sciolist

I've fit 3 Stock 2's with original style Bolos. First one was drop-in. Second required a good bit of grinding, and I learned a bunch from that. The third one is probably best, except the DA hammer dwell is very short. The gun seems to be 100% with CCI's and I mostly use FSP, so perhaps this is not a problem. If you don't need the extra hammer travel it's just wasted triggering. Rather than screwing up T3's Bolo, I decided to try an R7. I wanted to check it out in general, an also see if I could demonstrate increased hammer travel by removing material from the lower tip. I had to take more off the R7 to get it to work than I expected, but end result was a perfectly acceptable trigger with more pre-travel and a much more pronounced reset. Hammer travel was also better than with the Bolo, but not as long as my other 2 guns. The R7 is also shorter along it's initial vertical dimension than the old Bolos. I measured 0.461. Next I took 0.003 off the bottom tip very slowly, checking fit at each thousandth. That added about 0.06 to the throw the way I was measuring, which seems like a good result, and gut says that's a good place to stop. At that point, the SA hammer would catch DA rather than falling cleanly from the hooks. I removed a bit more from the inside arc, primarily in the forward direction and just a bit under the wing. As expected, the problem greatly reduced and there was a small increase in pre-travel. I experienced something similar with T2's Bolo fit, but was able to completely eliminate it without adding any pre-travel, by pulling the inside arc's radius forward. So my question is, how are all these relationships really interacting? In SA, the hammer just falls from the hooks on the sear. In DA, trigger pushes bar rearward, plunger pushes up on bar, bar pushes back on disco wing, disco bottom rides up frame ramp, disco arc rides on bar saddle, and I gather the top tip of disco rides on the ramp at the underside of the sear cage. Seems like the frame ramp geometry in T3 is significantly different than the other 2 guns. I don't mind grinding through a few discos, within reason. My goal is to reasonably master the ability to fit a disco on the first shot, and really maximize the result for personal taste and the specific frame and internals in question.

If you can shoot accurately, you probably know how to call shots. Having a high hit factor is about calling shots in a small amount of time, which is not quite the same as shooting fast. When people are shooting close to their limit, they often have the sensation of not shooting particularly fast. That's because their concentration is on calling the shots and getting on to the next thing - in a small amount of time. It can be helpful to consciously practice shooting fast to get the mechanical feel of it, but concentrating on speed in matches is likely to result in bad hits. At any given point in your development, hit factor is going to be highest if you get your concentration properly focused to carve away all the additional time outside of what is needed to place and call the hits within your mechanical ability. The feeling of going fast comes from seeing less than what you need to see to call shots. Your best HF comes from seeing only what you need to see to make good calls as soon as possible. If you can learn to push hard to good calls on all shots, you will be able to shoot very close to the limit of your ability. Then all you need to do is develop better mechanics.

I think the magnum cups are harder. This is based on having loaded and shot ~150K rounds from Production G34's over the last 5 years. I don't have any hard physical evidence, and Federal has told me via email the cups are the same. However, I have never had a light strike with a 100 or 100M, and I have had a few with 200's and 200M's. All of the light strikes have been in my practice gun, which has an OE striker with a very worn tip and a very light, worn striker spring that measures about #3.6. I have not had any light strikes with magnums and fresh OE strikers with good tips, though. So I think I've found the ragged edge for Federals in Glocks: If fully seated, 100's and 100M's basically always go off. Magnums need just a little more impact. They are probably 100% with a #4 spring and a good OE striker. Probably 100% with a #4.5 spring and a worn OE striker. And I would imagine 100% with an extended striker and a lighter spring, but I don't trust extended strikers. Just my experience.

A lot of the kinesthetic and analytical skills I developed in rock climbing transferred over pretty well to shooting.

The 3 main powders I use for Production are WST, N320 and Solo 1000. Solo prints about an inch lower than the other 2 for me, all other things equal. WST and 320 print pretty much the same. I don't know why this is.

What I've noticed is that it doesn't take more time to see a coarse sight picture than it does to shoot hoser targets on index, it just takes more effort. And my HF is generally better when I make that effort. One reason for that is if I do the hosers on index, I tend to transition out to tighter targets with too coarse a sight picture (or with only 1 sight picture instead of 2 on paper). So basically, for me, there's no such thing as shooting too fast to see sight pictures. They are coarse, but they are there.

I try to pay close attention to hits I didn't call correctly in practice. There are lots of reasons for bad calls, and you can start to see interesting patterns if you look carefully. The low/left thing is really interesting. It can be very subtle. USPSA shooting is dynamic, even when splits are slow. So architecture of the mount plays a big role, and can definitely influence POI - even when you (thought you) called a good hit. If you're right-handed, and grip primarily with your left hand, my guess is that your sights track at least slightly on the diagonal from low left to high right. From a mechanical standpoint, my guess is that most of the little nervous things that can creep in and disrupt your mount ten to influence POI downward. My observation of my own shooting is that this is why the bad call default is low/left. I did Ben and Bob's classes last year back to back. This is one of the areas I really wanted to work on, and I've put a good deal of effort in on it since then. Shooting a lightweight gun with irons makes consistent, neutral presentation critical. If you can get that part dialed in, a lot of other things will start to fall in line. My recommendation would be to start out with open paper at 20 yards, probably with a dot sticker on the target, and shoot some slow fire groups like you would to print sights. Then move up to 15 yards or so, and try shooting strings of 6-10 rounds with slow splits, but keep the gun moving. Try to be fully conscious of how the sights track, and how different aspects of your mount and grip can influence that. Look closely at the hits, and try to understand how elements of timing and mechanics are affecting the group size and placement. Work up to splits near your mechanical limit on close paper, but hold yourself to the highest possible standard of visual awareness. What you observe is the main difference between running stages with a dry gun and running them live. A maximally effective mount is the bridge between dry and live drills. If you do lots of dry practice and have difficulty getting similar clarity in live practice, this kind of drill may help.

Vogel's lateral pressure technique is effective, but I think less intuitive. What I do in that regard is to focus on bringing my elbows up higher. Camming the weak index finger under the trigger guard is also very effective for me.

I think drinking plenty of water helps, too.

I do a lot of dryfire, including on live fire days. I keep several stages set up in the house and rotate things around to work on movement, setting up, etc. My main goal with USPSA is to shoot entirely within my comfort zone at matches, and to be able to immediately know where that zone is. One way of learning about that is to experience where your comfort zone isn't. The best way I know to train speed is to go through a stage shooting 'at' the targets. That means going at maybe 110%, and making an honest effort to get good sight pictures on everything, but staying a little beyond the ragged edge of what you can manage. This can be done live, dry, or (best) alternating back and forth. Just try to take a complete stage of hail mary shots, and gradually bring that into your realm of reasonable possibility. Then bring it into your realm of comfort. One of the things I work on at the range is getting my walk-throughs, dry and live runs all to look as close as possible to exactly the same. I want my brain to have the benefit of a surrogate live warm-up run on the match walk-through. Having worked on that for a while, I would rather practice dry (even with no gear) than practice live on a restricted indoor range. If you've mastered overcoming the distractions of a live gun going off, you just need to bring that into the context of movement. That means movement of the gun (faster than slow fire) movement of the shooter through the stage, and perhaps movement of the targets and props. All of these things are just distractions. Your best hit factor on any given day will come from managing the distractions, so that you can look through them and see information more like what you see in slow fire. Then you can shoot good points. Some days are better than others. The key to consistent match performance is knowing where your present limits are (that day, that stage, that array, that target, etc.) and not exceeding them.

I've been extremely fortunate in avoiding joint problems over about 30 years of rock climbing. My experience has been that tendonitis comes more from repetition than intensity. Torsion and traction can be particularly problematic. Yes, I've felt some mild elbow tendonitis from dryfire. I have a pretty good sense of how to work around it. One problem with this kind of injury is that it creeps up as you 'overdrive your headlights' with reps. That could be reps with a hammer, chinning bar, keyboard, pistol, etc. My philosophy is that, if you are committed to putting in the work necessary to get good, you are going to get hurt. It's not a question of 'if', but 'when'. Same as with sight picture and trigger press, the key is to be sensitive to change, to learn from it, and react effectively.

I dry fire every day for 45 minutes or so. I've been shooting live twice a week for a couple years, including 2 or 3 matches a month. I've been experimenting with live firing 3 times a week lately, but I'm not sure if it's worthwhile. Production M.

Paul, I have to tell you, your post has intrigued me since I read it while today while driving 15 hours to Vegas. Could not reply till tonight. You are obviously getting this in big way, becoming an M class in under three years. Your insights shared here reveal a lot to me about your accomplishment in mental management. "Funny" that I had not considered that the visual part of quick transitions had a MENTAL component! DUHHHH. You pointed that out in the first sentence! Rowdyb posted another big mind-expander for me too, above. So my erroneous presumption that training our eyes was a PHYSICAL thing, only, is obviously deficient. So I am now in an excited mental state, anxious to explore this whole cognitive aspect of vision development pointed out by both of you guys. Clearly you are both onto something big as relates to the topic. Great job! Your statements about shooting "at" targets vs. "placing hits on them" is thought provoking. If I understand you correctly, the point is that you are acting, as Brian puts it, guided by your INTENTION of shooting, not on outcome (score). You are "focusing" on the process of executing each shot, as it is performed, in the "present" just like Brian says. Awesome! You have added yet another perspective to the whole discussion above, and Brian's post. You seem to be accomplishing, and describing your goal for match performance as "shooting within yourself," at a controlled pace, which pace is totally residual of whatever the tasks of doing so takes in time. I like it. And my experience supports your conclusion too. As has been said often by those who KNOW, we shoot our best performance when we shoot at our current capability level, not more or less. You have learned, as I am still working on learning, that match performance is kind of like the tortoise and hare story. Rushing ourselves and having to take many makeup shots, penalties and poor hits, is SLOWER on the clock and most likely lower-scoring. Especially tough lesson for striving intermediate shooters like myself. I desire to speed up my stage times, but have not been able to do so in a way that nets me a higher HF, with any consistency. In other words, I am "running the gun too hard" or pushing myself into the red-line of my capabilities, and beyond, with resulting failure. You are nailing the way to correct this type of error. I am going to use your phrase "but you can't outshoot yourself" to remind me of how silly and ineffective it is to push myself in match performance. Great! Thanks! I had very little shooting experience when I read Brian’s book, and I haven’t really reread it since, but it seemed to me one of his major themes was learning how to function with less visual information. That resonated with my experience in other sports, where I got good at doing things by truncating them down to the minimum. Most of that stuff is physical. If I’m only doing half as much work as you and we have roughly the same strength, I’m twice as strong. So with shooting, I started working on minimizing what I needed to see in live practice. But I still wasn’t shooting very good points across an entire match. Several things got me thinking about this, but probably the main one was taking Stoeger’s class last spring. We started off with a field course, which everyone shot, and Ben went last. The relationship between Ben’s run and mine looked about like what I expected, so NBD. Then we did some drills. Alrighty. Now Ben was tearing off 15HF El Prezes pass after pass. The best EP I’ve ever shot is under 10HF. So on the field course, obviously Ben was shooting way below the top of his mechanical ability on a static array. Driving home from Ben’s class, it occurred to me that I had never really worked specifically at the skill of seeing *more information in the same amount of time*. I had only been concerned with getting hits based on less information, which is pretty much the opposite of what I then knew Ben was doing. The fastest 9-yard rack I’ve ever shot is a shade under 2.5. I could probably repeat that in 15 tries, but in that process, there would be a bunch of runs over 4.0. If we set the par at 3.75, I could likely make 10 successful runs in a row. You tell me which is the better way to shoot in a match. I always joked I’d be able to make Production M without being able to shoot, and that is exactly how it went. Part of the reason I said that is because I knew I would need to develop a certain level of mechanical ability before my ego would leave me alone and just let me shoot at my own pace. I figured that level would be about 85%, and that turned out to be right. I look at it like this: There is a big number and a little number. Big number is you against the world. Little number is you against you. Chase the little number, and the big one comes along for the ride. Chase the big number, and the little number is likely to actually go down. I’ve beaten plenty of shooters who were better than me just because I made fewer mistakes, and I’ve been beaten for that same reason. Considering all the things that can happen, you might possibly beat anyone in a match… except yourself. You absolutely cannot outshoot your ability over the course of a match. My personal goal in USPSA is to develop the ability to *consistently* shoot within 95% of my current ability. The rest of it is just window dressing. That little number is a profoundly beautiful and introspective thing. For me, there is no sense of speed or accuracy, and certainly no blending of the two. A stage is defined by a constellation of sight pictures, and the hits are just physical echoes of those. If you can accept the idea that you really do have the mechanical ability to shoot 97% points and work to that standard, you can eliminate a lot of the (im)probability. I think there should be very little sense of anything other than simply placing hits on the scoring surfaces with a degree of urgency appropriate to your current skill level.

My experience has been that most of this is cognitive, not mechanical. I started USPSA with very little shooting experience, but plenty of athletic background. So running around field courses and learning to manipulate new objects in space was not much of a problem. I read Brian's book, started shooting a few matches a month, practicing daily, and progressed fairly quickly. It occurred to me recently that it's not that hard to just walk through a match and shoot 97% points in slow fire. If you put that on the clock and compute HF, you start to see how costly dropped points, penalties make-ups on steel, etc. really are. Doing this, I realized that most of my development has been more about refining the art of shooting *at* targets than actually placing hits on them. To the untrained eye, shooting with a coarse sight picture and shooting *at* the target look the same. But they are not the same thing at all. So my primary goal on most stages now is to experience the sensation of having a little more command than I actually need to place 97% hits on the scoring surfaces. Everything in the match... adrenaline, competitive distraction, props, etc. pulls you away from that basic goal. If you can stay focused on that one goal, you can shoot over 90% points with an appropriate level of urgency, and you will shoot a pretty good HF percentage of what you've got that day. Let the other guys have all the make-ups and penalties. Shooting in competition, it's natural to try and go fast to beat the other people. But you can't outshoot yourself. The best way to maximize HF throughout an entire match is to operate within your current limits. If you feel like your current limits are too restrictive, then build better mechanicals in practice. But do not flirt with those limits in competition. The math just doesn't work that way.

I shoot matches to get ready for practice. Matches are just snapshots of where you are at a particular time. Continuity and development comes from practice. Matches tell you how to practice. The art of shooting matches is ignoring the pressure to try to improve. The art of practice is refining your understanding of improvement.