Fishbreath

World shoot qualification is 50% USPSA Nationals results, which means you need to shoot an optic/comp revolver (which means you need one in the first place) to qualify for an iron sight event. USPSA is IPSC, even if people often forget or ignore that—tinkering with divisions to make them further from their IPSC counterparts is not something I'm favorably disposed toward, even if most people don't participate in international-rules IPSC events in the US.

I have two main objections: 1. With modifications to revolver rules, anyone interested in international competition has to either shoot US competition with an unlike gun, or intentionally handicap themselves in US competition. Picking who goes to shoot irons revolver against the best irons revolver shooters the rest of the world can muster based on who's the best dot shooter is backwards. 2. Dots will absolutely not reduce the barrier for entry. Revolver is already the hardest division to experiment with, because the bare minimum cost of entry is an $1100-$1200 gun and an entirely new set of belt gear, and the cost to be competitive is that plus the cost of gunsmith work, or the cost of learning to do it yourself. Adding an optic plate, a decent dot, and a compensator/porting is another $500 minimum. If IPSC eventually wants to turn revolver into an optics division, I have no issue with USPSA following suit, notwithstanding critique #2—revolver is only ever going to attract the kind of shooter who is deeply fascinated with the guns. Until that time, the furthest I'm willing to go is revolver categories in Open and LO to accommodate optic+gas-redirection and optic guns.

Certainly I don't want to be sacrificing the 5-10% a dot buys me! Any changes wouldn't take effect until 2025, at this point, so at least all the World Shoot qualification matches would be irons-only.

I was going to say I don't remember it being like that, but on looking at the 2022 scores again, I guess it was. I'd say that almost every division is a foregone conclusion or close to it, at a mixed-division match; it's particularly apparent in revolver because there are fewer of us total, and therefore fewer samples on the skill curve to bump into one another. For my part, I'd be shooting revolver whether or not there's a division for it—I'm at least as interested in how good I can get with it, as I am in direct competition.

The embedded assertion here is that lots of divisions is a problem, and I haven't yet heard a convincing argument as to why.

A revolver category in LO/CO would be interesting. So also, I think, would a revo category in Production—just steal IDPA's gear rules. (Maybe ESR, maybe SSR, maybe some hybrid.) That gives people a place to dip their toes in with the six-gun that they already have in the safe.

I'm not opposed to optics, but it seems wrong to have them in the division that controls access to IPSC (iron sight) Revolver. I'll be voting 'no' this time, personally.

There are a couple of engineering choices I think are better on Rugers. The cylinder release mechanism is the biggest one (at least once you put a big paddle on it). I had a 929 briefly, and that was far and away the biggest hangup for me. I think the crane retaining pin vs. yoke screw also goes to Team Red. The actual action seems easier to reckon with on a Smith, although Olhasso's Super GPs are comparable to the worked-over Smiths I've pulled the trigger on. (Mine are pretty good, but not quite that good, or at least not yet.) edit: I will say that I bought my first Super GP because I'm an admitted gun hipster and hate to shoot what everyone else is shooting. See also why I don't enjoy Carry Optics very much.

Every time I've emailed Bowen, the end result is, "Give us a call to place an order," so skipping to that step might get you over the hurdle with them. The Bowen extended firing pin comes with a drawing of their tool a machine shop could work with, too—if you know a guy, I can send you a copy of it. When you inevitably break the pins off in the tool because of over-torque, a shop magnet helps to pull them out so you can replace them. Bowen sells drill rod with the tool so you can make replacements, but I have the McMaster-Carr part number for additional replacements written down, too. There might be a size of snake-eyes bit that works. It occurs to me that I can probably check that against the tool drawing. A shop torch is handy for loosening up whatever threadlocker the factory puts on the bushing. edit: I heard somewhere (don't remember where) that Ruger is more willing to sell you the 'factory fit' parts if you know their internal part numbers, but I don't know the one for the factory bushing tool.

Reddit. As I understand, Brian Enos doesn't care for non-shooting talk, and still holds some sway even though he isn't running the place anymore, since it's his name on top of the page.

I like irons too, for a similar reason. I started in revolver because after a season of Carry Optics, I thought the dot in particular made it too simple to shoot competently. Dots on wheelguns wouldn't be the worst thing, but I would grumble about the change. I have other guns to shoot when I want EZ mode vision.

It's small but nonzero, and it's not just competitors—going by production numbers, way north of 90% of Super GP100s never see competition, even though they're ludicrously impractical for anything else. In looking at Gunbroker sales, it appears the .357s are going at an almost reasonable $1400-$1500 lately, and the serial number on one looks up to a 2023 date of manufacture—it looks like they dropped a small batch recently.

The person I'm thinking of wasn't a shooter, but a Beretta administrator of some kind, and I could almost see the "oh yeah, we import that, don't we?" expression when I mentioned Manurhin.

I talked to some of the Team Beretta folks at CO Nationals, because they noticed I was shooting my 92X there, and told them to give me a call if Manurhin ever wants to get into the 8-round competition revolver space.

Try checking with Alex Chu/@ethalider on Instagram (and evidently here, although no idea if he's active). He runs one now and then, and also ye standard 929. I think his was some kind of promotional/sponsorship deal, so he may not be able to be totally honest, but I don't know of any other Americans who actually compete with one.

Thanks!

I've actually had good luck dropping in used hammers from Numrich or Ebay—my main match gun has another gun's hammer in it. Across maybe five or six I've bought, I don't see much evidence of factory fitting to the hammers themselves. The part that 100% must be fit to a particular gun is the hammer dog, and those are cheap and readily available on Numrich as well.

1. The lowest I've gotten one that resets reliably and shoots most of the time the hammer falls is in the 5lb-5.5lb range. It was relatively trustworthy in 2020/early 2021 with some old Winchester primers, but got pickier when I switched to Federals, strangely enough. (Haven't gone back to Winchester to test since—maybe I will this offseason; could be better sensitivity to slightly off-center hits, which are kind of a Ruger trademark.) 2. My match guns are all in the 6.5lb-7lb range now, which is reliable enough that my first thought when the gun goes click instead of bang is 'bad primer', and that's usually what it is. There's probably some meat left on the bone at 7lb—Olhasso's guns are nicer than mine, by a detectable margin—but I'd rather spend the time dry firing than figuring out exactly which dimension needs to be a few thousandths different. Most of my guns have newly-fit hammer dogs to smooth out the transition between DA bearing surfaces. The factory usually gets it pretty close, but when they're wrong, they're almost always wrong on the 'removed too much material' side. 3. Not that I've noticed, at least! I haven't put it to the test scientifically, but I doubt the effect size of 7lb to 5.5lb is bigger than that of a week of focused practice, say.

A few places to look: 1. Firing pin return spring. They break eventually, especially given dry fire with a full-weight hammer spring. I found pretty much the same spring at a spring supplier, and I don't think it's meant to compress as far as it does in this application. I'm working on finding some good alternatives, but that's still a work in progress. The gun will still work most of the time, but it's possible for the spring debris to wedge the firing pin in the channel, so that it gets stuck forward in the divot of a fired primer. Bowen Classic Arms makes a handy wrench to remove the firing pin bushing. This was the source of my weird gun-freezing problems in 2021. 2. Trigger plunger. If it's juuuust on the edge of too short, the cylinder latch can occasionally jump back up into the notch before the cylinder starts to turn. Fitting it for pure function isn't too bad, but it also controls how much trigger return spring you need, and dialing in a light reset spring (for an overall light pull) is a 'two strokes of the file is enough, three is too many' kind of scenario. 3. Speaking of which, trigger return spring. If you have a reduced power spring, and it's wearing out, you might not be getting a full reset. Easy way to check is to let the trigger out as slowly as you can while pushing to one side. If you don't get the final reset 'click', stronger spring might do the trick.

I use the Uniquetek/PhotoEscape funnel too, which solved bullet feeder issues I was having.

Under '2023 US IPSC Nationals': https://practiscore.com/results/new/876c1126-9afe-4413-a6c6-c3ba46a5b906

To be clear, my 1st-person and 3rd-person footage is of #4 #5 (I might not like the result of Vincent pulling out a stage win on 7 to pip me to the line by three match points, but I can't deny it was clutch!). It's always nice seeing footage from the folks to whom I'm still giving up a bit of time, though! Helps to direct practice.

I haven't gone over it in detail yet, but I think I have 1st and 3rd-person footage of everything, which will eventually make it online.

Oops, missed this earlier. The hammer, pawl, and transfer bar* are from the Super Redhawk. I've put a couple of new hammers into my guns. So far, all of them have required fitting on the hammer dog, but not on the hammer proper. Info on that process is here. It's an easy job, but it's also really easy to take too much off, so go slow. * 9mm Super GP100s seem to come with a kind of skeletonized transfer bar—just a little pad on the end of a skinny arm, vs. the wide, tapering pad on .357s and SRHs. It breaks at the join between the arm and pad after a lot of dry fire. The lighter transfer bar seems to be good for ignition, however. I've had luck making more durable ones by filing down normal transfer bars into approximately the same shape, just with more meat there and a less sharp corner.

I still wouldn't have done it, but it would have been a lot more feasible here than at almost any USPSA match I've been to. I have a lot of moon clips to disassemble before my flight home with two rounds left in them.