motosapiens

people have gotten a LOT faster in the last couple years. The peak times keep dropping, and I'm guessing they'll drop again next year.

we're down to 20k primers (for 2 people). I am at a point where I am able to get a LOT out of dryfire, so we reduced our live-fire shooting a month or so ago. 6 months or so at the reduced live-fire practice schedule is what I figure. Might be able to extend that by switching to ss/l10 for a bit because i have 7k of LPP as well. I'm hoping we'll see primers available in the next 3-4 months, but if not we'll just ride dirtbikes more.

yes, no one GAF how much your grips weigh. Make them out of plutonium if you want. but you may have to mill some weight out of the rest of the gun.

we are there. mrs moto set a women's overall record today in pcc, and on 2 stages yesterday in rfpo. May not last long since mackenzie bragg still has to shoot both divisions. With regard to eugene's observations, the nature of the classification system means that people can make GM without actually being competitive at that level. If you shoot alot, you will almost certainly be M anyway, and if you hook up one or two days, boom, you are a GM. No one really seems to care like they do at USPSA tho, which is good imho. It's useful for looking at to guesstimate the skill level of the people you don't know, but it's dumb to let it have anything to do with awards.

when we say 'thumb rest', i generally understand it to mean something for the support hand them. Lots of grips on various guns have some kind of contour for the strong hand thumb, but i don't think it does anything to control or reduce recoil. As a CRO, I would tend to not care at all about what you do with a 1911 grip to make it more comfortable for you.

this actually only happens to b class senior open shooters, but those guys are usually mad about something....

this is a fairly common misunderstanding of the use of the word 'ricochet', and it often brought up (incorrectly) when discussing bounces of barrels. it is unfortunate that they used that word instead of just splatter. to make it more clear, if your whole bullet bounces off a rock, or popper, or prop, or barrel and hits the a-zone, it's generally a hit. if it looks like the bullet came apart and only part of the jacket (or the rock) hit the target, then not a hit.

if you ricochet off a rock and hit the a-zone, it looks to me (from reading the rulebook) that it counts, all day. it's pretty easy to see if a hit on steel is full-diameter or not.

embedded RO's, on an informal and ad-hoc basis. But we have a fair amount of certified RO's and good shooters with major match experience, so we do our best to keep stuff running correctly and maintain competitive equity.

cuz we like the way it works now (as long as RO's are reasonably attentive to their job), and when people lose a calibration around here, they are all willing to admit that they were just hoping to get lucky, and they know they got a low hit or an edge hit. I know there are a few dozen people on the internet that care deeply about this issue, but it just doesn't seem to be as big an issue to everyone else. I would think the issue of two bullets through the same hole would be more of a thing for people to complain about. That happens to me at least once or twice a year. Sometimes I get credit for it, sometimes not. Sometimes I just imagine it actually happened and I want credit for it, but if there's no physical evidence.... bummer... I think we are generally headed in the right direction on the popper thing, because troy and other RM's have been reminding RO's for a couple years now to manage the steel on their stage and check it routinely, and gradually the mindset is changing. I'd rather see the RO mindset continue to change than change the rules to make it easier to cheat and/or whine. I get the argument that a few points can be critically important, but as someone who has lost some big matches by a point or two, I don't get too wrapped around the axle about which particular points were the ones that cost me. In every match, every shooter makes myriad mistakes, and every shooter has odd or unlucky things happen (wind gusts, sun angle, dust obscuring targets, distractions, etc....). This is the nature of sport. Instead of dumbing it down so nothing unprovable can ever happen, we make a good-faith effort to keep things equitable in a very dynamic outdoor sport. I like it.

unless the popper is screwed up or defective somehow, the current rules work fine. The only issues I have ever seen like you describe were brand new forward fallers at A1 in SLC a few years back. If you didn't adjust the latches right, they would take 2 shots to fall over. the latch would drop part way on the first shot, then all the way on the 2nd shot. We adjusted all the latches on my stage so they couldn't be accidentally set to high before the match started. but any normal popper still remains in the same position if it doesn't fall over.

sometimes a simple physical inspection shows that the popper is screwed up. This used to be fairly common on the first stage of the day at our club, and we certainly never calibrated. We were like 'oops', someone forgot to adjust those when building the stage. I still check them when I get to a stage, but it seems like our club members have become much more diligent about checking and adjusting during setup. If it's obvious the popper not functioning correctly, it's not against the rules to simply declare it REF and fix it. You don't *have* to try to screw the shooter over or force him to take a gamble if it's obvious, and you don't have to waste everyone's time chasing down calibration ammo. Just fix the obvious problem and move on. This stuff generally shouldn't happen at a bigger match, but even then, sometimes weird stuff does happen for the first squad.

everyone I know would vote against that.

oops, AD

it has not been my experience that shooters intentionally cheat on PF. It has also not been my experience that there would be any point to cheating. Admittedly, I'm a grown man, but I shoot the same speed with major as with minor with the exception of some very specific types of targets, like 4-5 shots per target, or a plate rack at close range. Mrs motosapiens (3 division GM at steel challenge) shoots her 167pf limited ammo in steel because going lighter didn't make any difference in her times. for sure, it has been my experience that if you try to set a popper so that 115 will just barely knock it down, then you'll be doing lots of reshoots when the popper fails calibration.

It will also fall if the shooter's ammo didn't make power factor. That's why we calibrate with sub-minor ammo.

you seem to be confused about the rules. they actually very specifically ensure that a correctly set popper will be knocked over by a sub-minor hit in the calibration zone. That's why we use sub-minor calibration ammo. We use knuckle testing because we don't have time to repeatedly shoot poppers in between squads. For local matches, I always carry a handful of subminor ammo (115-117pf) for calibration challenges.

that depends on whether you ask a wacked range-lawyer who cares only about 'the book', or an experienced RMI who cares about competitive equity. Just because a situation isn't explicitly described by the rules shouldn't stop an intelligent person from applying the rules in a sensible and equitable fashion. Personally I think an RO has wide latitude to call REF when something is *obviously* effed up. I don't see why calling REF for the wind obviously holding a popper up is any less by the book than calling REF for the wind knocking a popper down. I've also seen it called when the wind does something clearly unusual with a max trap, either holding it wide open for longer than normal, or (more commonly) preventing it from opening all the way.

Stop shouting. Yes, if hit in the calibration zone or above, the popper should fall. This doesn't need to be complicated.

turn the adjustment bolt until I am confident the popper will fall when shot. It's not rocket surgery. The only time it should ever really be a problem is in gusty winds. We had an afternoon like that at limited nats last year, and on our last stage th CRO just called an REF if a popper was obviously hit in the calibration zone but didn't go down because of the wind.

it's not really 'therefore it doesn't happen', but 'therefore it doesn't happen nearly as often as some whiners would like us to believe.' I know it occasionally happens, and it's almost always a result of inattentive or poorly-trained RO's. I think there has been some progress on this at big matches. All the area and national matches I've worked in the last few years the RM has reminded us to manage our steel and not wait until someone gets screwed over to adjust it.

alternate and equally silly plan, abolish minor, and raise the pf to 175.

this is a reasonable question, and I've seen it called 2 different ways at area matches by experienced RM's. A1 at idaho falls a gm production shooter observed a popper that needed multiple hits by the previous shooter but finally went down so he asked for calibration before shooting. The RM consented and it turned out the popper needed adjustment. A2 when a i saw the future AD get popperf#cked, I asked the RO's when I got to that stage if they had been adjusting the poppers, they acted like dicks and said they just waited until someone left it standing and requested calibration, so I asked for the RM. That RM chose not to allow calibration despite the previous problems and the poor customer service of the RO's. I got the impression that it might have been different if I had reason to believe the popper was currently out of adjustment, but since all I had was the blatant popperf*ck from the day before and a poor RO attitude, the RM determined there was not justification. Pro tip, at some big matches, I have observed poppers with loose adjustment bolts and RO's paying no attention to them as the day goes on.

to be fair, I did observe the current A2 director get popper-f*cked at A2 a couple years ago before he was elected. The RO was a bit of a dick about it too, and also a bit of a dick about my concerns when we shot the same stage. I brought the problem to the attention of the RM, and then I made sure I got a good hit on the popper. I think over the last few years most CRO's have gotten with the program that Troy and others have been pushing, which is to keep an eye on the poppers and adjust when needed. When I work a big match, I check and adjust the poppers before every single squad.

it's already about the competitor skill. Most of the people who think it's about the mechanism are just lacking the skill.