Fishbreath

This guy on YouTube posts match video pretty regularly. Not sure where—we've never interacted, beyond subscribing to each other.

It's not an opinion or an attitude, ultimately: 5.1.9 and 10.5.7 are very clear, and offer no wiggle room whatsoever.

3 over 90% has its own issues—it penalizes you when one really good shooter shows up. There was a C-class guy at Area 2 in 2023 who finished 65.4% of Sailer, which is deserving of a bump to B if any C-class finish is, but he missed out because Sailer put 6.5% on Eddins and 10.2% on Joon Kim.

On the contrary, it makes one more important. How else does the local shooter answer the question, "Am I any good, or is my local competition just bad?"

I like this. Then, maybe we could build up a library of standardized stages so different clubs could set them up, and then shooters could compare their performance to more than just the local guys...

This is only a problem if you're trying to use classification as a system that indicates how good a shooter is now, which it is not designed to be. Dividing shooters into six strata is uselessly vague for that purpose. Classification is the analog to a martial arts belt system, not chess Elo.

Is it possible that there are pre-Practiscore scores affecting your analysis, or are you pulling percentages out of the USPSA website too, to catch legacy scores? I disagree with 'needs'; classification as a 'lifetime achievement award' is no less reasonable than an up-and-down classification system.

Reloads are a wrinkle with that tactic, but it looks like you're accounting for it already!

I agree with RJH that this is an odd critique, not just because (as he says) motorsport recognizes more divisions based on equipment performance than USPSA, but also because it's possible to make a competitive Toyota Tercel in particular in some of them.

It's an international sanctioning body for a sport, so my starting assumption is that it (like all other international sporting sanctioning bodies) is massively corrupt.

I've never put on a major, so I'll defer to someone with experience in that field, but everything I've heard says that cash payments are very hard to extract from sponsors. There's a profit/loss statement for the 2016 Georgia State match in this thread, and they picked up $2000 in cash sponsorships total, against about $23,000 in stuff donations. Nationals might have more pull, but I don't think it has 30 times more pull. On the flip side, there's probably no need for a swag bag line item if we're only accounting for cash—sponsor donations will cover it. I would call 3 ROs per stage understaffed for your average USPSA match, and 15 stages a little short for a Nationals. A stage of normal complexity probably wants a timer guy and two guys off to the sides; three per stage means nobody gets any breaks. Don't forget that your revenue will also be reduced by up to about 3%, for match fees, if you're taking credit cards, which is increasingly expected.

That was motosapiens. For my part, I was roughly break-even on working 2023 CO Nationals, if you count the $130 earmuffs I got at roughly 200th on the prize table. I was close enough to drive the three hours home after the awards dinner, however. If I'd had to stay until Monday, I would have been out of pocket again. Anyone flying, or driving further than you can feasibly fit in on Sunday after the last shooter wraps up, is probably losing money.

That's a really nice piece of work—both the jig and the resulting ratchet. Freehanding it was fine for this job, but I'm definitely going to build something similar if I ever have to do one from scratch. (If I can find the right magic words to make Ruger sell me the part, at any rate.)

I ended up ordering a Grobet parallel barrette escapement file, Swiss cut 4 (part number 31.709), which did the trick nicely. The straight side and safe edge made clean, on-angle filing easy, and the super-fine cut kept the material removal between tests to a minimum. Not too bad a job with the right tools, even if the Ruger teeth are a lot smaller than the Smith teeth on the 8-shooters.

As Schutzenmeister said above, I can't imagine anyone who's actually worked a major match characterizing it as a vacation. It's a substantially harder weekend than shooting one as a competitor.

Lodging isn't really optional. Almost every major match pays that cost for staff if you take a roommate. The RO gift at 2023 CO Nationals was a jersey. Memory might be faulty, but I don't remember a separate staff banquet. The stipend was $25/day. They reimbursed travel costs of up to $375. The last two points are the major differentiators over ordinary major match staff packages, but neither strikes me as excessive when you want the most qualified staff you can get, and you need twice as many (roughly) as your average level 2. I was the only person on my stage who didn't have at least a CRO certification. A large proportion of the difference comes from the fact that Nationals is longer, and daily expenses (hotel, mainly) run higher when your staff is on site for five or six days instead of two or three. Charging people enough to cover the costs (see the hike to $400 for 2024 Nationals) has social media howling with outrage. [correction: there was a staff dinner at the Cardinal Center campground's event hall; don't know why it slipped my mind.]

That's actually what's prompting this job in the first place—I thought I had the pawl fit correctly because it worked without a moon clip in the cylinder, but when it's loaded, the two sticky chambers reveal themselves.

Yeah, I don't know if there's something contractually that makes it better for them to shoot different divisions, or if he just doesn't want to compete head to head with a teammate, but it doesn't bother me in either case. I think it's more of the second reason, but the answer wasn't much clearer for me than for you.

At the Handgun Nationals dinner, Dave said that he shoots L10 because he can do it with a single-stack Ruger with a 10-round magazine, and that he doesn't want to shoot Limited if his only option is a custom gun with 'Ruger' stenciled on the side. If Taurus had one in about 2018, I probably would have started in revolver a year or two earlier than I did.

The short version is that I started shooting revolver because it was hard, not because it was fast. I suppose that's tradition, in a sense, or a twisted sort of fun. I agree with MWP—I think a dot goes against the essence of the division, which for me is "it's the most challenging way you can choose to shoot a USPSA match". I'm also in favor of IPSC parity for reasons I've gone over earlier in the thread. I will still shoot revolver if dots are added (although if I get a World Shoot slot, I won't be shooting a dot until after that's done with). Selfishly, I ask you to vote no on compensators if that's a question, because I don't have a straightforward way of putting them on my guns.

100%. Even in dry fire on close targets, which is about the most ideal case for irons, I'm still a little faster with a dot. The advantage only goes up from there.

Sounds like it's time to invest in some nicer files, then. Thanks for the advice!

To clarify: I've heard a lot of arguments as to why. None of them are convincing.

The one with the cutting surface parallel to the handle, or the angled one?

I have a gun that's perfectly timed on all but two chambers, and binds squeezing the pawl between the ratchet and the frame, which suggests those two teeth on the ratchet need to be reduced just a touch. (Ordinarily I'd fit the pawl a little more, but this gun has been persnickety—in time on these two chambers is right on the edge of out of time on the rest.) None of the files I have are quite the right tool for this job—seems like I'd want something very small (Ruger ratchet teeth, especially on 8rd guns, are not big), with a safe edge. Any recommendations? Is there a specific file for this task? My Googling hasn't turned one up, but I don't know if there's a particular name for it.