CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

This weekend was a busy one from a shooting perspective. The weather was nice over the weekend, but with the recent snow the match on Saturday was canceled due to wet and muddy range conditions. Since the match was canceled on Saturday I decided to go out and do some live fire practice with a few friends. Lucky for us the range wasn’t too muddy and the majority of the berm we were using was dry. We setup a stage and did a bunch of different drills, then shot the whole stage or sections of the stage. Overall it was a productive practice session for me and I shot 300 rounds. I had the Green FO rod in my front sight the whole day and liked how it was working. It was a full sunny day and it was just bright enough. Seeing it on the “Shadow” targets was harder, but that is always a harder sight picture to work with. Since the Green FO worked good the whole day I figured I would give it a go at the Pueblo match on Sunday. I also got a chance to shoot some steel plates at about 20 yards. This was good practice because I found that I really have to change my hold on the target verses what I was using before. I have to aim at the upper part of the plate where I can only see a little bit of the top of the plate above my sights. If I did this I could hit the plates pretty consistently. I have been using a center or just below center hold and that wasn’t working out too well in matches. I need to do a bunch of dry fire on plates to burn in this new hold.

I also got a chance to give my backup gun a test run and found that its accuracy is way off of where it should be. In slow fire the best group I could produce was about 10 inches at 20 yards, which is a lot worse than the 2 inches at the same distance with the primary gun. I didn’t waste any time trying to figure out the accuracy issue at the range. But I think it may have something do to with the crown on the barrel. This gun was mega accurate when it had the longer 6 inch barrel and all we did to it after that was cut the barrel down to a 5 inch length. I have Rick looking into it to see if recrowning the barrel will whip it back into shape.

The bad thing from the practice session on Saturday is that for whatever reason my primary gun was chopping on my hand again from slide bite. The primary gun has a smaller beaver tail than the backup gun so I will need to get another “Bigger” beaver tail made up for my primary gun. Other than that it was a good practice session and a lot of fun shooting with friends.

[CHA-LEE]

On Sunday I attended the USPSA match down in Pueblo. It was cold in the morning but by the time the match started the weather heated up quite a bit and we were back in T-Shirt weather. There was a mixture of clear and cloudy lighting that day so it was a good test for the Green Fiber in the front sight. It was slightly overcast on my first two stage runs and I found that I couldn’t stay focused on the sights worth a crap. The Green Fiber wasn’t bright enough to pull my attention to it and it resulted in a crap ton of shooting penalties. On the first two stages of the match I racked up 4 misses and 2 no shoots, along with a generous collection of C’s and D’s. The really crappy thing is that most of the poor or no hits were uncalled “bad” so I knew I was having an issue with seeing the sights. After train wrecking the first two stages I swapped my fiber back to Orange and then proceeded to shoot a 100% on the classifier stage which was next. After switching over to the Orange fiber I was able to call my shots a lot better regardless of the lighting conditions and shot the remaining stages pretty decently. But I knew I had done some unrecoverable damage to my overall match performance on the first two stages so I pretty much lost interest in trying to do very well on the last few stages of the match. This showed in me changing my stage plan on the last stage of the match right before I shot the stage and it resulted in a really clunky and clumsy performance. I was able to reshoot the stage for fun a second time using my original plan and it was over 2 seconds faster, so I am not sure why I thought that it would be a good idea to change my plan the way I did right before I shot it the first time. I think a lot of it was that I had already mentally given up on shooting well for the match so I was in more of a “let’s give this a try” mode.

Even though I had a pretty pathetic match performance due to trying to use the green fiber and then mentally giving up, I still had a lot of fun shooting with friends. I had a great time with my shooting buddies before, during and after the match which was really nice. I am happy to report that I achieved goal number 1 of having fun while attending the match. I hope that the weekend weather continues to work in our favor this coming weekend. I am hosting the local HPPS match so it will be a lot of work, but I will do my best to make it FUN as well.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend was a three day weekend of blasting entertainment since I had Monday off for MLK day. On Saturday I did my duty as Match Director for the HPPS match. We had several board members gone so I had to wear several “hats” during the match to make sure it all got done properly. I had to bust my hump doing Stage setup in the morning, Score Keeping before and after the match and then being the Match Director during the match. I shot the match as well.

It was a long day of work but it all turned out well and the shooters had a safe and fun time attending. I didn’t get a chance to check out the stages from a competitive perspective before the start of the match so I was in “Figure it out on the fly” mode while churning through the stages during the match. Lucky for me most of the stages had pretty straight forward stage plans that didn’t require many decisions. There was one stage that had several options in how to shoot it. For that one I picked a simple plan that had me shooting the majority of the stage from a single position and them moving to a second position to wrap it up. Overall I shot the match well within my bounds and didn’t try to “Push” aggressiveness on any of the shooting. This resulted in pretty good hits on target but it felt “Slow” when I was shooting. I am not sure if this slow feeling was really due to slow shooting or just a perceived slowness because I was being diligent on calling every shot. Either way it worked out and I shot a clean match. Given how much work was involved for this match I simply wanted to survive it much less worrying about shooting well.

The Sunday USPSA match was canceled due to muddy range conditions. Since the match was canceled I decided to go out to the range for some live fire practice. I had to test out some guns and gear anyway so this worked out good. My backup gun was having horrible accuracy after we cut the barrel down from a 6 inch to a 5 inch and all of the “Tricks” to fix it were not working. So we put a new 5 inch barrel in it and I wanted to get some run time on it to validate functionality and accuracy. The new barrel was dead nuts on so the accuracy issue was resolved. The Point of Impact is slightly high when compared to my Primary gun, about 2 inches high at 20 yards. So I probably need to put a taller front sight on it to get the POI the same as my Primary gun. It also ran 100% reliable with no feeding or jamming issues so that was good as well. I also tested out some new Grams followers in my magazines. I have had a couple of random nose dive jams in the past on my Primary gun and noticed that the sides of the followers were getting worn pretty good. So I swapped out the followers and springs with new ones and everything ran without any issues. I am sure that a lot more shooting will need to be done to verify that the intermittent nose dive jams are resolved.

I also had Rick build me a different upper with a slide mounted red dot. I had an extra Burris Fast Fire III laying around so I figured I would give that a try on a pistol. My primary reasoning in getting this upper built is to use if for the indoor matches with poor lighting as seeing a red dot would be a lot easier than seeing iron sights. I shot it a little bit to see how it was sighted in and it was about 5 inches low at 20 yards with the vertical adjustment maxed out. The Platform cut will need to be changed to put the red dot at a better angle so it can be sighted in within its adjustments. For fun I shot the practice stage with it and it was a pretty strange experience. The red dot was all over the place during the stage run and it was hard to calm it down to a point where I could break a shot and actually know where the hit was going to be. I think the primary issue or disturbance is seeing the dot wobble around within the glass a lot more than the mechanical movement or steering of the gun to move the sight. It’s not a 1:1 input vs sight movement like an iron sight setup and feels more like a 3:1. The twitchiness of the dot due to the magnified movement was very distracting to say the least. I will have to put a lot of time behind that setup to get use to that dot twitchiness. I wanted to focus on my iron sight shooting skills that day so I only ran the Red dot slide once. Once I get the flat fixed so I can sight it in properly I will dedicate some time into shooting the Red Dot more to see if I can get more use to it.

By the end of the practice session I had blown through 500 rounds of ammo and it felt like a good investment of time and ammo in doing some effective training. Right now, I feel like the 2011 is an extension of my hands from a gun handling perspective. Draws, reloads, Gripping and pointing the gun are now burned in to the same subconscious level as my EAA was. I still need a lot more live fire range time to get to this same level of subconscious execution while shooting it to be comfortable with how the gun feels during recoil and the tracking of the sights. But the good thing is that from a configuration and tuning perspective I am done fiddling with those things. So now I simply have to put in the range time to get use to the current configuration in how it shoots.

Since I had the day off on Monday and the weather was still cooperating I decided to go back out to the range for some more live fire training. This time I didn’t do any guns or gear testing so I could simply focus on shooting. Since shooting steel better is one of my goals I have been setting up steel plates and poppers during these live fire practice sessions to force myself to learn how to shoot them better. This day I setup a stage that had 5 plates setup in a way that had me transitioning between fast blasting paper and then slowing down for a plate then back to fast blasting paper. I also had a section of the stage where it required me to engage a plate while entering a shooting position to push the limits of how “Stable” of a platform is needed to get consistent hits on the plate. The stage I setup was a humbling beast of shooting challenges. Fast blasting, tight shots, multiple positions to hit, shadow targets, and requirements for hitting my reload aggressively. I shot this stage many times in different ways but was never able to produce a One for One steel engagement run. My hits on paper were solid the vast majority of the time, but the little plates were kicking my butt. I kept pushing the limits on how much patience is needed to ensure a hit on the steel and made some headway on understanding how much patience results in a hit or not. I also experimented with where I need to aim on the plate to ensure a hit. For my primary gun I have to aim at the upper portion of the plate to produce a hit most of the time. The real hard part with that type of hold on the target is that it obscures most of the plate while aiming at it. I just need to get use to creating that type of on target sight picture to make it the “default” aiming point when shooting plates. That is going to take a lot of live fire practice to burn in. I think I might have to spend a live fire practice session with a plate rack to make some serious progress in changing this aiming point. The other issue I was having was getting sucked into focusing hard on the plate if I missed it instead of staying diligent on the sights. This practice session was a humbling experience in trial and error, but this is what I need to do in order to get this stuff figured out. At the end of the practice session I did some one shot draws for fun to see how fast I could go. I did some spicy .67 - .68 draws and it was fun to break a shot off of a draw that fast. Pushing hand speed to the limits to produce fast draws like this is good so I can make that feeling normal in match conditions when needed. I highly doubt that I will need a .6X draw in a match, but it makes executing .8x draws feel in control and manageable in comparison.

Overall I shot 400 round during this practice session and once again it felt like time and ammo well invested. Through the extended weekend I shot over 1000 rounds and it all felt like it was well worth the investment. It’s nice to get back into the mode of practicing and training for myself. It’s also nice to have the weather work in my favor to allow me to do this kind of training. Hopefully I can keep at this level of training through the winter months. If I can keep at this pace of practice until the Florida Open I should be able to execute solidly for that match. I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

[BritinUSA]

I shot it a little bit to see how it was sighted in and it was about 5 inches low at 20 yards with the vertical adjustment maxed out. The Platform cut will need to be changed to put the red dot at a better angle so it can be sighted in within its adjustments.

Slide ride dots need to be mounted in line with the barrel angle (I think) as there is less vertical adjustment than with a frame mounted scope like a C-More.

Edited January 20, 2015 by BritinUSA

[Glock26Toter]

Yay, welcome to the dot world. I think you'll find that although a lighted optic can help in low light, it has it's own challenges as well. That "static" that you see while shooting is magnified indoors and you have to find the sweet spot between too dim and crazy dot static each time you turn it on. If you miss that sweet spot the dot can become quite the spectacle to watch while trying to see the target..... still, if you can get all that under control, clearly you'll have more fun at an indoor match. Maybe you can come back and knock me down a notch.

[BeerBaron]

Well the only match this past weekend was an indoor match at the Centennial Gun Club Sunday night. The mixture of crappy lighting and difficult shots or stand on your head type of shooting positions resulted in shooting penalties on every single stage. I even zeroed the classifier stage..... YAY!!!! I couldn't see my sights at all that night and I had to resort to point shooting in the general direction of the targets. This works ok when the targets are close but not so good on far away no shoot partial targets. I also changed my recoil spring to try out an ISMI 10lb and it felt lighter on the bench verses the Wolff 10lb. During the match the gun had pretty clunky feeding due to the weak recoil spring and even created a failure to feed jam when I was shooting weak hand only. The spring test was a bust so the Wolff 10lb spring goes back in. The match was a bust because I couldn't see my sights at all. The CGC indoor range has just about as bad of lighting as the Boulder indoor range. Not being able to see my sights while attending these matches is not an option. All it does is piss me off and I have zero fun while attending the match. I have tried many times to figure out a solution for shooting in these crappy lighting indoor ranges but nothing helps in an iron sight configuration. I think the only way to shoot these matches is with a Red Dot on an Open gun. I am not willing to spend mega cash on an Open gun just so I can shoot these few indoor matches so I think I will instead choose to not attend them any more. The Whistling Pines indoor range has really good lighting and I can see my sights in there, so I will continue to shoot those matches. But I am done with trying to force myself to perform at the CGC or Boulder indoor ranges when I know its impossible due to not being able to see my sights. Shooting matches needs to be fun for me to enjoy it. If its not fun, then why participate? Some times you gotta pick your battles and this is one of those situations where its not worth the frustration or wast of ammo.

edit: cancel that. I saw you've already tried my suggestion. The red dot is a good idea.

Edited January 21, 2015 by BeerBaron

[aaronsdmf]

[PatJones]

The panda is getting a red dot. We're all in trouble now.

[drewbeck]

That is awesome!

I'm buying stock in CMore now at the rate Charlie has broken fixed steel sights

[CHA-LEE]

I am not switching to Open Division this season. I am dedicated to shooting Limited for the 2015 shooting season. I am simply playing with a slide mounted red dot on my Limited gun so I can have a fighting chance in seeing some kind of sights while attending the poorly lit indoor matches. This experiment may turn out to be a flop. But it will be interesting to see how it goes.

If I achieve my performance goals for the 2015 shooting season I may entertain the idea of switching to Open division in the 2016 shooting season............... But that is waaaaaaaaay down the line. I gotta get through this season first and feel that I have achieved my Iron Sight shooting goals before I will consider switching divisions.

Edited January 21, 2015 by CHA-LEE

[thermobollocks]

We all knew Rick would do this to you sooner or later

[CHA-LEE]

This past week and weekend was a busy one. I loaded a crap ton of ammo during the week and did some more gun fiddling. I put a bigger beaver tail on my primary gun as the old one was allowing the slide to chop my hand. Since I had everything in and out a bunch of times, I decided to freshen up the Sear & Hammer mating surfaces and try a different trigger “Feel”. On my EAA I really liked a firm take up and soft sear push through trigger feel. Using a 2lb trigger pull as a base line, this trigger pull feel is like having 1.5lbs as the take up, and 0.5lb as the sear push through. Setting up an EAA trigger for this type of trigger pull is pretty easy, but on the 2011 it’s a lot more difficult without creating sear bounce and hammer follow. After a bunch of fiddling with the three leg trigger spring I was able to create a 1.25lb take up and a 0.75lb sear push through that was also not producing hammer follow or sear bounce on the bench. This trigger setup felt fairly close to the EAA trigger so I figured I would give it a try at the match on Saturday.

On Saturday I attended a local USPSA Club match at the AGC range. The weather was suppose to be fairly decent in the mid 50’s, but it remained overcast all day and was windy so it ended up being pretty cold. My hands were pretty cold during this match and this lead to several stages where I had some bump firing if my grip wasn’t totally solid. I could feel the gun moving around within my hand more than normal during these bump fire situations and having the extra trigger return spring pressure actually helped promote the issue. More trigger fiddling will be needed to find a good middle ground. Either way, this match was heavily biased towards getting your points with a bunch of non-shooting running around. Since most of the stages had high hit factors in the 5 – 6 range, I knew that getting my hits were going to be the top priority. I stayed diligent on my sights through the whole match and didn’t push the shooting speed. This lead to some slower shooting, but great points. I finished the match with zero D zone hits and no penalties. I was able to capture 96% of the available points which was significantly more than most other shooters for this match given all of the far away or partial shots. I didn’t burn anything down, but I didn’t risk much either. I know I could have shot a couple of the stages in a faster time if I shot more aggressively, but the risk of dropping too many points or ending up with misses or no shoots was too great to push the limits. I was happy with the results but knew that I needed to do some more work on my trigger to minimize the bump fire condition that was happening.

Sunday morning I took some time to redo the spring setup on my Primary gun. I bumped up the trigger pull to 2lbs 4oz and evened out the take up vs sear push through weights. Right now it’s setup in a 50/50 configuration with half of the weight on the take up and the other half on the sear push through. This was feeling pretty good on the bench and was still passing all of the sear bounce and hammer follow tests. I went out to practice with a couple of friends that day to test it out. It was warmer that day and the sun was out so the conditions were not the same a Saturday. I was able to shoot a decent amount and didn’t have the bump fire condition happen at all. I think that the take up spring tension was just too stiff on the other trigger setup and it was pushing my finger back during recoil to reset the trigger and create the bump fire scenario. During this practice I setup a stage that tested shooting on the move, steel plates and poppers, and no shoot partial “Shadow” targets. The consistent live fire practice with the steel plates is starting to pay off. I was able to aim at the correct spot and pause just enough to hit the steel plates without much effort or “Commanding” needed. When I did have misses on the plates I knew they were misses right away by not seeing the correct sight picture and made up the misses automatically. Its cool to get better at these plates and is giving me a decent confidence boost. I mixed in some mini poppers with the steel plates and those things seemed huge compared to the plates. But I don’t have the same aiming spot for the poppers so I will focus more on those the next time I go out. If I can get the popper aiming spot down like I have with the plates I should be in pretty good shape.

I also had a chance to give the slide mounted red dot sight gun a try and once again it was super strange to shoot. The nervous movement of the dot that is artificially magnified is very distracting. I also found that getting it stable so I could call the first shot was fairly easy but dealing with it dancing around all over the place for the second shot is pretty difficult. This resulted in a good first shot on paper, but a sucky second shot. The interesting thing is that I can shoot the steel pretty fast with it because the dot is settled down by the time I transition to the next steel. It will be interesting to see how a frame mounted dot tracks verses this slide mounted one. Before I get completely wrapped around the axel on this I think I am going to set this Red Dot madness aside for now and focus on my iron sight shooting skills.

Overall it was a good weekend of shooting and I am really liking how my steel shooting skills are progressing. I just need to keep at it until the sight picture and pause is built into a subconscious skill. My next major match is the Florida Open in a couple of weeks and they usually have a decent amount of steel at this match. Hopefully these focused steel shooting training efforts will help my match performance at the Florida Open.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend the only club match scheduled was on Sunday and the weather forecast was looking pretty bad for that day. So I decided to go out to the range on Saturday and do some live fire practice instead. The weather on Saturday wasn’t much better, but it was doable. When I got to the range it was 36 degrees and there was a faint amount of snow flurries. I setup a practice stage that had a mixture of mini poppers and plates then some paper targets on the side berms. I did a drill where I started on a popper and plate at about 25 yards, then engaged three paper on the move to the left followed by another popper/plate, then engaged three more paper on the move to the right and finished on another popper/plate pair. This was a good 18 round drill that tested several different skills. I shot about 200 rounds on this drill before the snow and wind got too heavy and forced me to quit. I wish I could have shot this drill some more because it was a challenging drill and I was learning how patient I need to be with the steel at the varying distances and positions. I never managed to shoot the steel one for one through the whole drill which was frustrating, but most of my misses were due to not pausing enough after moving into the next shooting position.

I am happy to be making some solid progress on shooting steel confidently. I am honing in on picking a specific aiming spot on the steel instead of blasting anywhere on “White” and hoping a “Ding” will happen. I painted the steel between each run so I could see where my hits were and the majority of the time the hits were in the middle of the plate, or the middle of the circle on the popper, so my aiming spot is good. I just need to put in a lot more practice until these aiming spots are subconsciously executed like it is on paper targets. I really liked this drill and will set it up again the next time I go to the range.

As expected, the weather decided to dump snow on us on Saturday night and this lead to the canceling of the Sunday outdoor match. It sucked to have the weather cancel the match, but that is what happens during the winter time here in Colorado. I was happy that I decided to go out to the range on Saturday to practice. It was cold out there but I at least got to shoot over the weekend.

The Florida Open is only a couple of weeks away. I want to make some more headway on the steel shooting before I head out there. Hopefully the weather cooperates so I can get it done.

[CHA-LEE]

On Saturday I was also able to get do some more equipment testing and tuning. The POA/POI of my backup gun was a little high compared to my primary gun so I put a slightly taller front sight in the backup gun. I was able to get the backup gun sighted in again and now it has the same POA/POI as the primary. While at the range I was able to chrono both guns back to back and they were both producing the same velocity within about 5fps. That is good to know since I don’t want to risk going minor at a major match this year if I have to switch to my backup.

When I got back home from the range I needed to do some more fiddling on the grip safety/beaver tail on both guns. Rick did some more welding and I did some more fitting so now they are both right where they should be. More live fire testing is going to be needed to ensure that they will hold their settings, but I am pretty optimistic about this part of the gun being “done”. I am glad to be at the final stages of gun fiddling so I can stick to the current configuration and burn it in like it’s a part of me.

[thermobollocks]

We could bust out some simulated steel targets at the indoor match tonight.

[CHA-LEE]

If it was "ICORE" Night you could. But not if its an official USPSA match you can't. There are no simulated paper steel targets that are "Legal" to use in USPSA matches.

[Bunchies95]

If it was "ICORE" Night you could. But not if its an official USPSA match you can't. There are no simulated paper steel targets that are "Legal" to use in USPSA matches.

Maybe no paper targets, but you can use the self sealing targets now.

4.4.2 Synthetic targets (e.g. "self-sealing" targets etc.), sometimes used by indoor ranges, may be used at Level I matches provided they comply with the sizes specified in Appendix B5.

[thermobollocks]

You can use white for soft cover, color the rest black for hard cover, and paint all the no-shoots blue.

(I was yanking your chain, however if pressed it is possible to thoroughly and unproductively abuse the rulebook)

[CHA-LEE]

Yesterday I was able to attend the Whistling Pines indoor USPSA club match. There were a bunch of shooters attending the match so it made for a long night of shooting but it was fun. The lighting is a lot better in this range verses other indoor ranges so seeing my sights is possible. It’s not perfect, but I can at least see my sights to call my shots.

As always with this match the stages were setup with some box to box shooting positions. The stages had a good mixture of close blasting, partial shots and further distance shots given what they have to work with. I shot a fairly solid match but had a couple of misses. The first miss was on the classifier which had a weak hand only portion and I mashed the trigger on the first shot pulling the sights off target. Since it was a Virginia count stage I couldn’t make it up even though I called it as a miss. Ever since my neck injury my weak hand shooting has been really bad due to the loss in strength. So screwing up on this portion wasn’t a surprise. The second miss was on the last stage of the night where I ended up with a hit about half an inch into the hard cover right next to the A-zone. I called the shot slightly marginal but it ended up being a miss. It sucks to have these misses during the match but its good that I was able to see my sights and at least know that they were going to be an issue.

Overall I was able to shoot and move aggressively through the stages and I am happy with that part of my performance. I was putting more of a focus on gripping hard with my support hand and I noticed a decent reduction in muzzle flip while shooting. I also used a trick I figured out while practicing of putting a small strip of target tape around the web of my strong hand. Doing this allows the web of my strong hand to burry into the beaver tail during the draw and not get bound up on the beaver tail due to sticky ness. Normally while shooting outdoors I can rub some dirt on this part of my hand to make it more slippery but I don’t have access to “dirt” at the indoor match so using some target tape works out good as an alternative. This is going to be helpful while attending some of the major matches that are really hot and humid making my hands sticky. I just need to remember to throw a roll of brown tape in my shooting bag so I can have it when needed.

The weather forecast is looking good so far for this coming weekend. It’s supposed to be in the 60’s on both Saturday and Sunday. If that happens it will be great outdoor shooting weather. I am planning on going out to do some more live fire practice on Saturday. Hopefully I can make some more solid headway on shooting steel and staying low in the shooting positions. Then on Sunday I will be attending the USPSA club match in Pueblo. These will be my last opportunity to shoot before I head out for the Florida Open next week.

[Husker95]

It was a good match last night - albeit long. You really hammered that last stage with a 9.27 time.

[CHA-LEE]

The past weekend the weather was awesome. There wasn’t a match on Saturday so I went out to the range to practice instead. Once again I setup a mixture of steel and paper and shot it several different ways. I was practicing with a couple of friends and it was fun to shoot with them as well. I had a couple of gun failure events where the hammer would follow post shot. I thought that this was due to there not being enough over travel so I gave the trigger some more over travel but didn’t have a bunch more ammo to really test it out. At the end of the practice the guys wanted to setup and try the El Presidente classifier so we set that up and shot it a few times for practice. At the end of the practice I could really tell how much weaker my left arm was. The shooting stuff was fine, but my reloads got progressively worse as my left arm was losing strength and causing inconsistent grabbing for the next mag or bringing it up to meet the magwell properly. Having a weak left arm due to this neck injury sucks. I think it’s a done deal though and won’t get much better, so I have to make due with what I have.

On Sunday I went down to Pueblo for the local USPSA match. The weather was once again awesome and I had a great squad to shoot with. On the second stage my gun hammer followed twice forcing me to rack the slide to continue shooting. I gave up about 4 seconds on that stage dealing with the unexpected stoppage so I knew that I was going to have an uphill battle if I was going to win the match. Since my primary gun was having issues I switched to my backup gun and it ran flawlessly the rest of the match. I am just glad that I threw the backup gun in my car as I don’t normally bring a backup gun to club matches. My backup gun shoots slightly different than my primary due to the slide being a little lighter. The felt recoil is a little more violent due to the lighter slide, but that was easy to get use to after a stage run with it. From a shooting perspective I felt that I did fairly well. I did ended up with an uncalled miss on a hard cover partial target while shooting on the move. But I was pushing the limits of my shooting on the move skills so its not too much of a surprise. I probably broke a shot as I was stepping hard and bounced the gun up or down causing the miss. Other than that I finished the match solidly. The miss along with the 4 seconds of gun issues was too much to recover from to take the match high overall finish. Oh well, it happens.

When I got home I dug into my Primary blaster to try and figure out what was causing the hammer follow issues. If I held the trigger back and racked the slide violently the hammer would follow about 50% of the time. This pointed to a sear spring or sear to hammer hook engagement issue. I fiddled with the sear spring tension a little bit but it would still hammer follow about 25% of the time. I decided to freshen up the sear lip cuts and hammer hooks. The hammer hooks looked great. The sear lip was a little beat up by falling to half cock during the hammer follow events. I was using a 50% primary, and 50% secondary cut on the sear and I think that was too aggressive. I changed it to a 70% primary and 30% secondary cut then tested it out again and couldn’t get it to hammer follow at all. I think I just wore out the sear lip and with using the 50/50 cut setup that was just too much on the edge. Since I prefer to shoot the primary gun I figured that I would go test it out in live fire to see if the issue was in fact fixed. The next day I went out to the range and burned through 400 rounds to test it out and it worked flawlessly. 400 rounds isn’t a ton of shooting to prove reliability but it’s better than nothing. I couldn’t get the hammer follow event to happen again in live or dry fire testing so I am pretty confident that the issue is fixed. I am going to roll the dice and use this gun at the Florida Open this coming week.

I am all packed up for the Florida Open and am looking forward to attending this match. I was looking at the weather forecast and its actually looking like it will be kind of cool there on Friday. Its showing a low of 34 in the morning and a high of 60 degrees so I am going to bring my cold weather shooting gear. This weather is a little interesting given the location, and I am sure the local shooters will hate it. But coming from Colorado, this is pretty much the “Good” weather conditions for shooting during the winter so I have plenty of practice in it. Maybe this will work to my advantage as the “warm blooded” southern shooters will probably be out of their element in the cooler range conditions? We will see how it goes.

[Nimitz]

i live about an hr from Frostproof and yes, it's going to be freakin cold both Fri & Sat mornings .. Luckily, Fri is just a normal training day for me so I'll probbaly sleep in and let it get to around 60 before I venture outside ... saturday I'm going to a local Steel Challenge match so I'll have no choice but to break out my artic gear for the morning ...

[PatJones]

Go get 'em boss. Have fun in Florida.

[CHA-LEE]

Last week I attended the Florida Open match. I decided to shoot this match all in one day on Friday. I found a killer flight deal ($100 Round Trip) for this match but it had me flying out on Wednesday night at midnight and getting into Florida on Thursday morning. I can’t sleep on planes so Wed/Thur ended up being a looooooooong 30 hour day. Either way I got to the range before lunch time on Thursday and got to check out the stages and watch the RO’s shoot some of the stages as well. The weather was great and the stages were awesome as well. Every stage was a long field course with lots of options in how to tackle them. There was a great mixture of running around, aiming hard, and pushing the limits of your stage planning skills. By the time I had looked at all of the stages I was almost delirious with exhaustion so I headed back to my hotel and crashed. 14 hours later I woke up and headed to the range to tackle the match. I was worried that pushing the limits of not sleeping would negatively impact my mental freshness on Friday, but the 14 hour Big Panda coma was good enough to get me back to a rejuvenated state.

I was on Squad 8 which was an awesome squad to shoot with. I knew several of the shooters on my squad and we all had a great time participating in the match and worked hard on churning through the stages as effectively as we could. On several stages the RO’s made positive comments on how well our squad was with working and getting the stage reset between shooters. I don’t like to pat myself on the back publicly much, but I am proud to say that we had a KICK ASS squad that worked hard all day long and had fun while doing it. Speaking of fun that was my primary focus during this match and I am glad to report that I achieved that goal. I didn’t shoot as well as I wanted to and even battled some gun issues that significantly impacted my overall result but I didn’t let that keep me from having fun and staying positive.

From a match performance perspective I felt that I didn’t do very well overall. I managed to rack up 4 misses and 3 no shoots through the match which was WAY too many shooting penalties. The “Good” out of this is that only 2 of the misses were surprises. The rest I knew were super marginal and ended up being a miss or I simply mashed the trigger down into a no shoot. The good in all of this is that I shot the steel in the match a lot better than I normally would, so my steel focused practice is starting to pay off. I still have a lot of work to do, but its good to see some benefit from it already. I can handle the self-induced mistakes, but I absolutely hate the unpredictable gun issues. Since I wasn’t 100% sure that the hammer follow trigger issues were resolved on my primary gun I would test it in the safe area before and after each stage run. The hammer follow issue started to happen in the safe area about half way through the match so I figured I would hedge my bets and switch over to my backup gun and not risk the primary gun failing in the middle of a stage run. I had used my backup gun for a couple of stages with no issues, and then for no apparent reason on the third stage in using it I had two major time wasting nose dive jams on the same stage, over two different magazines. This lead to wasting about 5 seconds of stage time clearing the jams and resulted in about a 40 match point loss in wasted time. I put brand new mag springs in just before this match so I knew that the magazines were not the root cause of the issue. So I lubed up the barrel feed ramp with some slide glide and it ran flawlessy the rest of the match. I think that the feed ramp on that barrel is slightly too steep and will need to be changed to promote feeding better than it currently is.

Needless to say, giving away 4 Mikes, 3 No Shoots, and 40 match points in gun jams isn’t a good recipe for producing a solid overall finish. Especially not in the depth of talent that was in attendance at the Florida Open. I had to wait until Sunday night to see the full magnitude of my poor performance and not too much to my surprise I ended up 10^th overall in Limited at 87% of the winner Todd Jerrett. This blows my goal of finishing in the top 3 out of the water, but looking at the match results it really wasn’t too far out of grasp. If I wouldn’t have had the 5 seconds of gun jams losing about 40 match points I would have finished 3^rd or 4^th overall. I also liked that my stage times were on par with the stage winners most of the time, so I am not too far off of where I need to be.

I need to get these gun issues resolved so I can get some more confidence in my gear. My guns need to work 100% of the time. There is no excuse for them to not work 100%. So getting them back on track is my number one goal right now. Beyond that I need to keep diligent on my live fire practice and kept beating on the steel. Right now shooting steel one for one at an aggressive pace is where I am losing the most amount of stage time. Eventually I will get better at it.

When I got home on Saturday I did some more trigger work on my Primary gun and think that I have a better sear to hammer hook engagement setup. I decided to shoot the local club match at Weld on Sunday to test it out and am happy to report that it ran flawlessly during the match and I still can’t reproduce the hammer follow issue on the bench. But I need several thousand rounds of flawless performance to actually prove that its fixed. As a funny contrast, on Friday I was shooting in Sunny Mid 60’s awesome range conditions. On Sunday I was shooting in hand numbing cold mid 30’s with blowing snow and howling wind. Going from “Summer” to “Winter” range conditions within the same weekend is pretty crazy. But I guess that is the “Practical” part of practical shooting. You have to roll with the flow if you want to get some blasting done.

[CHA-LEE]

Earlier this week I did some feed ramp tuning on the backup gun. I increased the feed ramp angle slightly and also moved it back some more. Hand racking rounds through the gun with the new feed ramp angle produced much smoother feeding of the rounds and most of the “clunky” feeding feeling is gone. I was able to get out to the range yesterday to test it out. I was only able to shoot 100 rounds through it before I ran out of daylight but it fed smoothly. After the range visit I looked at the feed ramp to see where the tip of the bullets were hitting and they are now hitting the middle of the feed ramp which is exactly how my Primary gun looks. I know that 100 rounds isn’t a very solid test to ensure that the nose dive jamming issue is fixed, but this is at least a move in the right direction.

While fiddling with the feed ramp I switch both primary and backup guns sear lip cut configuration to an 80% Primary and 20% Secondary. After doing this I can’t reproduce the hammer follow issue on the bench even if I don’t hold the trigger back while racking the slide aggressively. This setup is looking like it has a lot more positive sear to hammer hook engagement. I still need to do a lot more live fire testing to make sure that this new configuration holds and the hammer follow issue is resolved. But so far it’s looking good.

Figuring out what these 2011’s need to function 100% is an ongoing learning process. I went through the same learning process when I was using my EAA pistols and some lessons simply can’t be learned or discovered until you get a crap ton of ammo through the gun. All I can do is take it one issue at a time and continue to refine the tuning of the gun as needed to make it 100% reliable.

The Colorado Front Range is getting hammered with a big snow storm this weekend so all of the outdoor matches have been canceled. There is a USPSA club match happening in Grand Junction this Saturday and my buddy Bob Krough runs that match. So I am going to head over the mountains to attend that match. Hopefully the weather holds out on the western slope long enough for us to get some shooting done. We will see how it goes.