NickBlasta

The thing is they don't work. For me, about half the time. The feed lips are too wide for reliable function. You have to form them yourself with a feed lip tool.

Third time's the charm with the reload? Nice shooting!

Gun manipulation? In open? Do you mean 2:54? Yeah, that was mostly a combo of the weird angle and a bad grab on the mag, I'm not usually so bad at the unloaded starts. Actually I should practice that, running to the gun and loading. Most of my table start practice is like 'gun on table in front of you, load.'

12/6/2015 Match Report Open Div - 1st of 5 - 100% Overall - 1st of 23 - 100% Classifier 06-10 "Steely Speed VII" (6A 3.32s) - 9.0361 HF - 88.25% 555 of 555 available points - 111A - 100% (No penalties) Well, finished my first weekend ('real') club match as Master. There was some decent competition actually as most of the other open field was other masters. This was to be an all-steel match so I was excited, I love shooting steel more than anything. It turned out to be pretty interesting and there were quite a few challenging shots. 40 yard plate rack, 35 yard rack, 30 yard rack, among other things. I didn't have my usual patience with steel and rushed a lot of misses, and missing too many times meant I had some unplanned reloads, buuut it was good enough for the win. Classifier was okay, my best run on it so far.

12/2/2015 Dryfire Report I noticed during the last match I wasn't contacting the gun with my weak hand during the draw nearly early enough. Sometimes it was just staying out there until the gun was almost up. So I worked on that with component draws and then simple draws and some bill drills. Felt like a solid practice. 12/5/2015 Dryfire Report Match tomorrow is an all steel match so I set up a bunch of poppers on my wall and practiced drawing to them, shooting, transitioning, calling my shots.

Why hello!

I'd be interested to see data on how often this actually happens. That is, L10 people traveling out of a ban state to shoot matches.

When you say you are getting el pres in 3.3 seconds, what distance, start, and live fire scores are you doing? Because you'd only have to get like 65% of the points to get a 100% classifier with that time. I'd love to see someone do 3.3 in live fire. I do it like it says on the tin, surrender facing uprange, 10 yards. I haven't live fired El Prez in awhile. I'll have to try it and report back. 12/1/2015 Dryfire Report Reigning in the holiday season with El Prezents. If I do 3.5 par I can see everything I need to see for 12 alphas and not feel rushed and never bobble the reload. That's my Steve Anderson for the evening. I ordered some full size targets to use for my live fire so I don't have to use some barely held together second hand targets or scaled ones. This'll be fun.

I have the same issue, as I am generally a lot slower out of the gate than after I am warmed up. I'm considering doing 15-20 minutes of dryfire prior to leaving for the match to see if that helps any.. I don't think that would help. It's not a familiarization issue, it's a match pressure issue. I've learned to just roll with it and accept it and let it propel me into the first stage. 11/27/2015 Dryfire Report Experimenting with the 'scoop' draw today instead of my usual draw where I come down onto the back of the gun and then pull up. The timer tells me it's actually faster than my previous method. I don't know if it's going to matter on a field course, but maybe it'll shave .1 off a classifier for me. 11/30/2015 Dryfire Report Did more work with the new draw starting off with bill drills. I feel sometimes like I have a slow trigger finger. Moved on to work on transitions by running the hopkins.

11/26/2015 Match Report Not so much a match really as an informal event, though it was in a shoot-off format. We drew a pretty big crowd just getting together to shoot pins on turkey morning. Though I've been interested in trying it, I've never shot pins before. It was pretty fun. Everyone was saying you need .45 to really move the pins but I thought that both .40 and 9mm worked very well. The only guy that beat me was shooting a 9, in fact.

That doesn't really matter, because someone could have replaced their frame at some point due to parts wear or failure. This situation is addressed by NROI I do believe. It's not legal to put a G34 slide/barrel on your G35 frame (even though they are identical) and since there's no chance of anyone telling that your gun isn't legal by looking at it, it falls on the competitor to practice good ethics and not break the rules. So it's all on you as the shooter to decide.

11/25/2015 Dryfire Report Long sesh today, focused on a drill I picked up off the internet based on improving transitions. Basically you move the sights to a target, shoot once (and calling your shot) and then as soon as possible, move your eyes to the next target and drive the gun to that spot. In live fire you'd be snapping your eyes to the next target while the gun is rising from the shot rather than waiting for the gun to come down first. I like this, felt it was productive.

11/24/2015 Match Report Open Div - 2nd of 4 - 87.667% Overall - 2nd of 17 - 87.667% Dropped in for another indoor match. Feels like there's more people attending recently, probably due to the crappy weather. 90 rounds is a lot for 3 stages, you can tell an open shooter was in charge this week. I thought I did okay, some of my stage plans were not great and my WHO is soo slow! I don't feel I can go faster without seeing what I need to see for a good shot. I'll have to work on this.

11/23/2015 Dryfire Report Had a productive session today where I warmed up with draws and SHO/WHO work and then moved on to practicing shooting on the move at different paces to see how fast I can go and still call good hits. I wanna go do that in live fire at the range.

11/22/2015 Match Report Open Div - 1st of 14 Overall - 1st of 99 154.88 Raw Time + 9 PD (159.38s total) Well, here's the charity match. Like I explained previously it's an outlaw match that uses USPSA divisions and rules and IDPA targets and scoring. So, my thoughts going in to this were that I've never shot IDPA but I know that the scoring leans towards shooting few points down if possible. So my plan was to shoot way more conservatively than I would normally and shoot mostly 0s. I probably wouldn't pull off a lot of stage wins but the other open shooters would probably shoot it like it was USPSA and have a lot of highs and lows, and so maybe through consistency I could place well. There were also two all-steel stages that I knew I could gain lots of time on, I love to shoot all steel stages. I ended up winning! I had lots of fun and the stages were very interesting. One of my favorite matches this year. Oh yeah, I also got to shoot from a treadmill.

11/21/2015 Livefire and Dryfire Report Interesting day today. I mentioned DFing with unusual targets the other day. It's in preparation for the match this weekend. We have a match here called the Movember Classic, a charity match for men's health. It's also a bring-together match for all the USPSA and IDPA shooters. So it is an outlaw match that uses USPSA rules and divisions, and IDPA targets and scoring. So I did my dryfire today on these. Nothing too complex or pushing myself, ran through a bunch of what are essentially familiarization drills. I found myself several times firing what would be low A-zone hits which would be down 1 here. Don't want that! So I focused on only making 0s acceptable hits. Also man, they have the whole headbox to work with? What luxury. Then I went to the range and did some live fire. Had the place to myself, did 200 rounds. I used the IDPA targets but I only have the 1/3 scale ones I made, so I set up the targets at pretty close distances to translate to 7/15/25 yards. Did some doubletaps, blakes, and bills, easy stuff but great for remembering where that circle is for the match. I also tweaked the feedlips on two of my magazines and confirmed function today, so I'm back up to a full compliment of big and short sticks. This'll be handy for the match as they are also high round count stages for the most part. Should be fun! So pretty...

A few to deltas, no mikes. 11/19/2015 Match Report Open Div - 1st Overall - 1st of 10 - 100% 373 of 400 available points - 55A 24C 1D - 93.25% (No penalties) Got out to shoot another small midweek match after work. It's starting to get dark early again. And cold! I could barely feel my hands on the COF. I find it difficult to shoot when dark, sometimes the target is indistinct in my vision and hurts my shot calling, leading to unnecessary pickups. There was no competition for me, just another guy shooting an open revolver, so I was basically just shooting. I thought my movement shows continual improvement. Preparing for the charity match this weekend with some unusual targets for my dryfire...

11/17/2015 Match Report Open Div - 2nd of 5 - 95.892% Overall - 2nd of 19 - 95.892% 246 of 270 available points - 40A 1B 8C 5D - 91.11% (No penalties) Brutal storm knocked out our power, so since I couldn't work or do much but hang out on my phone, I decided to go to the action pistol match. Driving there was rough, but the match was fun. I think the work I've been doing on my hustle has paid off, but I still need to work on being more fasterer. The deltas wrecked my points kinda, but I was happy with finishing 96% of the GM.

Thank you. 11/13/2015 Dryfire Report Continuing with the gun re-familiarization I did my favorite drill, El Prez. Second run I smacked the mag release with my hand and dropped it. Oops! I find I can hit about 3.5 with really calling all my shots. I can push it hard and go about 3.2 with just seeing the dot on brown. Really importantly though my reloads are solid! I almost never mash it into the magwell and get the mag hung up anymore, used to do that all the time. I did have a funny moment where I missed the magwell entirely and released it and it went flying upwards across the room. Dryfire Report 11/14/2015 Got word the match on Sunday was cancelled due to rain. Does shooting in waders effect your times? Interesting experiment... Anyway. I hunted for matches and didn't really find one I wanted to attend. There was a steel shoot but they didn't allow open guns so I spent a DF session with my 9mm, trying to decide if I wanted to go. I ended up not but it was fun to practice some drills with my G35 anyway! I think I like the holster position in front of my thigh, kinda like appendix carry. Maybe that's dumb, who knows. Work is really killer for me this time of year. I feel bad for training less but it's difficult. Not to find the time but finding the will being so bone tired all the time. Bah humbug!

11/11/2015 Dryfire Report I decided to try a new holster position that's more in line with what I see a lot of open shooters use. Previously I had the gun pointed down-and-back, now it's got the muzzle pointed down-forwards. Feels like it's easier to get a good support hand grip faster on the draw. Since this is the first DF since I've been back, I didn't use a timer. Just ran some draws and then a few times through the "stage" I have set up on my wall, so there was some side to side movement and transitions. Feels good, like riding a bike. Misc Oh yeah, this happened. So excited!

11/8/2015 Match Report Limited Div - 7th of 23 - 70.18% Limited B - 1st of 2 Overall - 23rd of 53 - 58.37% Classifier 99-47 "Triple Choice" (10A 1C 4M 18.42s) - 0.76 HF - 12.11% 565 of 620 available points - 93A 23C 4D 4M - 84.68% (91.13% without penalties) I didn't end up using my G35 after all, but for fun I ended up trading gear with one of our Limited GMs. I used his Glock 24 setup and he used my Open gun. It was pretty fun, and I did okay other than being rusty shooting a gun with irons. I sucked out loud on the classifier on the weak hand portion, all but zeroed it. Interesting classifier though, haven't shot that one before. It was a fun off-season diversion.

11/7/2015 Livefire Report Haven't touched a gun in two weeks! I was in NYC and apparently they frown on that kind of thing there? Now that I'm home again I decided to head out to a range that had been recommended to me. It's a quiet range about an hour away but they have some little action bays so it might be suitable for practice. I didn't spend a lot of time there because they gave me an orientation for like an hour, but I did practice after that for about 300 rounds. I fired mostly drills with my old Limited gun, it's always weird to go back to, but I plan to shoot Limited tomorrow at the match as kind of a fun offseason thing. Hopefully with this new range I can LF more frequently.

10/24/2015 Match Report Open Div - 5th of 21 - 87.139% Open A - 1st Overall - 5th of 107 - 87.195% Classifier 06-04 "Fluffy's Revenge 1" (6A 1B 1C 3.12s) - 12.1795 HF - 82.13% 623 of 685 available points - 89A 19B 24C 3D 2M 1NS 1P - 85.11% (90.95% without penalties) I decided to go down to Oregon for a match because I'd be leaving basically the next day for vacation. I like to shoot, okay?! It was an interesting match and I didn't shoot particularly well, there were several cases where I didn't take enough care for shooting at partials. I also hate it when people decide to use a random squad order on every stage. Just go one down each time, jeez. But I shot a little above exactly the score I needed on the classifier to (by my calculations) make M next month. Since this is an outdated update I'll mention I went on vacation right after and didn't do any gun-stuff at all. A lil' break has me jonesing for shootin'.

Yay! Switch me to M?

10/21/2015 Dryfire Report Tossed up good old Prez today and ran through it a bunch. I think I like to use this drill as a benchmark for my shooting ability. When I started I could barely scrape 4 seconds, now I can nail it really well in 3.3. Fun stuff. 10/22/2015 Dryfire Report Draws and reloads focus today, started with bill drills and then went to blake drills and blakes with reloads. I think I'm gonna work on changing my hand position for my draw. Previously I would index my hand on the optic with my thumb on the lens housing. Now, if I have my wrist on the magazine floorplate, it's considerably less movement/less awkward. Gonna see if I can switch.