Fishbreath

There has been some talk on various social media about matches filling up. In some parts of the country, it seems like it happens for just about every local match, while in others, there is capacity to spare. To help steer that conversation, I thought it would be worthwhile to generate some data, so I wrote up a quick survey to gather information on match crowding conditions around the country. It shouldn't take more than a minute or so to fill out, so if you have a bit of time to spare, I'd appreciate it. I'll release the raw data on March 25, and do some analysis of it the following week.

Revolver, age 32 (the middle of last year). I'm invested in match performance right now, but someday I'd like to get it in a few more divisions.

@mikeAZ I assume you meant the trigger spring, since Wolff hammer springs only go down to 9lb. I have a source for lighter trigger springs, just trying to dial in what the lightest weight is that will work in most guns.

Very roughly 6lb-7lb with a trigger scale at the middle of the trigger, or 5-5.5lb at the bottom. (It's much easier for me to get consistent readings at the bottom of the trigger, since it's not sliding around on the curve.) Of the useful tricks I've found, one of the handier ones is using M5 washers as spacers on the mainspring strut between the spring and seat, to preload the hammer spring a bit—it lets you adjust hammer fall weight almost as finely as a strain screw, which saves you having to jump all the way up to the next weight of spring.

My big springtime project this year was recording everything I've learned about tuning up GP100s. Having tried Olhasso's trigger at the IRC, I think he does better than me, but not by very much. Hopefully this is useful if you have a GP100 you're interested in slicking up.

Like a lot of us, I shoot thumbs forward, and in trigger control at speed dry fire, I find I have the cleanest trigger pull when my thumbs don't put any significant force on the frame—either barely resting on it, or fully clear of it and parallel to it.

Yup, sensitivity 10 will get hammer falls.

Exactly—coming at it from the other direction, like @pskys2 did just above, irons look more stable than dots. It's either that there's the same amount of movement in irons, but you don't clock it unless you're laser-focused on the front sight, or that seeing every movement in the dot encourages you to chase it around, if your attention is on it rather than your point of aim. Or both, or possibly neither. I'm only just starting to work on dot shooting again, for the first time since I started getting good, so I'm spitballing here as much as anyone.

There's something to this, I think. My best shooting correlates with how religiously I do the trigger control at speed drill in dry fire. (It's also worth doing with a loose par time on the draw—1.2 or 1.3 before the first trigger pull will give you time to fix any gross errors, but not fine-tune your way to a perfect grip. Perfect trigger actuation with a slightly compromised grip is a much better skill to work on than compromised trigger actuation with a perfect grip, in my experience.) Exactly right. I like Steve Anderson's analogy: iron sights are like shifting a manual transmission. The revs build/the sight picture refines, and you shift/pull the trigger at just the right instant. Dots show you everything that's happening with your point of aim, and the natural inclination as an irons shooter is to try to process all that information. "See no more than what you need to see to make the shot" is a lot harder to do with a dot, since it's always giving you exact information.

100%. My match load chronos 132-135 most of the time. I don't change it between USPSA and ICORE, either. Much better to know it's always going to pass, rather than having to worry about it.

The L10-with-optic changes either weren't discussed at the in-person meeting, or weren't minuted if they were discussed. Being a modification of an existing division, that rule change won't take effect until 2024, if it's approved. If you want to see it, email your Area Director and make your voice heard.

Classification has value as a national game-within-a-game for people to play. Not everyone goes to majors, but everyone wonders how good they are compared to the rest of the country, and classification is a way for them to do that. Classification doesn't directly map to match performance, but it's very strongly correlated to match performance—the average GM is better than the average M to a statistically significant degree, and so on down to C class. (There's some overlap between lower C and D in most divisions, and U is anyone's game.)

I bought this set, then took a Dremel to the sides of the bit that was the right thickness until it was the right width, in case you change your mind.

I've done it this way (e.g.) for runs back and left. For runs back and right, I'm torn between whether I like the idea of turning my legs/hips and twisting my torso to reload (e.g.) more than loading while moving backward for a step or two, then booking it. If there's enough of a horizontal move at the end of the uprange one, maybe better to separate the start and finish of the load. If it's straight back, maybe better to get it done at the beginning and focus on the movement the rest of the way.

(For clarity, in this post, when I say 'strong hand reload' or 'weak hand reload', I mean the hand that's handling the ammo.) The last time I checked (2020? 2021?) and went digging for match video, the USPSA top 20 was roughly evenly split between the strong and weak hand reload. It's a little easier to do the weak hand reload on a Ruger with an extended cylinder release than on a S&W, but I've seen both ways done stupid fast. Neither one needs to break the 180 if executed correctly. There is some small risk of getting your hand in front of the gun with the weak hand reload, but I've done tens of thousands of them in dry fire and can count the number of times I've flagged myself on two hands, and that exclusively from pushing speed.

100% about confidence and comfort. I don't work on new skills or push par times in the last practice before a match. I'll drill any unusual shooting challenges from the match book—low ports, table starts, one-handed work, and the like. The very last thing I do will be shoot groups, both to verify that my sights are dead on as close to the match as possible, and to prime myself to think "I can make every single shot this match requires" when I get there.

Advantages, from my view: 1. It meters well in both my Lee and Dillon powder measures. 2. Good case fill for light charges. 3. Burns cool and clean under coated bullets. One wet patch, one bore brush, and one dry patch will clean out my guns, typically, and it doesn't heat up much even in fairly long practices.

Jay says that the TF basepads don't fit. I'm probably going to get a few anyway, in addition to a few of the Toni System ones, to see if there's any way to modify them, or the magwell, to make them work. If not, well, that's what I have CAD software and some 3D printers for.

I'd avoid overloading the definition of "string", because a VC standards exercise could have multiple strings in the classical sense (i.e., separately timed runs), along with multiple 'strings' per run. Deleting 10.2.2.1, or adding a note that 10.2.2.1 doesn't apply to VC stages, solves the problem a little more tidily, and makes 'only 2 rounds' in VC WSBs mean something.

Dots wouldn't be the end of the world (I enjoyed shooting my dot-equipped gun in Limited 10 Optic Revolver preview), but revolver is, as you say, mostly a drop-in division outside of a few matches a year when the crowd comes out to play. Adding dots—i.e., adding another $300-$400, minimally, to the cost required to compete, on top of '$1200+ 8-shooter' and 'an entirely different belt rig'—makes it even less likely to attract passers-by.

Shooting a one-handed target freestyle is engaging a target incorrectly, under that interpretation, so stacking penalties would apply 3-3-3 FS, 1-1-1 WHO. In the same way, shooting a freestyle target freestyle is not engaging a target incorrectly, so penalties would not apply 3-3-3 FS, 1-1-1- WHO. I don't hold that interpretation myself (I think both instances are stacking, and if the rules don't agree, the rules should be fixed), but beyond NROI, I know a few experienced ROs who agree with the blog post.

That's against 10.2.2.1, though:

For reference, here's the post explaining the answer. The example stage is a three-target Virginia Count speed shoot, with this briefing: "Engage T1-T3 with only two rounds each, perform a mandatory reload, and engage T1-T3 with only two rounds each." The scenario is that the shooter goes 2-2-3, reload, 2-2-1. NROI's answer is 'no penalty'. I can more or less reason my way to this, but I'm wondering where the limit is. 10.2.2.1 says we can't apply stage procedure penalties for the number of shots fired—we have to use specific penalties in the rulebook for that (one of extra shots, extra hits, or stacking, from 9.4.5). The only one that could possibly apply is stacked shots. I see two interpretations, based on the glossary definition of 'stacked shots' and the wording of 9.4.5.3: 2-2-3, 2-2-1 is a gap in the rules: 2-1-3, 2-3-1 would be two stacking penalties for incorrectly engaging T2 and T3, but because the definition for stacked shots is "shooting more than the specified shots at a target(s) while shooting other target(s) with fewer shots than specified in the stage briefing", incorrectly engaging only a single target doesn't as a penalty. Since all targets are engaged both before and after the reload, no targets are "incorrectly engaged" (9.4.5.3). "Incorrectly engaged" means engaging a target you aren't supposed to engage during a portion of the stage procedure, or failing to engage a target you are supposed to engage, or stacking shots during the freestyle portion of a freestyle-to-one-hand stage, no stacking penalties would apply, no matter how you engage the targets. As long as you fire a total of 12 shots with 4 hits per target, you're okay. 3-3-3, 1-1-1, for instance, is acceptable. The argument for the second interpretation seems a little stronger, but it also leads to the really weird outcome that freestyle-reload-freestyle Virginia Count speed shoots don't actually mean 'only two shots' when they say 'only two shots'. What do you think?

I hear this. I tell people I've turned into such a boring gun guy since I got into competing.

I put my inner belt on the normal way, with the open end at the front, and my outer belt on backward, with the open end at the back.