ATLDave

You can adjust HHF all you want, but certain problems are inevitable -see the example stages discussed in my post. This shows up in the fact that there are many classifiers in the system that do relatively little work. Plus, it requires conscious/deliberative "updating." I agree the current system "works" reasonably well. But if HQ is going to mess with it at all, why not go to a better system?

Since USPSA has opened the box of tinkering with classifier HHF's (a system that, at least for established divisions, was reasonably effective at dividing the shooting population into roughly appropriate boxes), I'd like to suggest that we re-think the way classifications are calculated. First, we need to agree on what the purpose of a classifier system is. I would posit the purposes are as follows: To test, under uniform conditions, core shooting skills (as distinct from stage planning or movement skills); To sort competitors into groups of similar shooting skill (i.e., to function as a handicap system); and To allow shooters to gauge their overall progress and standing within the population in terms of skill. If those are the goals, then a system based on percentiles, rather than percentages, seems more appropriate. (If you do not know the difference between percentile and percentage, the rest of this post won't make any sense.) It would also be easier to administer (automatic, really), remove subjectivity, make it possible to include new classifiers easily, make it easy (automatic) to develop appropriate classifications for any new or changed divisions, make it possible for every classifier shot to have an equal likelihood of being used in the system (avoiding the do-no-work classifiers that currently tend only generate "Below" scores in the system), avoid the problem of artificially low/easy HHF's on a few classifiers resulting in easy grandbagging, and help to more meaningfully separate the truly world-class shooters from the "mere" local GM's. How would it work? As now, shooters would shoot classifiers as stages in matches. There would be no change to how the classifiers are scored or how they play into the match. No changes at the match/MD/local level would be required. The only difference is what happens when the scores are plugged into "the system" on Tuesday night (or whenever it rolls). When a shooter's score is uploaded, it will be compared to all the uploaded scores on record of all other shooters in the division. Instead of a percentage being calculated against a particular HHF (however that is chosen/calculated at present), the percentile of the score is used. I.e., if 50% of the scores are above a particular shooter's HF on a classifier, and 50% are below, then that is a 50% for classification purposes... regardless of what percentage it is of the highest HF on record or other arbitrary HHF. One's classification would simply be an averaging of some selection of these percentile scores (we could keep the 6-of-8-minus-exclusions methods if desired). Why would it be better? For a whole bunch of reasons. Because the percentiles would reflect the actual performance of shooters, there would be no risk of a poorly-chosen HHF. Because it would update continuously, it would prevent HHF's from being outdated - if the population got better, then the percentile rank of a given HF would move down, and vice versa. It would automatically and swiftly set the proper levels for new divisions, or divisions after gear/rule changes. It would allow competitors to accurately know how they rank against the population of USPSA shooters, not just an imaginary HHF shooter. At a deeper level, it would do a better job of capturing the real differences in performance among shooters at all skill levels. Let's make up a pair of hypothetical stages. One is similar to El Prez, but shot at 10 yards with relatively close spacing between the targets, all of which are open. The other has exactly the same targets and the same distances and spacing, but has no shoots in between the targets eliminating the sides of the D-zones. For a high-level shooter on a good day (maybe what HHF is supposed to capture?), the times and hits on those two stages will be very similar... they'll be able to rip all A's quickly... they wouldn't be likely to hit a D, so having no-shoots covering some D-zone makes no difference to their score. On the other hand, for a lower-skilled shooter, they may have to slow down by a measurable amount in order to be assured of staying penalty free. Or they will have a much higher chance of getting one or more penalties. A HHF selected to reflect what is appropriate for a strong shooter will either mean lots of "below" coded scores for less-skilled shooters on the harder stage or lots of outlier/grandbagging scores on the easier stage. Alternatively, a HHF selected to reflect this change in difficulty/set appropriately for lower-skilled shooters (which would require a lower HHF on the harder stage) would result in high-skill shooters smashing the HHF and posting scores well over 100%. Similar dynamics manifest with lots of the long-distance "standards" type classifiers, where lower-skilled shooters simply cannot make the shots reliably enough to get scores that even count in the current system. It would also reflect the full range of approaches to a classifier stage. Both the "match mode" runs and the "hero or zero" (regardless of how they turn out) runs would factor into the score distributions. This system would also do a much better job of measuring the differences between highly-skilled shooters. As skill level/performance level increases, real gains in skill/performance come in smaller and smaller increments. Each successive tenth of time shaved off a draw or reload is harder than the previous one. At the upper reaches of the sport, a repeatable 3% difference in HF on a set of classifiers may represent a far larger gap in skill - a gap that then shows up as bigger differences in overall match performance. There are other reasons this would be a superior system, but these seem like more than enough to me. As long as USPSA is tinkering, let's go to a rational system. People and organizations whose livelihoods depend on predicting outcomes based on tests almost universally use percentiles, rather than percentages, for their systems. It's simply a better approach.

I see references earlier in this thread to a list of changed HHF's for limited. Does anyone have a link to that list/chart?

Do these work with the Henning flat trigger?

Interesting!!! Define "drop into"? Using the original slide? Any sense of the likely price point (not going to hold you to it)? I assume that it will not then be compatible with a Gold Team upper?

Apolo, are you doing 9 major or 38 super?

Does Canyon Creek still do that? (Or even exist?) What other FFL's are building Tanfo' race guns?

How do you like it in the open configuration? Have you had difficulty loading to major PF? Challenges getting it to run right?

I've been shooting a Tanfo' LTD in Limited division for several years. I have a lot of muscle memory/indexing built up on this "platform." I feel like I know reasonably well how the internals work, how to fix them/keep them running. I'm toying with getting an open gun. I have no intention of becoming a full-time open shooter. I'd like to maintain the ability to go back and forth between the open gun and my limited gun. Obviously, the CW is to get a 2011-based open gun. (But the CW was also to get a 2011-based limited gun... you see how much regard I gave that!). So I'm here for the crowdsourced wisdom: is Tanfo' stupid for open? Are Gold Teams feasible? Possible to keep them running? Are there readily-available options for changing out the barrel if the popple holes are making it difficult to make PF? Educate this ignorant, iron-sighted peasant, please!

In doing that drill, I can pull the trigger straight to the rear and hold the sights pretty steady for one shot. When I start hammering the trigger repeatedly, I find that I get more up-and-down oscillation than left-right. Often a hop up. I have no suggestions, just sharing your pain, OP.

Screwing with major PF scoring would do as much damage to LTD as adding 8-shot guns did to revolver. The difference is that revo' was already a troubled/marginal division at the time of that change, while this nonsense would blow up one of the biggest (often THE biggest) division in the game. It's beyond moronic.

IDK what is going on with the OP in particular, but I know I (like others here) had a little difficulty initially adjusting to the DAA holster after running kydex gun buckets. As noted above, the first inch (or even less) of travel has to be "on-plane" and in-line with the allowed movement of the insert in the holster body. If you're off-plane with your draw motion, it's gonna bind up. After a bit of work/practice focusing on a consistent motion, this became a total non-issue for me. I haven't thought about it in a couple of years except for when people ask questions related to it. Note: My gun is a Limited, but it should have the same frame/trigger guard as the Gold. But with Tanfo tolerances, who really knows???

It seems very accurate/repeatable, it's just a commie (likes the metric system). I have a smart phone, so converting numbers is NBD.

CHA-LEE, yes, I have been using a grip dyno. In fact, I got it after reading your posts about the correlation between overall shooting skill and hand strength. I even took it to a couple of matches to try and start gathering a micro-sample of the same kind of data you had collected! I got the same one you link to via Amazon. Works well, although, for some reason, mine is stuck in measuring in kG, not lbs, so I have to use a converter on the numbers it spits out.

Here's another approach that is 100% compatible with the existing rule set: Announce that an upcoming match will be "carry gun friendly." Figure out what kind of shooting people are most disadvantaged on by using a smaller gun, and then don't build stages that feature that. We do that sometimes at the small indoor match that we run, and try to make the stages compatible with carry gear. That means that we build stages that don't have 30 required rounds. We generally have 6 or fewer shots required from any position or view. For people who don't want to draw on the clock from their carry gear, we offer optional table/barrel starts (all shooters get the same choice, so it's equitable). We don't set up 20 yard partials. Some people take the opportunity to use their carry guns. Some people just use their regular gamer gear. The latter still have advantages, but they're no longer as big. More importantly to the shooting experience, the guys using carry guns are no longer worried about being simply unable to put out a respectable performance. They know who else was shooting a carry gun, and they can keep track themselves of how they did relative to each other. All of this is compatible with the existing rules. No new divisions or categories or anything. It works fine. It won't help people who only want to shot a Glock 26 full-time, but for everyone who wants to sometimes shoot a carry gun, or who is running a carry gun until they can figure out their gamer rig, it can be fun. And you can do it right now, without a rule change, without a separate match under different rules, etc.

It goes to whether, from an equipment perspective, USPSA is fundamentally an "experimental" sport or a "constrained" sport. In some sports, the idea is to make the equipment very, very uniform such that only the skill of the competitors is being measured during competition. In other sports, innovation in equipment is part of the game, and the competitive pressures drive that innovation forward over time. Most equipment-heavy sports try to balance these traits to some degree, but have a bias towards one end or the other. USPSA has always been fairly "experimental." One of the original purposes of the sport was to develop and test new techniques and new equipment. By pitting different gun types against each other, over time competitors could see which guns actually provided performance advantages or disadvantages. The creation of a different division for every potential gun-of-interest to some shooter works against that purpose. Think about the last 10-15 years in production. Earlier in that time period, the conventional wisdom was that polymer-framed striker-fired guns were superior, and that DA/SA metal-framed guns were going the way of the dodo. But subsequent events in the competitive world provided strong data that metal-framed hammer-fired guns were at least equal in terms of shooting performance. If along the way USPSA had created a separate striker-fired division, that evidence and knowledge wouldn't have been gained, or at least not as clearly.

OP, what would be the point of this new division? Is it to bring in new shooters? Or is it to give people who really, really want to shoot their actual carry guns but also really, really want to win their division a place to play? What about a 5-shot J-frame revolver division? Lots of people carry those. Will the carry method have to be the same? Is anyone carrying a G19 in a dropped, offset holster with 5 bullet-out magazines on a velcro double-layer belt? What is served by creating a division that lets people compete with what you suppose to be their likely "carry gun," but not protect "carry gear" from competition by gamer belts and hoslters and stuff. Also, doesn't IDPA already kinda do what you're suggesting? I think the fact that our game reveals certain guns to be non-competitive is actually one of the points of the game. The fact that few, if any, serious shooters use the Glock 19's in competition (despite many competitors owning such a gun and being familiar with it) is a useful data point in answering the question about whether it really does give away something in performance to larger guns. FWIW, I'm an MD and get some of the same questions you do. It doesn't bother me to answer them

And we thank you for your effort.

Book ordered. The effective sales pitch, CHA-LEE, was your long history of thousands of helpful, insightful, well-written posts on this board, not the one announcing the book itself. I can't wait to read it.

This isn't exactly like getting a gun on the California state-regulated handgun list!

More offerings for the LTD-division shooters, please!!! Tanfo's aren't just for Production!

I don't know whether you can really do section-wide marketing. Different clubs/matches have very different vibes, and new shooters aren't going to "connect" with all of them, much less a statewide conglomeration. I tend think different clubs/matches have different roles in serving the shooting populace, and some clubs are better suited to be feeders/finders-of-new-shooters than others. Clubs that generally have lots of memory stages and brutally hard shooting and large arrays of distant steel and tons of moving targets, etc.... they are for the shooters who already know the game. I'm the current president of a small, indoor weekly-match club. We end up being a feeder into the larger matches and the sport overall. A lot of people in our area start out shooting just our match, and then branch out to the broader sport once they get into it. Obviously we don't have 100% throughput on this, but if we get an average of one new shooter a week and one out of five decides they really like it and want to stick with it, we end up putting 10 new regular shooters into the local pool every year. So how do we get an average of one new shooter per week? IDK, but that has always been typical. A lot of it has to do with perceived and actual club culture. We have a pretty meaningful facebook presence. Most weeks, we not only post the scores, we do some kind of write-up of the match, usually with a humorous/lighthearted tone. When people do well enough to get mentioned (which is a pretty low bar), then they're prone to sharing the story, or at least liking it on FB. Pretty soon all their friends who are shooters are at least aware of us and think we get together weekly and have a lot of fun (which is true!). At the match, we're small enough that the regulars immediately know who is not a regular... and we introduce ourselves. Some of the more extroverted members make a point of hanging out with the newbies during the match and talking them through what is going on. It helps that we have some very visible and outgoing women and ethnic-minority members, so new shooters who fall into those groups can also feel more comfortable. If I were looking at it from a section perspective, I might think about which existing clubs are best suited to this kind of role. Then see if those clubs have the same vision - are they excited about new shooters and being a place to learn? If they are, then flow support to them. Help those specific clubs in that mission. Or maybe this is a stupid way to think about it, and I'm just captive to my own experience.

I've had a total of 3 interactions with them over the past ~8 years. I've always gotten to an acceptable resolution. It has always taken a little bit of patience on the phone. They don't go out of their way to make sure you are delighted. They start with "no," but, if you don't get angry and just pretend to be puzzled and keep asking questions and don't go away, they eventually figure out that it is better to take care of you. At least that was my experience. Of course, that's a stupid way to do CS, and it would be awesome if the new IFG competition makes them shape up.

TS feel different in the hand. I know of several shooters who sent their TS in for frame grinding back before the TSO came out. The TSO comes closer to the Tanfo frame feel. The TS is closer than a Glock or 2011, but not the same. Worth seeing whether you can cop a feel of one somewhere.

Dropped in for me.