Tips for shooting irons and optics

[Makicjf]

I want to keep shooting OSR and RFPO all year. However, I still want to shoot Lim 6 at the south regional and the IRC?

  My past experience bouncing between dots and irons was pretty miserable. Though retrospectively, the issue may have been my poor interface with the R8 revolver I had dotted.  My dot shooting improved drastically when I gave up on the R8 and stuck a dot on my 627 PC.

I do know to be ICORE accurate, I do require more front sight focus.

How can I do both?

I mixed in irons with dots on pendulum dry fire last night, with the same 3.0 par time.

I felt I was more confident of "hits" with irons 

Thoughts?

Jason

[gargoil66]

21 minutes ago, Makicjf said:

I want to keep shooting OSR and RFPO all year. However, I still want to shoot Lim 6 at the south regional and the IRC?

  My past experience bouncing between dots and irons was pretty miserable. Though retrospectively, the issue may have been my poor interface with the R8 revolver I had dotted.  My dot shooting improved drastically when I gave up on the R8 and stuck a dot on my 627 PC.

I do know to be ICORE accurate, I do require more front sight focus.

How can I do both?

I mixed in irons with dots on pendulum dry fire last night, with the same 3.0 par time.

I felt I was more confident of "hits" with irons 

Thoughts?

Jason

Y0 - Jason.

 

I feel more confident with irons too.  Until I shoot.  That's when I realize my calls were sloppy and I wasn't focused on sight alignment and picture sufficiently.  Normally because I try to use the irons as fast as with a dot. 

 

Ain't going to happen with anyone so maybe the first thing to get into the Brain Housing Group is that a guy will take longer with irons.  I think when that is accepted, then the iron proficiency will go up.

 

Once a guy accepts a bit longer with the irons, he allows himself to attain and maintain very good sight alignment and picture throughout his string.  Have to ditch thoughts that you are not going fast enough and continually ensure alignment and picture until the string is done.

 

 

Anything you can do to see alignment and picture should be used.  If the alignment is blurry, get some shooting glasses and un-blur it.  If there isn't enough light around the front sight, or too much, change things until what you are seeing is comfortable to your eye and comfortable in the most likely light conditions you will be shooting in since light plays a gigantic role in seeing consistency with irons.  Fiber optic front sights may not be ideal if they appear to get bigger in bright light or smaller in low light.  Up to you but nothing is stopping you from going back to target sights and sight black.

 

Be prepared to spend quite a bit more time working with the irons and expect to get fatigued a bit faster until you become more proficient and thus more confident in what you are seeing.  Then you can battle with trigger pull.

 

GG

 

 

 

 

[MikeBurgess]

I found that while I thought I needed to see the front sight better to shoot irons more accuratly I can actually shoot target focused irons just as accurately its just very weird at first and takes a lot of rounds to get comfortable with. 

 

that said the biggest thing is likely figuring out out to ignore the clock in your head that is screaming at you that you are wasting time waiting for the sight picture you need.

My theory on dots vs irons is this,

Dots give you digital information, the instant you see the dot you know where the bullet will go.

Irons give you analog information that builds over time, as in, you can see the gun and know sort of where its pointed then as you refine the sight picture and over lay that with the target you get more and more information on where the bullet will go.

When switching between the two you need to give yourself permission to allow the time for the irons information to grow to where you need it. 

[Makicjf]

On 5/3/2023 at 10:17 AM, MikeBurgess said:

When switching between the two you need to give yourself permission to allow the time for the irons information to grow to where you need it. 

  I suppose I should do more irons dry fire and try and develop better target focus skills, and rely on the 10% bump a dot brings.   

Does that sound reasonable?

Jason

[MikeBurgess]

1 hour ago, Makicjf said:

  I suppose I should do more irons dry fire and try and develop better target focus skills, and rely on the 10% bump a dot brings.   

Does that sound reasonable?

Jason

yes, I would also want to do quite a bit of live fire with target focus. With target focus you are working in a wired in between place, where on any given target difficulty you may be able to get acceptable hits with less visual information than you would initially think so life fire is the only way to know what you need to see in dry fire.

 

not sure about the 10% figure, but that gets into a whole time perception thing. when I'm pushing speed on targets and the accuracy goes away then start to focus hard and make sure I'm calling good shots my perception is that I have taken forever to make the shots, the timer usually says that it didn't. My perception of time is faulty and I have to work at making myself ignore it. 

[Makicjf]

3 hours ago, MikeBurgess said:

sure about the 10% figure

I'd assume that a dot is about 10% faster than irons.

I'm curious if effective target focus irons shooting narrows that gap.

Jason

[MWP]

15 minutes ago, Makicjf said:

I'd assume that a dot is about 10% faster than irons.

I'm curious if effective target focus irons shooting narrows that gap.

Jason

As it pertains to steel challenge- In raw time they’re the same. The dot provides “cleaner” feedback because the vision shift doesn’t need to happen.
 

The difference in speed comes from how comfortable a person is with either of the sights.

 

The main difference in overall match times, for equal guns (in this example both revolvers) comes from make up shots. It’s much easier to have a makeup shot at full pace with a dot. 
 

For most people I’d say 10% difference is the correct number. There’s always people who are very much outside that number, but over a majority or people for a long period of time I’d say that’s a close number. The top shooters who shoot irons at an extremely fast pace still see a lot more sights than if shooting uspsa. The targets are tougher, the reward is much lower for an extremely high risk in SC to truly send it on a target focus. 

[Joe4d]

24 minutes ago, Makicjf said:

I'd assume that a dot is about 10% faster than irons.

I'm curious if effective target focus irons shooting narrows that gap.

Jason

May depend on the game..  I gave dots an honest try at pins for a good year or so,, finally pulled them and times went down

 

[MikeBurgess]

2 minutes ago, MWP said:

As it pertains to steel challenge- In raw time they’re the same. The dot provides “cleaner” feedback because the vision shift doesn’t need to happen.
The top shooters who shoot irons at an extremely fast pace still see a lot more sights than if shooting uspsa. The targets are tougher, the reward is much lower for an extremely high risk in SC to truly send it on a target focus. 

Good point, my experience is 90% USPSA type shooting where flirting with a few too many Cs isnt like makeup shots on steel.