare. When the one in my gun breaks, I drop in the spare and order a new one. They take a week or more to get it to you.

What he said. Nik does it to me, and I'm the Robin to his Batman, running one of the local matches. Really? Do you guys wear the masks and shiny tights as well? Well I do .. I'm still trying to convince Nik that he would look dashing in a black cape.

What he said. Nik does it to me, and I'm the Robin to his Batman, running one of the local matches. It shouldn't matter who the shooter is, if you didn't see that chamber you should ask him to show clear again.

As I was doing the scores for last weekends match I notice one of the odd "features" of the hit factor and max stage points that USPSA uses and it got me thinking about scoring systems. The trigger for this was that as I was typing in the scores I looked at the relative standings for two shooters. After entering the scores for the first squad for all 7 stages Shooter 1 was leading Shooter 2 by about 3 match points, both having shot the match on the same squad. After entering the rest of the 7 squads, Shooter 2 was leading Shooter 1 by about 3.5 match points. Now, I understand why that happens. I get the math of it. However it seems odd to me that our scoring system changes the relative finishing positions of two shooters depending on the performance of a third (or fourth, or fifth .. ). I don't even know that it is a bad thing, as the the current system basically builds in some measure of "skill weight" by saying some stages required more control of certain skills then others and the balance of those skills across multiple stages may not be fully represented by only two shooters. Anyway .. I was wondering if anyone can thing of a system that would work for USPSA/IPSC scoring and resolve this kind of flip, without changing the flavor of the game. We could use time plus, but that changes the balance of DVC away from the current one, and starts to break down on very long or very short stages. We couldn't use raw HF because that would completely screw with current "worth" of short stages vs long stages in final match standings, course design would become a much more complex issue. There is the idea of giving the same number of match points to each stage which may balance out the short vs long issue, but it retains the problem of switching finishing order. The only mad thing I could think of was having a hybrid HF/time+ scoring system where the HF for a stage would determine the time value of dropped points, but the math of that would be kinda nuts and without cranking some numbers through it I'm not even sure that it wouldn't introduce its own issue. And that is even assuming you would have a good way of determing what HF to use for each stage. I'm not advocating we change the scoring system. I'm not trying to start a new rules discussion. I'm just curious if people know of a scoring system that would work better then what we have now, which isn't all that bad. PS: in the interest of full disclosure I was Shooter 1 who was leading Shooter 2, and then I wasn't. I'm not looking to find a way to raise my scores here, Shooter 2 really is a better shooter then I am, I just happened to notice it and it made me think.