johnsons1480

Dillon 550 I'm pretty sure you can adjust the height of the ram which seats the primer so you can really lean on it. I load on a 650 and I slightly flatten the primers in their pockets. I'm mashing them in there. They're below flush. I ordered a 13 lb spring, we'll see what happens. Maybe I need to polish the strut more? I did some basic polishing, but maybe I need to make that thing shine.

Got the new sight on the gun and got it zeroed and lock tighted after my session. Thanks to Dave at CGW for standing behind his products, and getting me a new sight out so quickly. Had a good day at the range yesterday. Did the dot drill to start, got 2/6 of the dots. I know what the problem is. I draw my focus from the front sight to visually verify my shots every time. I really need to work on maintaining that hard front sight focus with this drill. Ran the Blake Drill at 10 yards. My best run was 2.07 seconds, 28 points, 13.53 HF. I had some really good runs, and really focused on transitioning with my eyes instead of following the gun. My averages times, points, and hit factors were better than when I ran this at 7 yards the last time I ran it. That feels really good to see marked progress. Singles at 10 went well too until my rear sight drifted clean over to the right. I wanted to verify zero after the session and lock tight it then, but not locking it down first was a mistake. It didn't cut me too short though. My best run was 1.73 seconds, 15 points, 8.67 HF. It's a little slow, but I felt good about it. All in all, training is going very well. Dry fire has been happening every day but Sundays. I just did reloads all week last week until I got my sight back and installed. I'm going to be changing things up a little. I emailed Ben Stoeger with some questions and he got back with me. Based on his suggestions, I'll be doing live fire monthly as follows. Session 1, one marksmanship drill, one to two core USPSA skills drills Session 2, two field course drills Session 3, one marksmanship drill, one to two core USPSA skills drills+ Session 4, two short course drills I'll pick them out a month at a time, here is what I'm running this month

Dillon 550

I'm having an issue that's been infrequent enough that I've ignored it until now. I have a CZ 75 SP-01 with a HS-12000 hammer spring. I case gauge all of my ammo and check for high primers. When using Federal primers, I would have a 1 in 600 or so rounds fail to ignite. That's about once every other practice session. If I pulled the trigger again, they fired. This is an issue whether or not the gun has been recently cleaned, oiled, whatever. I switched to CCI recently, and yesterday I had 3 primers fail to pop. They were all DA pulls when this happened. I stuck them in a magazine at the end of the session and was able to fire all 3 rounds in single action. I know the hammer has more travel and more force in SA, and that's why it worked then. All that being said, I've polished the crap out of this pistol. I have the extended firing pin, reduced power firing pin spring, reduced power trigger return spring, etc. I have all the go fast parts. Should I just switch to the HS13 for my own sanity and assurance that all CCI and WIN primers will pop always? Or is there something I may have missed when polishing that I should try polishing again?

I got Orion Arms to do my SBR lower. They did a fantastic job. Here's their website http://www.orion-arms.com/

I'm currently dry firing 15 minutes a day using the "Fast, but inaccurate" plan in Ben's dry fire book. I'm live firing once a week with ~300 rounds. Every month, I pick one drill from each section to address an area of weakness I have. That's four drills (one from Marksmanship, Core USPSA Skills, Field Course, and Short Course), one for each week of the month in live fire. At the end of the month, I look at where I've progressed and where I'm still lacking, and pick four more drills for the next month. I'm currently trying to work hardest on transitions, so this months drills focus primarily on that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOll9_IF9X4 Moved the video to my new channel

It's not a CZC sight

Got in touch with the manufacturer, and he's sending me a brand new rear sight free of charge. They were already aware of the issue, and had previously redesigned the sight so this doesn't happen anymore.

Wow! I've seen front sights shear of from bring banged againsts ports, walls, etc. but I have never seen that. Now that sucks! I have never seen or heard of it either. Just got an email back from the manufacturer. He told me they were aware of the issue. They redesigned the sights after finding out about the issue, and he's sending me one of the new ones free of charge.

Fixed sights break too. Mine broke with about 6k rounds through the gun. Not clear on how it happened, but it snapped in half while I was practicing yesterday in the middle of a string. I don't shoot 3 gun, throw it in dump buckets, use the sight as a slide racker; in fact, I'm generally pretty nice to this gun.

Not one that would be any good to me. I have my Glock 34, but that seems counter productive to train with in the interim. I'd love to get a backup gun, but it's not in the budget at the moment.

I went to the range and did Criss Cross today. What an interesting drill. Definitely showed me that I'm following the gun when I'm transitioning. I was able to start transitioning with my eyes and shaved off some time by the end of it. Got about 280 rounds in, and I was going to run the drill 2 more times. Then, while shooting the second to last string, my rear sight broke in half and flew off. These are fixed sights so I'm pretty surprised by this. Not happy this happened, but at least it didn't happen in the match Saturday. Going to call the MFG tomorrow and see if there was a bad run or something. I'm not throwing the gun around or anything, and I rarely even touch the rear sight. Seems like every time I get back in the groove of dry fire, live fire, and shooting matches, something breaks down. First the holster, now this. Hopefully I can get it taken care of soon. Until then, I'll be practicing my very slow reloads in dry fire I suppose!

Forgot to add my takeaways. I would say my transitions are the lowest hanging fruit. I am going to look at my training plan today and try to figure out where I want to go with things. I'll report back when I have that figured out.

Shot the best match I've probably ever shot Saturday. It was a 7 stage club match. Third place in Production, shot 69% of a legitimate GM. No classifier stage at this match, which was kind of a bummer. Here are the results Match https://practiscore.com/results.php?uuid=f9e05810-765e-49fd-bc71-53a464a9d47f Individual

Dry fired all week, and shot Fixed Time Standards A on Friday. That drill was tough. Here are the results. The goal was 80 points The first run, 28/90 available points Second run, 51/90 I then started shooting the strings individually 13 times 10 yards WHO, High 19/30, Average 13/30. Average Draw 2.18 sec 20 yards SHO, High 24/30, Average 13/30. Average Draw 1.83 sec 30 yards Freestyle, High 22/30, Average 19/30. Average Draw 1.98 sec Then I shot it a third time, 40/90 points. I feel like I could pour a whole lot of effort into this and shoot the goal points. I don't think mastering these skills would be the best use of my time though. It got me more comfortable shooting at 30 yards, SHO, and WHO shooting and draws. That's what I'm taking away from it.

No

I had a pretty good match today. Glad I could shake off this first stage. This was an odd stage, all mags needed for the stage had to be on the start barrel. I was going a little slow, but doing alright until I got to the steel. The plan was to bring two mags to the 3 poppers and the Texas Star at the end of the stage. I put one in the gun as a reload, and I was supposed to set the other one on the barrel. If you notice about the 25 second mark, I just throw the magazine at the barrel and somehow expected it to stay put. I saw it skid off the barrel, and proceeded to knock down the 3 poppers and all but one plate on the star. I was hoping I cold reach for it, but it was way down there. Had to laugh about it after the fact! https://youtu.be/Ebkpj1Vrgnc

Welcome aboard! What area of Houston?

13-04 hhf has apparently changed. The old limited hhf = the current production hhf The old open hhf = the current limited hhf the current open hhf = even higher. I checked peoples scores from the last match and this seems to be true. Do you have some numbers for me? 13-04 on 5/2/15 Open: 11.6737 HF = 88.4371% Limited: 10.6557 HF = 86.4910% Production: 8.4034 HF = 72.1290% Singlestack: 9.6107 HF = 82.4917% Revolver: 1.4563 HF = 15.1697% Updated open and limited. Production had been updated from someone else's results already, single stack remained the same. Revolver wasn't on the list so it's on there now. Thanks for your info! Keep it coming guys.

13-04 hhf has apparently changed. The old limited hhf = the current production hhf The old open hhf = the current limited hhf the current open hhf = even higher. I checked peoples scores from the last match and this seems to be true. Do you have some numbers for me?

Not a valid test. If you gave me 78k+ rounds (1000 round break in, 300 rounds for 12 stages, 3 calibers) I bet I would get better as the test went along.

I am always blown away by Donnie's customer service. I called him this morning and asked for a case of non-standard .357 sized 124 gr RN bullets in green. He told me he had some unsized bullets, and he would have them sized and in the mail by this afternoon. Donnie is the man!

Had the best day of practice in quite some time. I did about 200 bullets of distance changeup, and focused on accuracy at first. After I was comfortable with my hits, I started pushing the speed a little. I shaved about a second off of my run with comparable hits. Then I did 15 yard bill drills. I started out just pushing for A's, and I was hovering around 3.5 seconds with all A's. I started pushing the speed, and my best run was 2.51 with 3As and 3 very close Cs. I'll keep working on my draw speed in dry fire, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I was around 1.5 seconds on the draw to 15 yard popper, and I don't think I missed it a single time. A couple of things have changed since my last discouraging practice. I focused solely on grip in my dry fire sessions the last few days. I think I can move back to doing regular drills, but I need to continue to emphasize grip in dry fire. I changed from an SP01 slide stop to a regular CZ 75 slide stop. It's just out of my way now. It was messing up my grip and my gun wouldn't lock back when empty. Switching that out removed an obstacle to me being able to place my thumbs correctly. And lastly, I switched to VZ Diamondback grips. I have tactile feedback now when I'm not gripping hard enough. I can feel the difference in dry fire when I'm griping properly. They are a little less thick than the rubber grips, and I feel like they fit my hand better. All in all, I feel like they were a good purchase. Glad to have a great day at the range finally. Hoping to get out for another practice on Friday, and then a match on Saturday.