Bamboo

I use a 9mm single stack in USPSA and a rat-rodded tanfo 9mm (limited elite lower with cut back dust cover, and a 9mm longslide conversion) which is my action steel gun. The tanfo is an easy gun to shoot and works great in the limited class for action steel. It is plenty accurate for the steel games. I'll say that I like the Henning magwell a lot just for the improvement in the grip, it is also a great mag well. Rich's are great also, but need to be epoxied or welded on. Either one is better than a stock limited magwell.

I enjoy the process and wish I could always approach it as a therapeutic zen session. But, sometimes I just need good ammo and am focused on the product of reloading. So, for me it is 50/50.

That is impressive! Being able to walk and using both hands point shoot at will different targets at various distances...wow! I had to look his name up - Vitaly Kryuchin - a very active IPSC shooter in Russia. He has done pretty well at several world shoots, and has been MD and the Russian Representative to IPSC. I wonder if he ever shoots steel challenge type stuff?

Funny you wrote that. A while back I let a young hot production shooter mess with an open gun and I actually felt a little guilty....almost like I was introducing him to crack or something equally evil. After steaming through the plate rack a few times and doing a some impressive bill drills on paper he said he liked his CZ production gun better and thanked me. I thought that was cool. Odd, but cool. Maybe he was too polite to say that he will wait to get into open until his eyes go bad and he is too slow to reload. i donno. My eyesight isn't that good any longer, but what I found is that good single visions that allow a decent front sight focus let me to shoot irons pretty well. For the red-dot open guns I use mild progressives for a target focus. So, glasses with a good prescription for shooting can help a lot no matter what type of gun you choose to shoot. Definitely try a few open guns out if you can. Not everybody takes to their feel. Also, they require more attention and the oddest stuff can make them finicky, which can be frustrating. I like open, but I really like revolver a lot, too. Been playing with single stack minor lately and doing OK, but when the weather cools down will go back to open. It is all good. Hope you find your happy place!

Some suppliers like Bayou will let you request specific diameters. Also, many offer the same bullet profiles in 9mm/38 super at .356" diameter, and .357/.38 special at .358". I've had good results using .358 bullets in my 9mm guns. If you get hang ups because of the larger diameter you can get the chamber throated to accommodate lead bullets. Beven Gram has a reamer special made for the slightly larger lead bullets and his fee for reaming a chamber is very reasonable.

I like the lee dies a lot (550 and 650 user here) and agree they make good ammo. One thing they do is size farther down on the case, which is both good and bad. The good part is that the finished ammo has fewer rejects when gauging, the bad is that the funnel lead-in feature on the sizing die is smaller than other brands. So, if you are running a progressive and the case is leaning or not completely centered you will probably crush the case with the die. On a 550/650 I can feel the occasional hang up, stop, and tap the case so it is centered and continue. On a 1050 I think it is a little more difficult to interrupt the down stroke to align the case. The Dillon sizer has a very generous lead-in feature to align the case to the die to prevent this. So, as Vlad said you might want to mix and match your dies to match your needs. I'm sure real 1050 users will chime in soon with what they find works.