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swingers


cletus9mm

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last fun match i shot had swingers. i've only shot at them maybe 3 or 4 times. this last time confirmed my feelings of the first few times. they suck. i feel like i have fundamentals down as far as shooting goes. i can call my shots more often than not, and i am visually aware of my front sight. i am completely lost when it comes to swingers though.

the problem i think i have is sight picture. i can get good hits if i wait for the swinger to get to the end and fire one shot. then in order for me to get another hit i have to wait for it to swing to the other side and then back before i press my next shot. if there are 2 plus swingers in a stage that adds up to too much time wasted for me to be comfortable with. last time i tried pressing two quick shots i got one hit and one mike. same thing for the second swinger in the stage.

what is your technique to mastering this wobbly devil of a target? my guess is that i need to get my splits down to a time quicker than the swinger oscillates. thanks in advance for your suggestions and advice.

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one is dont feel like you have to rush to get 2 good shots if you have to wait for a second pass at our current skill level, then do it, wait....are you actually waiting for the swinger to 'pause' at the bottom of its motion before going the other way(they all do it to gather momentum to swing the opposite direction) fire when it pauses, not when you first see it, also, are you tracking it back and forth??? big no no...pick a spot(like where the target pauses) and stay there and wait for it to come to you, not the other way round, and you wont feel rushed trying to shoot it.

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Manny Bragg covered this in the class I took because it's an area a lot of people struggle with. His method...Try shooting the first shot just before the swinger pauses, let the gun recoil during the pause, and take the second shot as it starts to move back up. It's just something you need to do a little bit and suddenly, they're not so hard. Also, if you can track them with your eyes, rather than just looking at the spot where they'll stop, it makes them appear to slow down, visually, relative to the front sight. R,

Edited by G-ManBart
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I agree with Gman when a swinger presents itself and you can catch it at the bottom of the arc as it transitions back the other way. The only successful way I have found for hidden swinger - and I am sure there are better methods - by hidden swingers I mean the ones that are behind barrels and only present themselves at the top of their arc - is to pick my aim point where it will intercept the target on the leading edge. I time my trigger pull to start when I first see the target in my sight picture. I adjust that further onto the target if it happens to be a slow swinger. Between the lag time for reaction time and the relative speed of the swinger I get on target hits. I won't say always A zone but A - C hits.

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This is another place where perception deceives reality.

Get your timer out. Notice your split times. As your splits decrease in time the more comfortable you will be shooting swingers.

For me, this realization enhanced my confidence immensely. Once I knew I could accurately hit a target with a second target in less than .3 seconds and the swinger as it starts to slow down to the time it accelerate is more than .3 seconds, I knew mentally that I could fire both shots and be on target.

The ability to ambush the swinger was dependent upon picking the spot on the berm where I wanted to fire my shot when the target got there on the way down and on the way up.

So you perception may be that you do not have enough time, the timer will demonstrate that you do have enough time. Once you are convinced this is true, the next part is following the correct program/procedure.

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This is another place where perception deceives reality.

Get your timer out. Notice your split times. As your splits decrease in time the more comfortable you will be shooting swingers.

For me, this realization enhanced my confidence immensely. Once I knew I could accurately hit a target with a second target in less than .3 seconds and the swinger as it starts to slow down to the time it accelerate is more than .3 seconds, I knew mentally that I could fire both shots and be on target.

The ability to ambush the swinger was dependent upon picking the spot on the berm where I wanted to fire my shot when the target got there on the way down and on the way up.

So you perception may be that you do not have enough time, the timer will demonstrate that you do have enough time. Once you are convinced this is true, the next part is following the correct program/procedure.

Good stuff!

be

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I agree with Gman when a swinger presents itself and you can catch it at the bottom of the arc as it transitions back the other way. The only successful way I have found for hidden swinger - and I am sure there are better methods - by hidden swingers I mean the ones that are behind barrels and only present themselves at the top of their arc - is to pick my aim point where it will intercept the target on the leading edge. I time my trigger pull to start when I first see the target in my sight picture. I adjust that further onto the target if it happens to be a slow swinger. Between the lag time for reaction time and the relative speed of the swinger I get on target hits. I won't say always A zone but A - C hits.

For those over-the-top swingers, move the gun with the swinger, along the arc of the target. That slows the relative motion (perception) and makes them much easier to hit. It does require that you've picked a spot, and know which side it will be coming from when you get to it. R,

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I agree with Gman when a swinger presents itself and you can catch it at the bottom of the arc as it transitions back the other way. The only successful way I have found for hidden swinger - and I am sure there are better methods - by hidden swingers I mean the ones that are behind barrels and only present themselves at the top of their arc - is to pick my aim point where it will intercept the target on the leading edge. I time my trigger pull to start when I first see the target in my sight picture. I adjust that further onto the target if it happens to be a slow swinger. Between the lag time for reaction time and the relative speed of the swinger I get on target hits. I won't say always A zone but A - C hits.

For those over-the-top swingers, move the gun with the swinger, along the arc of the target. That slows the relative motion (perception) and makes them much easier to hit. It does require that you've picked a spot, and know which side it will be coming from when you get to it. R,

Could you expand on this? I've heard you shouldn't "track" the swinger. Is the same thing?

Edited by pries81
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I agree with Gman when a swinger presents itself and you can catch it at the bottom of the arc as it transitions back the other way. The only successful way I have found for hidden swinger - and I am sure there are better methods - by hidden swingers I mean the ones that are behind barrels and only present themselves at the top of their arc - is to pick my aim point where it will intercept the target on the leading edge. I time my trigger pull to start when I first see the target in my sight picture. I adjust that further onto the target if it happens to be a slow swinger. Between the lag time for reaction time and the relative speed of the swinger I get on target hits. I won't say always A zone but A - C hits.

For those over-the-top swingers, move the gun with the swinger, along the arc of the target. That slows the relative motion (perception) and makes them much easier to hit. It does require that you've picked a spot, and know which side it will be coming from when you get to it. R,

Could you expand on this? I've heard you shouldn't "track" the swinger. Is the same thing?

This was something Manny Bragg covered when I took his class earlier this year. For swingers that go over the top, there isn't that pause where you can hit it either stationary, or nearly so, and we know they often have vision barriers to create narrow window of availability...so it's a different kind of shot, and tracking the swinger works great. For most people, trying to estimate the lead seems to result in poor hits, or mikes. Just look at how bad the hits are any time you see one on a stage...it can be ugly. Manny set up a swinger like this and simply had us draw our guns, pick a spot and dry fire as the target exposed and swung by...a big brown blur as it moves past. He then had us track the swinger as it moved through it's arc by following it with our eyes and guns...it made the target appear to slow down and you could easily see the A on it, rather than a blur. Since the target was only exposed for a short distance, it was obvious you couldn't get two shots off in one exposure, so the idea was to track it, let it disappear, then pick it back up going in the opposite direction when it reappeared.

He had us shoot it this way and literally everyone was getting two solid hits on it every time, often two alphas. There were 8 of us, most B or C Limited and Production shooters, if that helps put it in context. I liken it to hitting a clay bird with a shotgun. It's really hard to pick a spot and shoot just before the bird gets there....lots of misses that way. Swing with it, and it's much easier to hit. Again, that's just for the over-the-top moving swingers, not the more common side exposures. R,

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