GunBugBit

Thanks for the welcoming!

I shot Single Stack (.45).

I enjoyed it very much because: I was fortunate to go through all 8 stages with a nice group of experienced guys who gave me helpful coaching -- thanks Hazen, Scot and Scott! It's great practice for a new competitor like me The club in general is run very well and the facility is excellent I'm eagerly looking forward to future Steel Challenge matches!

Steve Anderson suggested doing reload drills without a mag in the gun to drop, just hit the mag release button and load a mag from your belt. Repeat as desired. One good thing about this is that you can do more reps in a shorter time. I practice reloads over the back of a leather chair, letting the mag drop onto the leather seat. But I still have to bend over to retrieve it. I don't mind the effort but it takes longer to get reps in. I'm doing some of both -- dropping a real mag and a ghost mag. When I practice reloads with a par time, I start with the gun held on target and consider myself done when the sights are back on target. I DO see a lot of value to the Burkett reload drill. Most of the time is taken up by reaching down to the belt and raising the mag to the magwell's mouth. This drill lets you focus on that. Last night I was doing this and finding that I could later beat my full-reload-sequence par times with a little time left over, allowing for a quick pause to make sure the mag is lined up to slide right in. My fastest is not fast. 1.2s is the par time I can usually meet but I still botch it during practice sometimes. In matches, I hardly think about the reload but they go well. A couple of guys watching me one night made comments that indicated they thought I was pretty good at the mag change, but compared to truly fast people I am not fast. I've tried going for less than 1 second but can't pull it off.

I appreciate your work, jakemaul!

Child's play. I know you know what heat is all about! I am not well suited for the Phoenix sun due to skin type but I stopped using it as a reason to not compete. Now I look forward to going out and sweating during the matches.

I used to keep my support thumb on the frame, before starting to compete, with a grip very similar to Dave Sevigny's. After shooting quite a few rounds in a short time, it got hot enough that I wanted to keep my thumb away. The gun doesn't heat up that much during a typical USPSA or practice stage to make it an issue, but I see wisdom in keeping that thumb off the gun apart from the heat thing.

I'd like to jump in as a Single Stack shooter. A91644 Thank you ZackJones.

What's discussed here is what I've been trying in dry fire. I'll have more to say about it after employing it in a couple of matches. There's a lot more to shooting than the grip of course, but we're talking about an aspect of how the human being interfaces with the gun. So it's a non-trivial topic in my mind. I really like what Moltke said, rings true for me.

They might have trained themselves to use the support hand thumb as a useful tool in keeping the gun on target and/or managing recoil. Those who haven't put much thought/effort into controlling that thumb as it touches the gun, probably get no benefit, or even detriment, to their accuracy.

Wind is a total PITA.

I catch myself squinting my left eye on longer shots, more out of habit than anything. That doesn't help much because my slightly nearsighted aiming eye is great for getting the front sight in sharp focus, but not great at seeing more distant targets. Anyhow, no one that I know of can focus on a near thing sharply and a far thing sharply at the same time with the same eye. Little kids have the best overall vision by far, but I don't know if even they can do that.

As I understand it, the support hand thumb touching the gun can disturb accuracy, even though we don't intend it or think it's happening. Keeping the support hand thumb floating there, relaxed, not touching the gun, is a new thing for me but think it will be good.

Somewhere I saw a discussion about rotating the palms inward to keep them pressed together. Was that the concept? I've been trying that, along with a definite but not too uncomfortable rotating of the support hand forward, keeping the support thumb pointed forward, relaxed, and off the frame. I also now have minimal contact with my shooting hand thumb on top of the safety; it's resting more on the support hand's thumb-base -- I have seen Brian talk about this. Shooting hand grip applies pressure front-to-back, support hand grip applies pressure on the sides. These adjustments make sense to me as I seek the most solid, sensible grip that will provide optimal potential for accuracy and recoil management. I hope I'm getting this. I'll be testing this new-to-me (maybe old-to-others) grip in upcoming matches.

Where's the "Pants On The Ground" guy when we need him?

Rain, no problem. If the match continues, I'll be there. Heat is much harder to endure but I had my best match so far in 115.

Howdy! I probably won't be there this Sunday, but good luck! If you haven't seen it, there's a separate page just for stats about the Cactus Thursday match... https://azshooters.org/tnpm_shooter... much the same sort of thing. That's great! I've been using a spreadsheet to analyze my match scores relative to all shooters and the other single stack shooters. I will use your utility for sure! See you at the range sir!

Hi jakemaul, looks like a useful tool! I'll be shooting my first Steel Challenge this coming Sunday at CCML. I recognize you from the Thursday night matches.

I've been mixing dry fire into live fire lately. This lets me transfer the feeling of keeping the sights still during dry fire, immediately to live fire. This has taught me something. At my first match, I remember how I had come from shooting with a G20 using full power 10mm loads. I found that applying trigger follow-through while just letting the recoil happen was effective in tightening my groups. I just accepted the muzzle rise with bad grip angles. My motivation with that gun was not to shoot fast, just to be more accurate than I initially was. Then as I shot some matches with a 1911, I reverted back to less follow-through as I tried to shoot faster, and my accuracy suffered. Recent dry fire plus live fire steered me toward going back to good follow-through after making sure I'm keeping the gun still during trigger press and not pushing down against the recoil. The result is better accuracy but more muzzle rise if I use my old grip angles. A new thing I'm working with is focusing on grip angles that are recommended by top shooters but which I find uncomfortable. It is worth the discomfort because I'm now in a new world of much better recoil control while keeping the accuracy improvement. It has taken me hours of dry fire and live fire to get to this point and it will take more to really bake it in. I see dot torture mentioned. I have the dot torture sheet taped onto a wall at home and I'm using it a lot. I do the sheet as written, plus I get creative with it, moving from dot to dot in different sequences.

+1 one Dawson Precision. They are a nice information and product resource for sights, among other things.

Thanks Brian. As a beginner I sometimes try to rush.

Best thing is to get out and start shooting matches! Any training you do apart from the matches will then be so much more focused.

I pressed the 'start' button on the movie a few times, and another movie played. It was due to inadequate skills, which I can fix.

Telling yourself you should be in a higher class than you are, based on your awesome shooting skills, is doing yourself a disservice. You might occasionally shoot an array of targets very impressively, but if you can't do what those in higher classes do when it counts, you don't merit that same higher classification. You might think or want to believe your shooting skills are at their level, but they probably aren't. Sure, you likely need work on your stage planning and that alone might move you to the next higher class, but if you think you've arrived at GM level shooting skills when you're in B class, I think you are deceived.

It's going to save such an unnoticeable amount of weight. I don't get it.