Garrett

Silencer, suppressor, can, un-loudenator. They all work. I like to use on... just because I can. I'm not always competitive. So I might as well get to use some of my toys.

The frame in the picture above is actually made of carbon steel. It has just had the finish removed, and you are looking at the bare steel.

Depends on what you want to do with it, and what you're shooting it through. You running a bolt-action? Single shot? Semi-auto? You wanting to run subsonic / suppressed, or you looking for a supersonic hunting load? Or are you trying to make USPSA Major PF? Because the loads I use in my suppressed T/C Contender don't feed very well in my AR15, for example. And the loads that run in the AR15 aren't as quiet as what I run in the Contender...

The girls are still young enough that it's fun to do whatever Dad is doing. (I expect that may change before they become teenagers). The 2-year-old likes to case gauge the ammo. And for some reason, loading seems to go slower when I'm using the automatic-bullet-feeder attachment.

This. I just bought 40 lbs. of 14/20. Shipping documents said it came from Colorado. From the MSDS sheet, it appears it was sourced from a company in west Michigan... 15 minutes from where I work. When I get through this batch in a few years, I might have to see if I can just pick it up locally. eta: address appears to be a house in a residential neighborhood. Who knows.

I have shot USPSA stages with both an Open gun and a subgun. It often depends on the stage, which gun will do better. As noted, the pistol transitions and manuvers better. Reloads are about the same for me. You also have to consider, one often does better the second time through a course. So you have an advantage for whichever gun goes second. Where the subgun can be at a disadvantage is if it runs too fast to pull singles on demand. You burn through more ammo than you need to, and end up making extra reloads. I saw this recently at a match. There was a rimfire stage that could be shot semi or full auto. It was a stand & shoot type stage with around 45 steel plates. The subgunners had two reloads where the semi shooters only had one. Nearly all fo the semiauto rifle shooters posted better times than the SMG shooters.

I run a couple of old Sterling 40-round mags that I've had for a while. Once upon a time, they were about the only mags out there that would hold more than 30 rounds in an AR15. They were actually made for the AR18 / AR180, but they have the cut for the AR15 catch as well.

Does the really long, quiet "comp" count?

Mine looked okay. No big notch like yours had. I could probably smooth it some, but it's nothing like how yours looked. And it's odd, it only hangs up like that on the last round.

Point taken. 16 reliable rounds is good. 18 or 19 reliable rounds is better. I wasn't going to try running them In a match until I had all the bugs worked out.

I bought an STI mag from Brownells, and it showed up today. Like the .38 Super mags I tried, the mag body slides up in the magwell and has a decent fit. It doesn't act like it's going to want to drop free though. So that may be something I need to work on. But it doesn't feel like it's binding hard either, so it should be doable. Now I just need to cut a square hole in the front of the mag in the right location and I should at least be able to try it out.

Several years ago I had loaded up some Gold Dots in 9mm, as well as some Berrys plated RN to use for shooting jackrabbits. I found both acted the same on target. Little entrance wound, and a big 3" exit wound. I would hesitate to use them if I wanted deep penetration (not that I'd necessarily use a 9mm for penetration anyway), but for expansion the Berrys bullets do great. They don't appear to need a hollow point for this. As noted, they have a very soft lead core, which seems to deform very easily on target.

I very rarely shoot shotgun. (I bought a Saiga 12 a few years ago, test fired it, and put it away. Finally sold it to someone who will actually get some use out of it) Because of this, getting my 1100 really hasn't been much of a priority for several years now. But I've got a 4-gun match coming up that I'd like to have a running shotgun for. Previously, the gun would run on light loads, but would not feed on heavy loads. I would usually end up with the bolt locked back and a shell on the lifter. The typical fix here is to get a heavier mag spring, and tune the trip on the lifter. I started with the easy fix and got a heavy mag spring, cut it to fit my mag extension, and went to try it out. I brought some full-powered buckshot and slugs, as well as some #7-1/2 trap/game loads. The gun would generally cycle. At least it was better than before. But it still had some issues. Twice it failed to feed the 3rd round from a fully-loaded gun. I'm not sure if the follower was hanging up where it goes from the extension to the factory mag tube, or something else. I'll have to look into this some more. But on a couple of instances, the last round in the mag popped half way into the lifter and wedged its self into place. When it does this, the round won't lock back into the mag tube. And it won't pull out onto the lifter. You have to push it into the mag, and then allow the lifter to go up out of the way. Then it feeds just fine after that. The first time it did this, I was cycling the rounds out of the gun by hand while testing for length on the spring. I thought then it was just the rim getting beat up from multiple load / unload cycles. But later it did multiple times it while shooting, as the gun cycled. It doesn't always happen, but when it does it's always on the last round in the mag. It happens with the light loads or the heavy loads. I've got an easyloader gate on the gun that's been there for over a decade with no issues. Any ideas? I'm thinking I may just have to put a mag extension on an 870 and shoot the match with that.

I keep toying with the idea of using a USP for USPSA. I've got a number of 16-round mags and a jet funnel. However, that is still somewhat limiting, when I've got other guns that hold 20 rounds in a 140 mm mag for that sport. Some have said they had shoehorned various aftermarket Glock basepads on the HK mags with some success. I'd read here previously that Bruce Gray had been converting STI mags to work in the USP. I tried one of my STI .38 Super mags, and it fit just fine. If I wanted to convert a mag, would it be as simple as taking an STI .40 mag and cutting a catch in the appropriate place? Other than typical mag tuning, is there anything specific to converting one of these to work in a USP?

I'd like to know as well. I can only find "extended" tube springs on Brownells and Wolff's website for capacities of 6-7 rounds total. Nothing for 9-11 round tubes. The Nordic webiste lists their spring at 45 inches "so you can cut the length to fit your tube". Thinking about it, the ID on any of these extension mag tubes will have to match up with the ID of the factory tube. So any of them should have the same internal dimensions. Which would mean any spring should fit any manufacturer's tube. At $8 for a mag spring, I think I can afford to try one of these and if it doesn't work in my Choate tube, I'll try to find something else.

Yeah, the Reising M55 has it in the looks department, but the wire stock can't be all that comfortable to shoot. You can get the 30 round Ken Christie mags for it. They run as well as my 20 round mags.

Spanish Destroyer Carbine converted to 9x19.

That worked great. Thanks! Here's the finished mag.

Forgive me if this is an obvious question and I'm just missing it, but how do you take the spring & follower out of a single-stack 1911 mag? The base plate appears to be welded in place, and I can't work the follower out the top of the mag without fear of bending it. Maybe people don't routinely disassemble these for cleaning? I ask because I'm cutting a notch in the rear of a handful of 9mm mags to adapt them to a different gun. For the time being, I was able to trap the spring / follower slightly below the notch. However, I am still hitting the follower with the file, and it would be much easier if I could remove the follower. Any suggestions?

Garbage in what way? I've never been able to get a Glock with a comp to shoot very well, with the couple of comps I've tried. Groups open way up, even when the same loads stay tight without the comp on. It may be the spring. Don't know. I finally just gave up and stuck with the 2011.

I'd love to have an MP5. Then again, I borrowed one to use on a different category at the match on the second video I posted above. Guess which gun choked half way through the stage... And it wasn't the M11. I keep toying with the idea of selling the M11 and the Reising and putting it toward am M16. But those guns can be finicky when set up om 9mm. Even so, it's modular enough and versatile enough that there's not much you couldn't do with one.

That's how my gun is set up. The added weight from the AR15 buffer slows the ROF significantly. You usually have to play with springs as well. I use either a solid steel buffer (9 oz) or a rate-reducing buffer from AAC (11.oz) The biggest negative to this system is that you have to drill a hole in the rear of your receiver. It's nothing that can't be fixed, but a lot of people would balk at it. At the time, there were a couple of drop-in rate reducers that sort of worked, but not well enough. There was a slow-fire upper that had been made in very low quantities, that everyone had heard of but nobody ever saw. There were a handful of custom "heavy" bolts out there. The AR15 stock method (typically referred to as a TASK slowfire, as it was developed by some guys in the Triad Action Shooting Klub) was really the only reliable method that was generally available. I remember reading about it in the first issue of Small Arms Review, where the author stated it had been developed as an alternative to "buying an expensive $3500 MP5". (Those were the days.) However, the need to drill out your lower receiver went away when Lage started building high quality drop-in slow fire uppers and putting them out in quantity. As you say, drop-in slowfire uppers are available from both Lage and Alliance Armament. I've shot the Lage MAX-11 on a couple of occasions. To be honest, it feels a little choppier than my slow-fire M11. More like shooting an Uzi. That being said, if it had been available at the time, I'd have likely gone with one of those. Both the AA unit, and the Lage MAX-31 give you the option of using Soumi drums or 50-round coffin mags. The MAX-11 uses the traditional magwell/grip on the M11. Drum models from either company require you to get on a waiting list until one becomes available (my .22 kit from Lage was around a 1-year wait). Last I heard, Lage had enough MAX-11s on hand and was shipping them pretty quickly. I know he's basically a 1-man shop, and subs out a lot of his work. So sometimes it takes a while. His stuff is pretty much always in demand. AA hasn't been making M11 uppers for nearly as long, but from what I've seen of them they are high quality as well. Their unit is a little more bulky, but gives you more caliber options. Reportedly, they are planning to make a magwell to use a Beta mag (M16 or MP5), as welll as a handful of other caliber conversions that are out there now. I keep thinking I should get a MAX-31 or an AA. But I haven't gotten there yet. Many matches either limit the number of rounds in the gun (so drums offer no advantage), or require you to reload when moving between arrays. This keeps the guys with drums from dominating by not having to reload, but there is still an advantage to having a lot of extra ammo on board. eta: subgun competition discussion at Bullethose.com

J-Ho was asking about a gun specifically for subgun matches. What guns are nearly always at the top of the ranking at most subgun matches you've seen? Oddly enough, it's usually the "cheap" M11/9. I agree that in stock configuration, it leaves a bit to be desired. There is more aftermarket support for that particular gun that any other subgun out there. I agree that an MP5 would be nice. They were expensive at $5500 when I first got into subguns. Now they're close to $20,000. It's difficult to justify that kind of price when you can get a competitive gun for 4 to 5 times less, and smile when you kick the HK Snobs butts. They even split up the Knob Creek match into open bolt & closed bolt so the HK shooters wouldn't have to compete directly with the "cheap" M11/9s. And now that there are a few closed-bolt conversion out there for the M11/9, guess what gun won the closed-bolt/optics category last fall at the Creek? Now, for a match-only gun, the Sterling is extremely smooth and easy to shoot. In the same price range, the Uzi is more versatile and easier to mount an optic on. I went that route, as I could get a .22 conversion for the Uzi as well. But I still shoot my tricked-out M11/9 better. I would love an MP5, but as noted above I really can't justify the price. I run my Uzi in closed bolt setup as well. It's less reliable, and the ROF is way too fast. I've got it slowed down to where I can pull doubles, but it still has some bugs to work out. Closed bolt guns are not any more accurate in my experience than Open Bolt guns. Here's a couple with the M11/9. I'm always tempted to push the 58-round mag a little too far, as seen in the first vid.

I've got a Dillon belt that I used for several years. It's very stiff, which is good. However, it's 2-ply leather, which is twice as thick as a "regular" belt. Which is too thick for some things, like cell phone clips, or even some clip-on type holsters. So who makes a good, stiff holster that isn't overly thick?

I bought a .38 Super 6 or 7 years ago, and haven't ever changed. I think I've probably still got some of the brass that came with the gun. I don't think I've ever worn out a piece of Super brass. They get lost long before that can happen. To be honest, I don't want to switch to 9x19 because I'm lazy. I've got a couple of subguns, and they tend to chew up the brass a bit. I would have to keep my brass separated between my "pistol" brass and my SMG brass. Using a different caliber makes this much easier...