eric nielsen

Best-looking Tac Sport that I have seen.

Cheely mount. Has a very visible dot that can go from pretty dim to much brighter than the traditional C-More. At low setting it may look like a 3-minute size and at full blast definitely looks a 6-minute dot. It also remembers the brightness setting as you turn it off so comes back on at that same setting.

Yes I have people all the time tell me how stupid I am. These big thoughts are just too challenging for me.

This will work: http://www.benstoegerproshop.com/BSPS-BOSS-DOH-Holster-Systems-p/bsps-holster.htm I bought Ben's BOSS hanger & put it on my Comp Tac holster. It's right around 1,000,000,000 times better than the International belt hanger. I do like their holster, the "pop" out of the trigger guard retention is a little nicer than Blade Tech and the fit to the gun is always perfect.

How many Open Nationals have been won with a 9 Major? How many World Shoots? How many serious contenders for these shoot 9x19? Ans key: Zero, One (1990), and very few.

If you check benos forum and the USPSA classified ads you will find very good deals if you are patient. Guns based on a wide-body 1911 frame for less money than a new gun built on a compromise platform originally made for 9mm minor. For cheaper brass 9 Major loaded long in SV mags or Caspian Hi-cap mags can be made to work but will always have a significantly smaller envelope of reliable function. If you go with a new gun or almost-new gun, something to be cautious of are new builders who started selling and heavily promoting very expensive guns just a few years ago, or builders who've been around and still don't have a stellar track record. True of any gun type but in Open especially, there is a huge difference between a builder who makes guns that work right the first time, and builders who "stand behind their stuff 100%". Biggest differences are: how many times you ship your gun across the country, how many stages you DNF, and how many seconds of time spent furiously racking your slide at matches. Some forums allow more dissenting opinions than others, for this Google can be your friend, just like if you're looking for reviews and complaints regarding a particular brand of refrigerator or lawn mower. HTH

Anything you do from this within the rules of the range you go to http://www.benstoegerproshop.com/Skills-and-Drills-by-Ben-Stoeger-p/skills-drills.htm An old drill I was doing recently - http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=184713&page=3 - I believe is called "Criss Cross", which is two USPSA paper targets with about one target-width between. At the beep draw and shoot 2 in the lower-A-zone of left target, transition to upper-A of right target 1 shot, transition to upper-A left target 1 shot, transitions to 2 shots in the lower-A of the right target. Then switch. Unlike the Blake Drill, which is great but won't work at your range, the criss-cross drill should have different times for splits and transitions, and different times easy-hard transition vs. hard-easy transition. I cut the A-zones out of a 2/3 size dry-fire target and used that as a template to Sharpie the above targets onto the side of a big cardboard box, then stapled a piece of box lid to the top-center to let the target hang down lower and allow clean shots into the backstop whether engaging body or head shots. Run out to 10 yards this simulates 2 full size targets at 15 yards; I tape between every 2 runs or 1 run if it includes a reload for 12 total shots. Like a lot of drills dry-fire or live-fire, if you try all the possible target sequences you may find the overall time is significantly shorter doing an easy target from the draw and from the reload.

Aliexpress.com. Grey over white Fellcross 2's. $38.90 w/free shipping. I will NOT be showing that website to my wife.

This is a very good thread, thanks.

Shot both my Production CZ's at an indoor range. Came back next day & shot my Open and Limited STI's. Since learning how to split off eye convergence from focal distance (accommodation) I'm shooting better with iron sights than ever before. No more Scotch tape, window tinting tape, squinting for far shots - none of that. I'm able to find a dry-fire par time, then quickly rack the gun and come close to matching that live fire - maybe one shot overtime by 2-3 tenths. AND, am able to see and diagnose where those too-fast live shots went and then bring not only the time but the accuracy very close to the dry-fire. Some of that is getting a perfect solid grip and mashing the trigger with less upset, some of that is the corrective glasses, most of that is the new way of seeing thanks to a clear explanation by Jshuberg, with more detail from this article: http://pistol-training.com/articles/vision Saw that article a couple months ago and for whatever reason didn't "get" it or didn't believe it. Wild guess, many of the past & present iron sights champions see this way. I think Jerry Barnhart was talking about it on his tapes with the camera over his shoulder, also a very old thread on here has Travis Tomasie describing a string with colored beads set at different distances. None of that got through to me. What clicked was holding one target image, 2 thumb images, holding the thumb images apart, and seeing a clear thumb nail. It's still a chore to make that vision "pop" the first time I try it each day, it's sketchy at first but then gets better to where I transition target-target very well and see a very good sight alignment too. Crazy part is even though I love the new sight on my Open gun and have practiced Brian's Transition Drill parts 1 & 2 with the new dot quite a bit, right now i shoot better with iron sights. Slightly slower times with better accuracy and cleaner transitions.

I completely agree with this. Task-shifting is possible but usually both efficiency & accuracy suffer. "Full attention" is a dying craft. I've done 10-hour shifts as pharmacist-in-charge where I take everything as it comes (continuous interruption & re-direction of my thoughts), and shifts where I clump similar tasks into small piles and then jump on one pile at a time till it's done. Long lists of patient home meds, always riddled with nurse transcribing mistakes, get pushed to last. Checking IV's and hazardous drugs gets pushed to shortly before their delivery run-times. Text messages from nurses pile up at my printer until there's about 6-8 of them or 30 minutes goes by, whichever's first. Clinical dosing gets done when it's quiet or gets handed to the other clinical person if there is one. Brand new 1- and 2-line orders from MD's go first, they go fast, and they keep the work-queue looking manageable rather than dire. Newborn's, kids, and ER orders jump the line, those interruptions get allowed into my brain, not much else. Stubbornness about process and flow really pays off. Seen the numbers (we're a for-profit hospital, I have no choice) and the results are not even close. I accomplish far more and have fewer mistakes & do-overs using the triage/clumping method. In my experience the people who brag the most about multi-tasking are the ones who play with their phones and gadgets way too much. [rant: off]

Good thread, Just ordered 250-ct samples of 9mm, both 125 and 147 grain bullets. If I didn't still have a metric sh#t-ton of Bayou 40's I would've got some Blue 40's too. Will load 147's with WSF thru my CZ Shadows and 125's with HS6 thru my Open STI.

More detail, including draw styles of some classic Steel Challenge winners (Barnhart, McCormick). Especially for shooting Open, I think the flat & level presentation is the way to go but try them all. What matters isn't what feels best but what works best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URLTraSQvmE

Go with how the instructor does it; skip how the student does it (changing his wrist angle); put much work into this at all you should be under 1 second. Ron took me from 1.25 to 0.85 in about 3 minutes.

Without the help of a huge magwell i had a lot of problems with the Production mag change too. Remembered a class with Ron Avery where he showed us tipping the magazine into the gun after initially touching the mag to the back of the magwell. Looks like how this guy does it. If you can capture and replay the video at slow speed you see the contact - back of mag to back of mag channel: That helped a bunch but I will be working on the arc-visualization too, I think I need that.

When i got my custom glasses i spent more shooting time with a target focus and tried to "notice" the sights, gave up too soon. Wish someone told me the paragraph i quoted above a long looooong time ago. As they say, the 2nd best day to plant a tree is today.

My Pact III (like the photos in Brian's book) starts to sound like a long beep with a hiccup in the middle when you go under 0.60s; you can still hear the 2nd beep down to 0.50 then at 0.49s it's all one beep.

Thanks, I didn't know about the CO2 cartridge cooling. I bought the Grauffel model Tanfogio Limited Airsoft, fits perfectly into my CZ Shadow's holster. Bought a 2nd mag so now at least I can run them back-back until they peter out from the cooling. I find it's a little loud and scares the dogs so mostly use it in a central closed room like the master bedroom walk-in closet. The trigger is mushy because of the parts but still needs to be reset and prepped - it's pretty good for practicing transitions while working the trigger and tracking the sights.

Before reading this I never got the point of this line of discussion. I was very surprised how easily I could make my eyes do this while running my thumb across an array of dry-fire targets about 8 yards across my living room. It was "almost" as easy with iron sights, exception being the more I made myself aware of sight alignment, the more likely the single target would mush out into 1.5 or 2 target widths. Then I put on my cheapo custom glasses (zennioptical.com) with +0.75D in the right eye and -0.25D in the left eye. MUCH easier to hold the sight alignment and the target focus, because the 2nd 'gun' off to the right is so much fuzzier and the main 'gun' on the left is completely clear due to the correction in the lenses. If presbyopia is your new enemy then this might be your new friend. Thanks J.

Interesting. But - at UF if we referenced Wikipedia that was an automatic F for the assignment.

That is correct, the two markings are the only difference - for Starline brass only.

In Vogel's videos (on DVD or Panteo subscription) he talks about the forearms twisting the hands into the tops of the grips. He never mentions shoulder or chest muscles and I believe (could be wrong) he doesn't use muscles north of the elbows. This makes what he's doing different from what you see in videos by Mike Hughes and Mike Seeklander with the "big dumb muscles" (which has been around for 3 decades or more). At the indoor range a few days ago I spent almost 30 minutes shooting my STI's (open and limited) and CZ's (production) with no target, just blasting into the backstop and watching how the guns recover with different grip styles. For most of 2 years I've used Vogel's grip and it seemed to help control and help point the plastic guns like Glock and XDm, maybe because they're so slide-heavy/frame-light, something like that. I made it work on the CZ's by getting grip panels that were flat on top, also by building my hands up with Captains of Crush #1 and #1.5 - seems like the stronger your pinky fingers, the more you can twist into the top of the grips. I found it hard to do this with the STI's because they are not flat at the grip tops. I've tried the Hughes/Seeklander grip too: more pressure into the bottom rear portion of the grip. For me it seemed to pop the guns back on target with very little effort, once the grip is set up. I found setting up that grip to be un-natural after holding a gun with a neutral Enos grip for many years. The Seeklander type grip also left me with the feeling that the sights were floating up there and not completely under my control; by comparison the Vogel grip does a better job (for me) of pointing the gun where I want it to go. What I settled on this week after all the 9mm, 40, and Super rounds into the back stop is: No twisting with the arms at all. Hold the gun with the hands (title of a podcast by Ben Stoeger). I just grip so hard with the four fingers of the off hand that I can feel the support hand palm trying to crush the left side of my pistol grip. No help from the off hand thumb, it's tucked under the frame alongside the trigger guard. The strong hand pinky finger is also gripping a lot, starting as the gun clears the holster. No tension in the middle finger as it is tied together with the trigger finger by shared tendons. Try gripping something super tight with only the bottom 2 fingers of your strong hand, then work your index finger through an imaginary trigger press; watch what happens to the middle finger. Hope this helps.

I would expect that set-up to fail. In the early days of double-stack 1911-type guns it was very rare to see someone get thru a stage much less a whole match without malfunctions. Until everyone figured out the stacking you need for each caliber, and the width you need inside a mag to get that stacking, the gun were very unreliable. This was with truly great gunsmiths tweaking the feed lips. Even now the Para and the Springfield 40 cal guns use a stacking that's sort of hit/miss; look how many of their sponsored shooters use SV mags with a special mag catch: pretty much all of them do this. You want to use double-stack mags designed specifically for the width of the ammo case.

A good trigger job will trip at less than 2 pounds using a 17- or 18-pound mainspring. Those will light any brand primer w/a decent firing pin. A 15-pound mainspring can give you iffy-looking primer strikes; not many people use a 15; I don't like the way the way they make my trigger feel.

If you really want to improve your efficiency (get higher hit factors) especially with lateral movement, try this at home: Find a hallway in your house with doors opening off to the sides. My downstairs hallway I start - 1. In guest bedroom: draw, engage target, then move to 2. Guest bathroom engage target, move to finish up at 3. Laundry room, engage target; done. Reverse direction drill starts in the laundry room, ends in guest bedroom. For all movement going to my right, I pull the gun back to have the gun vertical about shoulder-high, the slide pointed directly downrange, and I see the slide directly under my right eye. Pushing out to the target and making a clean shot goes quicker and easier than any other gun position (i've tried a bunch). No twist, no elbow up, or any of that. Just figured this out after taking some of Max's advice about dry-fire, see link. For movement going to the left, which is tougher for most right-handed people, I still find a way to get the slide/optic directly under my right eye and when setting up into the 2nd and 3rd positions, I'm still pushing directly out to the target, just that the slide might have been a little bit off from directly downrange (not much). If you engage 2/more targets or have doorways off at angles (like my upstairs) it's a different drill but also good to work on. The less often you mag-change, the more this efficiency shows itself on the timer and on the quality of your shots. So for Open with long mag and an optic, this is a good way to shoot just about non-stop. With mag changes thrown in, I might move my gun off that right-eye/downrange spot a little, but going to my right it's almost no difference and going to my left I commit to moving the slide no more than 45 degrees off of downrange which has worked well for a long time: I've never been DQ'd. Link: