motosapiens

it's not about outrunning the slide, as you alluded to in your second line, it's about outrunning the return of the sights. it's worth doing some testing to see which you prefer and which allows you to shoot accurately more quickly, but for many people it might not matter much.

what actually happens when it doesn't chamber? is the round nose-diving into the feedramp and stopping? or is it getting most of the way in but not fully into battery? 7# spring is pretty light imho. most folks i know use 8 or 9 lbs (we use 8). i would check your extractor tension. our 38sc open gun likes alot of extractor tension to ensure consistent ejection, but that also makes it slightly harder for the rim of the round to slide up under the extractor hook. too much tension will cause the round to not fully go into battery. after a few k rounds of break in, i tensioned ours (on the advice of the builder) to just barely be able to chamber a round if i ride the slide slowly forward with my hand, so it works consistently in normal operation. also, if the gun is brand new, it might just be tight and need to wear in a bit more. our builder told us to not stress about any feeding or extraction failures in the first 500 rounds or so. after about a thousand rounds we stopped having any real issues, and now it's been at least 5k since the last malfunction of any kind.

yes... not a super easy reload (mine are still pretty new), but if you practice a bit they'll seat reliably. It this point i'm putting 23 + 1 in to start, but reloading to 22 for matches just because it's lower risk with magazines that have only been loaded up 15-20 times. With the magwell reloads are so fast and easy that I don't really stress over a round anyway.

you are correct. published load data is exactly the correct place to start. Then you can adjust up or down as needed. for example, i have some 9mm roundnose bullets that are fat, and had to shorten them to 1.06 for them to plunk in one of my guns. Generally, somewhere around 1.15-ish is about as long as I would load roundnose bullets, and probably no more than 1.10 for flat nose or hp unless i needed longer for them to feed.

all dots eventually stop working. Sig has a pretty fast and painless warranty process at least.

at least not on enos. it's been over a year... i would probably start mentioning their name on social media, emailing MD's of matches they sponsor, etc.... $1000 is alot to just walk away from.

edit: my guess was wrong... apparently there are other shysters out there too.

Good shooting! i console myself with the knowledge that the first two seniors in 2021 have 10+ national and world championships each, so they don't really count in my book, lol.

lol, sounds like a bit of wild exaggeration, but it also sounds like kind of a dumb stage, and I don't mind running at all. I just like shooting better, lol.

that is about the only stage where a 24 rd magazine might make a difference, but regardless, you definitely need bigger magazines for field stages whether they are 23 or 24. It sounds like you also need to practice reloads until you can fit them into a 5-6' movement with no loss of time. I personally use TTI extensions with gramms followers, but I only get 23 in my cz mags. I borrowed a 24 rd mag from a buddy for that classifier a few weeks ago. He used a henning extension and mbx spring/follower combo. I don't have any data on the reliability of the mbx follower, but I have never had a malfunction using the gramms followers.

meh, i wont be whining about “track meets” just because im old. and ill probably still be able to outrun the fat gm, and he’ll probably still be beating me in every match.

I think 17 rounds would not be any worse than 15, but I don't see it as significantly better either. you're right and wrong here. I'm 62 and i often design stages with a bunch of running, but the primary focus for me is to build a stage where the top local gm's choose different plans. I have literally never seen a stage where 'who can run the fastest' is a thing. Even at my advanced age I can move my feet, and whether it's a stand and shoot or a 75 yard movement stage, I still get beat by the same old fat GM that shoots well and doesn't waste time.

I shot 2021 and 2022 ss nationals (and brought home 3rd place senior trophies, hooray!). Obviously when you only have 8 rounds in the gun, you'll tend to find away to make a position 7-8 rounds. i remember lots of places where I could only shoot 4-6 rounds from a single spot, then move a few steps and shoot another 2-4 rounds. I bet if you shot those same stages with 15 rounds in the gun you'd find yourself shooting 12-13-14 rounds pretty frequently between reloads.

if your local stages are all 8 round arrays, I'm sorry. that sucks. Our stages rarely break down that way. Stages at nationals and good area matches rarely break down that way.

bullets are bullets. i have heard of some 320's having some tumbling/keyholing issues with 147's and we definitely experienced it, but we only used a few hundred that we got free at a match. ours definitely prefers .356 diameter, for companies like blue bullets that offer you a choice (their default is .355). most people use 124gr. we prefer 115gr, but the difference is subtle. we had better luck with the stock 14lb recoil spring, or a 13lb we got from somwhere (springer, I think). the stock 12lb spring seemed to contribute to light strikes, like it was just too easy for the slide to get ever so slightly nudged out of battery. Local GM also says his groups were tighter with the 14lb spring.

he's a noob, remember?

so you would think, but in a 1911-only match a couple years ago, i got my clock cleaned by a little girl shooting 9mm on a heavy-azz spinner (i was shooting 45 and I don't suck at spinners).

my experience is with the 115gr blue vs berrys, and I found the blues to be 1-3 pf higher for the same load and oal. if I switch between them, I add .1grain of powder for the berrys and don't worry about it. fwiw tho, i generally prefer the blues for cost reasons. the only reason we ever use berrys is because all 25k or so blues I have are .355, and my wife's sig CO gun is significantly more accurate with .356. If i ever run out of blues, I will get a couple k of .356 just in case she ever wants to shoot CO again (she has moved to open).

Appreciate the interesting reading. It sounds like you like to play around with 2011's, which is cool. These prodigies seem like a decent place to start for handy folks like yourself who want to do a little customizing. Not to hijack your thread, but I went a slightly different direction for LO. I won a staccato P in the raffle at A1. When I got it 2 weeks ago, I slightly tweaked the leaf spring to my liking, mounted an old DPP, zero'd it, and then I shot it in 2 matches. After the first match I switched to the light spring from dawson (my gun only came with 1 spring, and it was ejecting brass about 18"). After 600-700 rounds with zero malfunctions, the trigger is at 2 1/4 lbs, and I kinda like it. Last practice I was able to put 4 shots in a row in the upper a-zone (head box) in under 3 seconds 3 times in a row. The one thing I'm not thrilled with is the stock mag release is not drilled for a button, and it's not compatible with normal 2011 mag releases, which is entirely lame. I'll eventually drill and tap it, but in the meantime i'm returning to my production roots and slightly breaking my grip to reload. Other than that, I'm awfully impressed with this gun, especially considering I made fun of staccato for the last couple years after they stopped honoring warranties and went after the cop market. We've had 7-ish STI's (and still have 5), and they have varied in quality from pretty good, to amazingly tight, but we also had 1 gun that was meh, 1 with a poorly fitted barrel link, and an edge that was a rattly POS when new and shot 3" groups at 10 yards.

we have 2011's in 40 with a steel grip. they are fine, but awfully heavy, and it does slightly slow draws, reloads and transitions for a tall skinny guy like me, plus it's a pain in the hip to carry it around all day. My wife is shorter and more muscular and doesn't feel the steel grip slows her in the slightest (and she's faster than me). Still, for 9mm minor I personally would definitely go with an aluminum or poly grip, but it wouldn't hurt to handle a few guns and see what you think.

i've shot a ton of 9mm 1911 (one tri-topped slide and one gi-profile slide), and now I have a staccato 4.4" 2011 with a pretty standard slide. I don't know that the difference is dramatic enough for me to care, but if I were choosing from scratch, I would *probably* choose a 5" gun with a lightened slide. Like others say, I would try them back to back and see. It seems to me like the shorter gun comes back to exactly where the dot left from, but it may bounce slightly higher too. One slight advantage to the longer barrel is you'll definitely get a few pf points out of it, so you can load 1-2 tenths lighter, but all in all, barrel length is not one of the things I would really worry about if I already had a gun that ran.

a waste of .2-.3 seconds. not optimal, but better than racking the round out if that's what the problem is. I also have shot primarily 1911-2011's for the last 10 years, but I never developed any muscle memory to rack the round out because i never have light strikes with those guns, lol.

I don't know how serious I am. I only have a few trophies from nationals, area matches and world speed shoot, but with my cz i definitely pull the trigger a 2nd time. I probably developed the habit from using some harder primers for practice when good primers were in short supply. It's happened a couple times in local matches over the years and the primer has always gone off on the 2nd strike. Much faster than racking the round out. Of course it's even faster-er to use softer primers or a stiffer mainspring and check your ammo more carefully.... that's probably why it's never happened at a major. Anyway, the fact that I *can* do a second strike is exactly the same reason that I have to, lol. Starting SA you can just use a normal mainspring that will light off any primer, so it becomes a non-issue. At any rate, I certainly wouldn't convert to SA-only. Maybe I don't need DA today, but I might some other day in some other division.

same here. CO has really been a gateway drug to open in our locale.

seems different where we are. almost all the local gm and m's shoot 38sc, and everyone who ordered a new gun in the last year ordered 38sc, probably because its an objectively better round for open (better durability, and compensator function). right before we ordered mrs moto's gun we bumped into our local GM (top 25-30 at multiple nationals) who was really fighting with his 9mm gun a bit and trying to figure out how to get it to shoot like his 38. To me it seems dumb to spend 5-8k on a gun and knowingly choose a caliber that will make the wear out or break sooner just to try to save a couple bucks on brass (or a little trouble of picking up brass). Anyway, back to the OP. I don't know that there's any disadvantage to switching to open. From what I've observed with others, it really allows you to concentrate on all the other stuff required by the game, since the shooting and recoil management and reloads are less of thing to worry about. All those other movement and blending and planning skills will still be useful in other divisions.