Fishbreath

My scores should be going in soon, but I don't see any other wheelgunners in the partial results presently posted. There's still one more weekend to run the match and submit scores, if you are a match director or have the ear of one. The prop requirements aren't too onerous, and the stages were fun. I only rarely get the chance to shoot against other revolvers, so I hope to see a few in the final results!

To a point, it depends on the match—the higher the target density, the harder it is to keep up with the semiautos. I think you have some low-hanging fruit in transitions on close targets. You were doing a lot of confirmation on easy shots, and can probably afford to push the speed on those a bit. For reloads while moving, I think it's useful to train reloads until your reloads are done before you arrive in your next position (on average), then start working on reloading while moving faster, until you're arriving in your next position before the reload is done. That gives you a nice training rhythm, and ensures you don't over-train either half of the equation.

I wear a golf glove on my left hand. (It's also good for grip with sweaty hands.) The Ruger rod has a nicely rounded end, though, so I don't need as much hand protection that way.

Jake Martens is getting a review gun for some upcoming Front Sight issue, I heard at Nationals. I can't imagine Ruger would send one out and generate press without having more of the guns ready to go, but then again, maybe that's exactly what they're going to do. Competitors aren't exactly the biggest market—less than 1% of Super GP100s built show up regularly in competition. That's for sure!

It'll probably be one of my big travel matches for '23, given the history. Rare to find more than 5 wheelgunners around here.

Maryland State, more likely.

Nationals less than three hours from my house sounds great to me!

I'm pretty set on going. We'll see how well I can adjust to time plus after a full season of USPSA!

Those look great!

Or, in my case, an angle grinder to take the spur off, a carbide Dremel bit for additional shaping, and a file I don't mind wearing out for finish work. I sure wish I had a mill, though! I'd love to try skeletonizing a hammer.

Carry Optics nationals were always in Talladega in September, so no need.

There are at least three different kinds of focus that come up for me: 1. Ocular accommodation, the distance where my eyes converge, which controls what I see singly and what I see in double vision. 2. Optical focus, what's clear and what's blurry. 3. Perceptual focus, which is a bit harder to explain. If you focus on a wall across the room, and hold up a finger at arm's length in front of your dominant eye, it's possible to look through your finger, so you see a ghostly outline, or look at your finger, so you see a solid finger in front of the wall, without changing accommodation or optical focus. When I'm shooting, my eyes are accommodated to the distance of the target, so I see one target, and my perceptual focus is on the front sight, so I see solid sights over the target. My optical focus seems to vary based on the difficulty of the target. The harder the shot, the more my optical focus comes back to the front sight. The easier the shooting, the more it's on the targets.

I applied to work Classic Nationals, and they turned me down because they didn't need entry-level ROs with two majors on their work records. If Classic Nationals can afford to be choosy, I suspect 4-division Nationals isn't going to be hurting for staff either.

I've done a 1.61, at least. Very easy target, however, and I don't think I've gone below 1.8 in a match. If it's a moving reload, I feel good if it's about 2.0 I've dry fired down to about 1.4 if I'm being even remotely honest with the sights, and high 1.2s if I'm not (pure point shooting, firing the preceding shot on the way back toward me and the following shot on the way out).

8.9 is pretty reasonable for iron-sight guns with moon clips, and even 7.45 wouldn't be out of reach, I don't think. A .9 draw, .22 splits, and 1.6 reloads will do it, by a nose, which would be a great run for me with irons but not a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime run, and I still have a good bit of ground to make up between me and the perennial contenders.

I wonder if there isn't a market for that kind of thing. Picture a 6-stage match with 40 shooters, but $50 instead of $20—so you're grossing $2000 instead of $800. Put $1000 toward staff, and at $50 per slot, you can afford eight setup guys, plus two ROs per stage. (Stick the other $200 into a prop fund, or pay $60 per staff slot instead of $50.) Shooters paste and stack props at the front of the bay when they finish their last stage, and that's all that's expected of them. No second gun to help keep time commitments down. Set up on a Saturday afternoon/evening, and you can run a staff shoot in advance of a Sunday match, and staff shoots free on that day. From the MD perspective, I could ask more of a setup crew I'm paying, which means higher-effort stages, which is tempting for shooters and helps justify the higher price. From the staff perspective, doing something I'd be inclined to do anyway (set up, run tablet/timer), but also getting the match totally free and making $50-$100 on top, seems like a pretty good deal for a local match. From the competitor perspective, I don't know if I'd be willing to pay $50 for a local given the presence of $20 locals, but then again, I'm also a cheapskate, and other people might weigh the benefits of dedicated ROs and setup/teardown crew, plus potentially better stages, differently. Academic for me, since there's a lot of inertia behind our current schedule at my club and it works well for me, but interesting to think about.

A bit more work done tonight. In my parts bin, I have an old Super Redhawk hammer, which I bobbed and tried for a while on the .357 gun. I thought it gave me better ignition then, but it also had a terrible gag at the beginning of the trigger pull... which I now know how to solve. I didn't even have to file on the spare hammer dog; it fit right out of the box. I did two additional things to this hammer tonight: one because it predates Ruger's move to the LCR-style screw-in bushing in the full-size guns, and one to combat hammer drag. The first task involved removing some material from the hammer step. Newer Ruger hammers have a step about 1/8" tall; old ones have a step about 1/4" tall. The larger old-style step hits the firing pin bushing on the newer guns, and the repeated impacts can cause the bushing to back out over time. Very slightly reducing the lower 1/8" of the hammer step means it won't hit the frame/bushing anymore. For reducing hammer drag, I've found that shims are about a 90% solution, and the other 10% can be solved by taking a bit of material off the sides of the hammer toward the front, tapering it like this. It doesn't take much at all: the taper above is substantially exaggerated. This is about as far back as you have to go: This hammer was .407" wide, and is now about .380" wide at the front edge where the file cut the deepest. I'm still missing a little bit: not the circular scratches 2/3 of the way down (those are leftovers from the original shaping), but the tiny discoloration at the right edge of the highlight, between the taper and the rest of the hammer. I think that's probably not enough to matter.

It's better to hit them again with the same gun, from the perspective of diagnosis. My troubleshooting process in practice goes like this: 1. Does it go off if I hit it again in double action 1-2 times? If yes, insufficient primer seating. 2. If no, does it go off if I hit it in single action 1-2 times? If yes, DA hammer/firing pin energy is too low. (Either too little spring, or it's losing energy somewhere in the hammer fall.) 3. If no, faulty primer.

I had similar experiences with email, but no trouble getting him on the phone.

We do half off for Thursday evening setup before our Saturday match, and half off for hauling things back to the prop shed after the match. (Competitors tear down their last stages to the front of the bay, but geography means our prop shed is a long way from our bays, and we only have the one Gator to unload stuff.) We're a relatively small club without a lot of props, so we typically have 2 biggish field courses, 1-2 short/medium courses, and 1-2 speed shoots/classifiers. Setup is usually between 5 and 10 people, and we almost never take more than two hours to get everything laid down. Sometimes even less—May was our most complicated match in a while, in terms of prop count, and we were done in about an hour and fifteen minutes once the full crew showed up.

The NROI blog answered a very similar question a year or two ago, here. TLDR: if the hit penetrates the target, score it as the highest scoring zone it touches. 2A is the right call.

14 stages on 12 bays, so two bays have two stages each on them.

Well, after the best hand filing I've ever done on anything, to say nothing of critical action parts in a gun where 0.01" is a massive change, time for a dive into the inner workings of the Super GP100 again. The hammer dog fit controls two potential trigger problems: an early hitch or wall, and late stiffness/clicking. The early hitch/wall occurs here, before the pawl reaches the ratchet and begins to turn the cylinder. It's caused by too short a hammer dog. With a short hammer dog, you may also encounter a hitch that occurs when you leave light to moderate finger pressure on the trigger, after it fully resets and you start to pull again. It's possible to lengthen a hammer dog, by gently hitting it with a hammer and more or less cold-forging it longer, but Numrich appears to have access to factory-new hammer dogs, so it's possible to dispense with that. The Ruger mavens suggest lengthening the tip, but as I'll get into later, controlling tip length doesn't appear to be how Ruger fits the part at the factory. Mechanically, the binding here happens when the DA sear (the right-angled bottom surface of the C-shaped trigger hook) hits the underside of the hammer, because the hammer dog, being too short, hasn't lifted the hammer far enough out of the way. You can also fix this issue by lightly stoning the underside of the hammer, where the DA sear rides. However, knowing what I do now, I don't recommend that: reducing that surface reduces the DA hammer arc, and you want as much hammer swing as possible. Anyway, moving on. The late hitch/bind occurs here, near the end of the cylinder rotation. It's easiest to feel if you pull the trigger enough to unlock the cylinder, turn it by hand to the next spot, and continue the trigger pull. It manifested as a click for me on all three of my spare, non-fitted factory hammer dogs. This is caused by the hammer dog being too long. The Kuhnhausen shop manual for the Six-series revolvers says it may also appear as stiffness at the end of the trigger pull for very slightly over-length hammer dogs, or hammer dogs with incorrectly-shaped tips. The shape of the hammer dog/trigger cam and DA bearing surface/DA sear changed between the Six series and the GP100 family, so I can't confirm whether that's still the case on the later-model guns. Mechanically, I believe this happens because the hammer dog lifts the hammer too far before releasing it to the DA sear, so the trigger jumps a bit to catch up to the hammer. Let's take a look at the hammer dog now. In this orientation, the hammer goes to the right of the hammer dog, facing left, with the top of the hammer toward the top of the picture. The indicated surface on the top of the hammer dog rests against the inside of the slot in the hammer, and controls the angle at which the hammer dog protrudes from the hammer. The more material there, the earlier it bottoms out in the slot, and the less the hammer dog protrudes. The marked bottom surface is where old-school Ruger gunsmiths suggest working, but I think it's better left alone, based on the following evidence. This is the hammer dog from my 9mm Super GP, fit by the factory to the gun. It is sitting on top of a new, unfit hammer dog. The only obvious difference in profile is at the arrow. It's the same with my .357 factory-fit hammer dog. By controlling the angle of the hammer dog, you control its length relative to the trigger surfaces. So, in my admittedly limited experience, the surface indicated by the arrow is the only one you should adjust—stick to polish everywhere else. The process I recommend is this: If your hammer dog is slightly short, try hammer dog shims. (Lance Shively sells them, and you'll probably need some of his shims to get the hammer-to-frame fit right anyway.) Eliminating hammer dog tilt may bring you back into spec. Otherwise, buy a few from Numrich, and fit them to the gun. As far as I can tell, you want to change the angle of the indicated surface while removing as little as possible from its bottom corner. Here are two reference photos. The hammer dog on the left is the factory-fit one in my 9mm gun, which had slightly too much protrusion (too much material removed). The one on the right is a new, unfitted part. You want something in between. The factory-fit part is on the left. The part I hand-fit is on the right. The difference between good and bad is extremely subtle, so work carefully and check often. I did most of the material removal with a 400-grit diamond file, checking frequently, then switched to a 600-grit diamond file once I got close. This surface doesn't need to be polished—it doesn't slide against other metal pieces, merely serves as a stop for the hammer dog. I don't recommend anything more than polish on the bearing surfaces, the two bottom facets of the hammer dog by the words 'bad fit' and 'good fit'. Even very fine-grit stones or sandpaper can remove enough to cause trouble, based on the saga of this gun. I put a little dot of Flitz on a patch, put the patch on my bench, and rubbed the dog on the patch until the surfaces felt smooth. Putting sharpie on the tip and working the trigger a few times suggests that both of the bottom facets on the hammer dog are implicated in the DA trigger pull: the long one on the right side of the hammer dog (facing back into the hammer, slanted up and to the right in this photo), and the short one on the left side of the hammer (facing forward into the gun, slanted up and to the left). The end result is a near-perfect pull—I ding it for a bit of stacking at the end, but not enough for me to notice even at casual group-shooting pace. Hopefully this is helpful to someone else down the line, looking to better understand the Ruger trigger.

Based on the data on this year's classifier HHF updates from USPSA Insights, I'm pretty confident in guessing that HHF updates are a manual process, or at most semi-automatic. A great many classifiers didn't change, even in CO, which has no shortage of recent data and also uses Production HHFs for all the pre-18 classifiers. In Revolver, the 18 series got uniformly harder (except for 18-01), along with 20-02 and 09.04. 20-01 and 20-03, which used Production HHFs and required a reload, got substantially easier. Notably, none of the classifiers pre-18 with forced 8-round sections changed. (I'm doing my part to generate data for those by setting 100s. ) I think that's much more the source of any perceived softness in revolver than HHFs too slow to adjust. Philosophically, though, I think it's fine if classifiers represent super squad match pace rather than super squad hero/zero pace. Using the very best run as the HHF can pollute the data: there's not a lot of oversight of local matches, and incorrect setups or score entry fumbles do happen. It's difficult to tease those out from valid data in an automated fashion. More pragmatically, I think slightly too soft is a better error than slightly too hard—Open M, for example, seems to trap a lot of people who are in the running for wins at majors, and I think that's bad for the same reason that I think sandbagging is a worse sin than grandbagging.

You steal a reload on the sixguns on 99-57, but 13-04 and 18-03 are both fair. (Maybe even a little 6 Major-biased.) 09-10 doesn't take an extra reload, but I think it's more natural to shoot with 8 than with 6.