CHA-LEE's Tale

[drewbeck]

We're all screwed now...

We were already screwed, now we're just really screwed.

[BeerBaron]

My apologies if you mentioned this before but I'm curious about the barrel and comp?

Bull, bush or island barrel?

Which comp?

Any barrel holes?

It looks great with the 115s but I know a lot of that perceived performance is down to an excellent grip.

You'd be a great gun salesman.

*Picks up random gun.

'See how flat shooting our new 40 megawatt plasma blaster is. Demonstrated here by average joe, Charlie Perez'.

* Charlie comes out in thick glasses and short sleeve shirt with pocket protector and pencils.

Gun shoots flat.

Profit.

[CHA-LEE]

Q: Bull, bush or island barrel?

A: KKM .355 cal, Bull Barrel, 1/18 twist

Q: Which comp?

A: Cheely Stainless 4 Port Comp

Q: Any barrel holes?

A: No. There are enough holes in the comp

Edited November 14, 2015 by CHA-LEE

[BeerBaron]

Thanks Charlie.

[CHA-LEE]

This weekend we got lucky once again with the weather. Both Saturday and Sunday ended up being in the 60’s which was really nice shooting weather. On Saturday I attended the CRC USPSA match and shot Limited. I also brought my Open gun so I could shoot the hot 115’s on a few stages after shooting them with my Limited gun. I shot the match fairly solid with my Limited gun with only a couple of minor issues. I got all of my hits and it was fun. On my Open gun runs I was able to consistently finish the stages 2 – 3 seconds faster than my Limited runs. Being able to shoot the long distance and partial shots faster and more aggressively is where I think most of the stage time is coming from. It’s still “odd” shooting the dot and seeing it dance around while shooting. I also found myself waiting for the dot to settle too much on target before breaking the shot.

On Sunday I decided to go practice with the Open gun instead of attending another match. I spent a lot of time shooting drills and tweaking the POA/POI at different distances. The vertical shift of POA vs POI from close to far is dramatically more than an iron sighted gun. And much to my surprise the 124’s had a more dramatic vertical shift than the 115’s. I settled on a 15 yard zero which produced about an inch low at 5 yards, and about 3 inches high at 25 yards. Setting the zero at 20 or 25 produced a much lower POI at closer distances which I think would be more detrimental while engaging close targets verses being a little high at distance. I would rather have a little bit of trigger mashing insurance at distance anyway.

I did some close to far and far to close drills burning up the different loads of 124gr bullets. I also tested to see if the point of impact changed left/right verses manually displacing the dot at different distances to see if there was any parallax to account for. Much to my surprise, regardless of distance or where the dot was within the glass, where the dot was is exactly where the hit ended up. So it’s literally a 1 to 1 sighting process. Where the dot is = where the bullet will hit. That will make learning how to shoot this bad boy as speed a lot easier than with iron sights. The only POI offset that I have to consider is the vertical stringing verses the distance. But with the 115’s and sideways C-More mount there really isn’t that much offset to account for. I will affect the POI more by mashing the trigger while shooting at speed verses the actual offset.

I chronoed the 115’s with my chrono and they came in at a HOT 1575fps which is 181 power factor. That is way too hot so more ammo loading and testing is going to be needed. We are going to try an 8.5gr drop instead of the 9.0gr to see if we can bring the velocity back down to a reasonable 168 – 170 PF. Since the ammo was so hot I didn’t put much effort into trying to get use to the tracking of the dot or dot noise as I know it will be reduced when the ammo is softer. That and I shot a bunch of the 124gr bullets that have a more dramatic dot movement than the 115’s.

More than anything this practice session was a “learning how to crawl” with the Open gun type of practice. I was getting use to the Ghost Holster, Turning On/Off the dot every run, adjusting the C-More to sight it in, loading & unloading using the slide racker, and basic stuff like that. It’s going to take a while to get use to all of these new “basic” things so it was nice to get a bunch of repetitions with it. The good news is that I didn’t have to “hunt” for the dot at all while shooting. Every time the gun was drawn and mounted the dot was right where it should be in the middle of the glass. The bad thing is that I catch myself looking at the dot instead of the target quite a bit. The other bad thing is that the back bottom edges of the slide are sharp and it was cutting into my hand. Damn panda paw is always in the way. I will have to round off the sharp edges so it does not cut me open when it hits my hand.

[BeerBaron]

great news. my sighting philosophy is the same. I've seen far to many guys end up drilling close shot no-shoots when forgetting that while at 3 yards just because the got is just 1 inch above the no-shoot the bullet is going straight into the top of it. a 90 degree mount helps this a lot but I still like mine to be 2-3inches high at 25 yards and like you can live with a bit of fudge room for mashing the trigger down when I'm slapping that thing at distance.

I also totally agree the main advantage to the whole open thing comes from the dot and from being able to take distance shots or tighter shots more quickly. at 10 yards or less there's nothing in it to a decent limited or even production gun (apart from perhaps the odd reload). but at 15 yards and further or on small partials the dot really comes into play.

[CHA-LEE]

Last night I was able to attend the Indoor USPSA match at the new Bristol Cone range. I have never shot at this range before so it was cool to check it out and see how they do things. I also decided to shoot my Open gun for this match as its first official match. Even though I still don’t have the “optimal” ammo for this gun it’s at least close enough to get the job done for a local club match like this. We shot four stages with most of it being box to box type of setups which is normal for this type of match since all of the rounds need to impact the back stop.

On the first stage I tried setting the dot brightness pretty high, just below flaring, and it was very distracting. It was hard to maintain a hard target focus with the dot being so distracting. I shot pretty aggressive and ended up mashing the trigger enough to pull a shot down into a no shoot. This stage also had a door in the middle that I opened too hard and it bounced closed so I had to reopen it to unblock some targets. This wasted a couple of seconds on the stage screwing around with the door.

The Second stage was a three box setup with two boxes in the back and one in the front. From the back boxes there were two sets of double stacked targets both close and far. I was able to shoot the far partial targets really aggressively and get solid hits. I was also able to hose down the close targets in the front box really good. I don’t think that I can run the Open gun any faster on the close targets than my Limited gun, but I can really see a shooting speed difference on the difficult targets.

The third stage of the day was back on the first bay where the stage was basically shot again but from the opposite direction and each target required three hits instead of two. I was rocking that stage really gun until the last position where I had a really light round fire which didn’t have enough power to cycle the slide. So I had to stop shooting, rack out the spent case then remount the gun and finish. This cost me at least two seconds dealing with the issue. Other than that I got good hits and was able to shoot really aggressive when needed.

The last stage of the day was the classifier which had you drawing off of a table twice in two separate strings and shooting tight no shoot partial targets. I haven’t done any off the table drawing practice and was kind of surprised by how much the back of the C-More was in the way of my normal pick up point for a Limited gun. I probably could have simply picked the gun up with only my strong hand, but that didn’t feel “Normal” either. So I ended up picking the gun up pretty slow on both draws and then wanted to get solid hits so I shot slow too. Even though I was shooting slow I managed to mash the trigger on the final target pulling the hit just into the No Shoot past the perf. YAY….. Drawing slow, shooting slow and getting a Miss No Shoot to boot. That is not the way to start my classification with this new blaster. Oh well, it is what it is.

Overall it was fun and I learned some good stuff about what dot brightness is optimal for indoors. I still need a lot of trigger time to get use to looking at the target instead of the dot, but it’s cool to be able to shoot way more aggressively on the further/tighter shots. I also found a couple of things that I need to figure out in Dry fire that is unique to the Open gun.

The weather is suppose to be really cold this weekend and we are getting over a recent blizzard so I am not sure if there will be any matches or practice this weekend. We have a couple more days until this weekend so maybe it will turn around, but I am not holding my breath.

[CHA-LEE]

This weekend the weather was really crappy so the matches were canceled. I didn’t get to do any shooting over the weekend. I did do some dry fire with the Open gun & Race holster setup. I am getting more use to grabbing for the gun aggressively without hitting my thumb on the C-More and whatever else. It’s still going to take a crap ton of dry fire to work out all of the kinks, but it’s at least going in the right direction so far.

This Monday was really slow at work so I was able to break away and take advantage of the 60 degree weather to get some blasting done with the Open gun.

We setup a little field course stage that had some hard aiming and tuff shooting on the move which was a great test for the Open gun. I still had some 124gr ammo left so I burned that up during this practice. It is strange how the 124gr ammo just feels “off” compared to the 115’s. It produces a lot of dot bounciness and excessive muzzle flip. I used that ammo to mainly experiment with what dot brightness would work the best. Much to my surprise I settled on a dot brightness that was just bright enough to pick it up but low enough that I could almost see the targets through the dot. I also tried shooting with sunglasses verses clear lenses and the sunglasses didn’t work out as they seemed to subdue the targets too much making the dot seem brighter than it really was. The sun was facing the backs of the targets so they were all “Shadow” targets. Maybe the sunglasses are simply too much for the “Shadow” target situation. I will have to test the sunglasses out again when the lighting is better. The main discovery today was that if I made the dot brightness just above the target brightness it seemed to work the best. Doing this allowed me to maintain a hard target focus much easier and peripherally put the dot on the target.

I burned through all of the 124gr ammo and finished up my last three practice runs with the HOT 115gr ammo and it was much better. Even though it’s still a little too excessive in the velocity department the recoil impulse and muzzle flip is a lot less dramatic than the 124gr ammo. I can’t wait to get some “normal” 115gr Major PF ammo loaded up to test out. I think it’s going to be really nice with this current gun & spring setup.

I still have a long ways to go before shooting a dot gun is second nature like my Limited gun. But it’s fun to learn something new. The weather is suppose to be nice tomorrow so I am going to see if I can break away again and do some more blasting. The weather is going to take a turn for the worse after that so there won’t be any more opportunities to shoot after Tuesday. I am also going on Vacation this coming Saturday so I won’t be able to shoot at all for about two weeks. It will be nice to go on vacation and get away from this cold weather. It’s probably better to go on Vacation than to be stuck at home and not be able to shoot because of the cold weather. Winter is here for sure.

[CHA-LEE]

The weather was nice again yesterday so I went out to practice some more. I was able to burn up the rest of the HOT 115gr ammo while doing some practice stages. I had a couple of jams while running through the rest of this ammo. The first was a nose dive failure to feed jam due to using the same magazine a bunch of times without brushing it out. The limit of reusing the same mag without brushing it out seems to be about 5 times. After brushing it out and doing so every 2 – 3 uses it didn’t jam again. I keep forgetting that there is a lot more burned powder to deal with on these open guns and the mags and gun need to be cleaned more frequently.

The second jam was a wacky one that I have never seen before. I was chain sawing at some targets during a run and it had a failure to feed. Before I try to recover it I stop and I look at it and what I see is an empty unfired case with a bullet laying backwards on top of it and unburned powder everywhere. I have attached a picture of this craziness to this post. Evidently the bullet became dislodged during feeding and ended up in this failure mode. The 115gr bullets are not pushed into the case very far with the 1.125 OAL and there wasn’t a lot of crimp used so this allowed the bullet to literally shake loose and come out while shooting. While shooting this ammo I have had a couple other instances where a round would chamber but when it fired it would be a really light feeling and sounding load. This would make sense if the bullet gets knocked loose and came out but still chambered then the chamber its self acts as the “Case” to fire the round and push the bullet down the barrel. I think the next batch of ammo will need to be a little shorter OAL along with some more crimp to avoid this from happening again.

While shooting the Open gun today I experimented with different grip pressures and every time I gripped the gun hard the dot would track way more consistently. There is still a little too much dot noise for my liking but I guess that is to be expected with the hot ammo. It will be interesting to see how the gun shoots and dot tracks with some 170PF ammo.

Even though I have been shooting the Open gun for a little while, I still feel like a fish out of water while shooting it. I still need to consciously decide when to break the shots as I am not use to paying attention to the dot and simply calling the shot when the gun goes off. It’s also very challenging to not get distracted by “looking for” the dot while shooting instead of looking at the target and letting the dot get there on its own. I am sure it’s going to take many thousands of rounds in practice to figure this out and allow it to become second nature like my Limited gun.

I knew I was going to run out of Open ammo during this practice session so I brought my Limited gun as well. I also wanted to test the Ghost Holster with the Limited gun. I shot the practice stage several times with the Limited gun and was usually about a second slower with it, but that is to be expected given the target difficulty used in each shooting position. Shooting the Limited gun was like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes that fits and feels perfectly normal. It was nice to get back into the mode of subconsciously processing the sight picture, calling shots, and letting the shooting happen at its own pace. I hate to say it but getting back into my comfort zone with the Limited gun made me not want to shoot the Open gun any more. I am not going to quit on the Open gun that easily, but it made me realize just how far I am from shooting the Open gun properly. I think I will continue to bring the Limited gun to my Open practice sessions to use it as a gauge to see how my Open shooting is progressing.

The one thing I did find with the Limited gun in the Ghost Holster is that the muzzle perch extension that I made is a little too restrictive. I made a muzzle perch extension for the Limited gun that screws into the tip of the Open muzzle perch cone. The plastic tip that engages the Limited barrel was too straight and tight in how it would engage the barrel and it would hang up if I tilted the gun forward or to the side during the draw. When I got home I modified the plastic tip to make it more of a cone shape like the Open perch. This should give it enough clearance within the barrel to allow the gun to be tilted and still not bind in the barrel rifling like it was before. I still need to do some dry fire with it to verify that the issue is fixed but the solution is coming along nicely. It’s cool to have a single race holster setup that can quickly be converted between supporting the Open and Limited guns. It takes less than a minute to add or remove the Limited standoff perch with no other adjustments needed. This will allow me to shoot both guns back to back without much delay or fiddling needed to support either gun.

[thermobollocks]

Finally, I'm not the only one to have ammo fall apart.

[PatJones]

What sizing die are you using Charlie?

[CHA-LEE]

I am not loading the ammo so I am not sure what sizing die is being used.

[PatJones]

Fair enough. I was wondering if neck tension could be increased with a smaller die.

[CHA-LEE]

Probably. I will look into that.

[BeerBaron]

it's a fairly common issue guys have with long loaded 9 major. they tend to either get setback (can happen in the mag under recoil, or can happen during feeding) or get bullets being dislodged during feeding. particularly with 115s loaded long as there is not much bearing surface for the case to grab. in those cases either loading a little shorter (providing it meets accuracy and reliability goals) and/or adding some more crimp can cure it. a undersized sizing die can help with more neck tension too as pointed out above.

Do keep an eye on it as rounds with setback can cause a fairly significant pressure increase.

[CHA-LEE]

Yesterday I got back from my week long vacation with the wife. We went on a Caribbean cruise and it was great. It’s nice to get away from it all for a week and simply take it easy. I can honestly say that I didn’t think about shooting much during the trip. That is good and shows that I needed a break from it all for a little while.

Tonight I am going to attend the indoor match down in Colorado Springs at the Whistling Pines Gun Club. I am all out of 9 Major ammo so I will be shooting my Limited gun. I need to get some more rounds down the pipe of the #3 Limited gun anyway since I just got it coated and only about 100 rounds on it since putting it all back together. I want to see if the front sight starts to drift like it was before getting coated. Hopefully the extra material in the dovetail from the coating process will make it tighter so it won’t drift. We will see how it goes.

This week I am going to see if I can get some more ammo loaded for the Open gun so I can play with it this coming weekend. The weekend weather forecast is looking pretty poor at this point though so there might not be any matches to attend. If not I will get some dry fire training done around the house.

[Richc2048]

What are you signed up for area 2?

Are you officially switched? Only shooting limited tonight because of ammo?

Glad you had a good time on your break!

[CHA-LEE]

I signed up for Limited at the Area 2 match and fully plan on shooting Limited there. I have not "Officially" switched to Open either as I am still trying to get everything figured out. I still have a lot of work to do on getting the Open ammo ironed out. I will continue to shoot Limited for now. I may only use the Open gun for the crappy lighting indoor matches anyway. We will see how it goes. Right now the Open gun is just another thing to play with in the off season.

Edited December 7, 2015 by CHA-LEE

[Richc2048]

Nice! Thanks for the clarification. Can wait to see you chain saw that open gun.

[CHA-LEE]

The WP match was fun last night. The #3 Limited blaster ran flawlessly and the front sight didn’t drift at all. I know I need to shoot a bunch more through the gun to verify that the front sight isn’t going to drift but it’s looking good so far.

Having not shot in two weeks I wasn’t sure how I was going to do at this match. I didn’t set any expectations and simply let the shooting happen when it wanted. This little break from shooting didn’t seem to change my performance at all. I was able to shoot accurately and aggressively like always. It’s nice to be able to take a little break and hit the ground running again. The first two stages were fairly straight forward blaster type with a lot of open targets. The third stage was the classifier, which was the old El Presidente stage. I missed my grip on the turn draw which had my strong hand rotated around the grip too far. This lead to a funky presentation of the sights and inability to reach the mag release during the reload. I knew I had a miss on the first target I engaged due to the displaced sights so it was a train wreck from the start. Then I had a bump fire extra shot on the last target after the reload due to the crappy grip. Amazingly I didn’t have a miss or extra hit since my bump fire happened on the first target I engaged. I still had to eat the extra shot penalty, but that’s better than a miss plus an extra shot and extra hit. My luck continued on the last stage which was the same as the first stage but with the lights turned way down and hard cover added to several of the targets. The lighting was DARK for this stage and I couldn’t see my sights well at all. They looked like black on black sights pointed at really dark targets. Since I knew I couldn’t see my sights I had to rely on point shooting the targets and let it all hang out. I shot the stage super aggressive trying to point shoot as fast as I could and simply “Hope” hits onto the targets. Much to my surprise I got all of my hits which was a shock given the conditions and simply slinging lead in the general direction of the targets. Sometimes you let it all hang out and get lucky, this was one of those times.

During this match I used the new Ghost holster with my modified muzzle perch for the Limited gun. The muzzle perch didn’t hang up on the barrel at all so I think I got that issue fixed. This holster has the height of the gun about an inch higher than my Blade Teck DOH so that is a little funky to get use to. I need to do a lot of dry fire to get use to the slightly higher gun position so I can aggressively grab for the gun with confidence. This holster digs into my leg a little bit which is a little annoying but not horrible. The good thing is that I am yet to have it jam up during a draw unlike the other race holsters I have tried in the past. It’s nice to have a single holster that will be able to work with both the Limited and Open guns. I am not ready to totally ditch the Blade Teck DOH though as that thing has proven to be very reliable and comfortable for many years now.

I also got a chance to try out some new shooting glasses that came in while I was on Vacation. I had a chance to try on some Oakley Radar EV Path sunglasses at the mall before leaving on vacation and they actually fit really nice. I ordered some with clear lenses before I left so I could have them when I got back. They worked out great for the indoor match. They have a decent amount of lens wrap around my face to provide really good protection but also have enough space between my cheeks and forehead to promote good ventilation. I still need to test them out in sweaty face conditions to see if they are as “breathable” as the Rudy Project Rydon glasses but it will be a while before I can test that out. Either way I am happy to have yet another set of shooting glasses to use for matches.

Hopefully the winter weather restrains its self enough to let us shoot this coming weekend. You never know what the weather is going to be like here in Colorado until about a day out. So all I can do in the meantime is keep my fingers crossed.

Edited December 8, 2015 by CHA-LEE

[CHA-LEE]

The winter weather kept us from shooting outdoors this weekend. I got some 115gr Open ammo with 8.3gr of HS-6 made up making about 170 power factor. Since these rounds are significantly less “Spicy” than the 181PF stuff I decided to do some slow motion video of the new ammo. The slow motion video shows that the goal of zero muzzle flip during the shot is almost achieved. I don’t think I will be able to 100% eliminate the muzzle flip but its pretty close in this current configuration. This ammo felt significantly softer than the 181PF stuff while shooting it as expected. The one thing that stood out with this ammo is how much the dot “Noise” is reduced verses the hotter ammo. The dot moves around a little bit but the motion is pretty smooth and predictable, verses an erratic “Static” type of vibration movement with the hotter ammo.

I have not accounted for the weight of a full magazine verses an empty one. All of these slow motion video’s I have done are with 5 rounds or less in the magazine so the magazine weight is nonexistent compared to a fully loaded one. I need to do some more slow motion video comparisons between full big stick mag vs only a few rounds in the gun. I ran into a significant felt recoil difference while shooting the indoor match on Sunday when I had a fully loaded big stick in the gun verses using the little sticks. I will get into that later when I talk about the match. So far the ammo development is going in the right direction and I am happy with the results.

Since I had a lot of down time due to the crappy weather I decided to fiddle on the extractor. With the stock AFTEC extractor setup there was a significant “Clunk” resistance when a round is chambered and the rim of the case gets pushed up under the extractor. With the barrel out and I manually place a piece of brass into the breach face under the extractor it feels like it has the correct amount of tension. But when I do the same test with the barrel installed simulating the barrel locking up there was a significant amount of extractor tension. I think that that chamber alignment to breach face alignment is slightly deviated towards the extractor when the barrel is locked up and that is causing the excessive extractor tension. I modified the extractor tension to have a decent amount of tension when the round is chambered, but that creates a not even holding the rim of the case tension when you manually place the brass up against the breach face. I know this setup does not seem “Right” but I figured I would give it a go to see if it would produce failure to extract issues. The thing I like about the current extractor setting is that ammo feeds butter smooth now and that should assist with more reliable feeding while using the 7lb recoil spring. I was able to shoot the gun a little bit over the weekend, only about 100 rounds and didn’t have any extraction issues so maybe this setup will work. I need to get a couple thousand rounds though it to really prove that it works or not though.

While I was dry firing the Open gun I was working on unloaded starts where you have to rack the slide before starting the shooting and reaching over the top of the gun to pull on the slide racker then moving your hand back over to the left side to build the grip is super clunky. I noticed that I could pinch the front of the slide from under the gun and rack it just far enough to feed a round before my fingers bottomed out on the scope mount. It was very inconsistent though because my fingers would slip back a little from the front of the slide and then I wouldn’t be able to move the slide back far enough to chamber a round. I had Rick mill off the sides of the comp just in front of the slide so that there is a ledge to hook onto on the front of the slide and now I can rack the gun pretty reliably by pinching the back of the comp in the milled off section then pulling back to catch on the front of the slide. Being able to rack the gun like this saved about half a second on the loading process and it also allows me to build my grip after the rack a lot more consistently. I will still use the slide racker to make ready and unload after the run, but when loading the gun on the clock racking the gun from underneath by pinching the front of the slide is way faster.

On Sunday the outdoor match in Pueblo was canceled but the Boulder match was happening with only indoor stages. I figured getting some shooting done would be better than none so I attended the Boulder indoor match. They had three stages setup side by side on the indoor range and there were two “Flights” of squads so we could basically shoot the three stage match twice.

I didn’t sleep worth a crap the night before and I felt a cold coming on so I was feeling a little zoned out that morning and it really showed in my shooting. I had a pretty horrible match with only one decent stage run. The lighting was pretty dark in the range and I was struggling with finding the correct dot brightness that wasn’t too overwhelming or not bright enough. I was also surprised in how differently the felt recoil was with a full big stick mag. The felt recoil was a lot less with the full mag and this lead to some strange shooting vs trigger finger timing issues.

I am still a very long ways from shooting the dot from a subconscious level so every shot seems to be a conscious decision on when to break the shot. This is very distracting and keeps me from doing other things subconsciously as well. After train wrecking two of the first three stages I pretty much gave up and simply threw lead down range in the general direction of the targets which resulted in a fantastic collection of shooting penalties. Mixed in there I also had an ammo failure where a primer popped out after the shot fired and the loose primer locked the gun up so I couldn’t finish the stage. It was a pretty horrible match overall for me but not too much of a surprise given the lack of sleep and a cold coming on. The good news is that I didn’t have any extraction issues so my new extractor setup may be good enough to get the job done.

I am signed up to shoot another indoor match on Wednesday, but I am not sure if I will attend or not given this cold that seems to be getting worse. I don’t want to force myself to shoot when I am feeling crappy and full of cold meds. I know it will dramatically impact my shooting and just cause more frustration. So we will see how this cold goes over the next couple of days. If it gets worse I will not go to the match.

[thermobollocks]

What's indoors on Wednesday? The pinshoot at Centennial?

[CHA-LEE]

The Bristlecone USPSA Match in Lakewood.

[thermobollocks]

Nice. Bit of a hike for a work night, but I'm glad to see Centennial and Bristlecone thrive.

[aaronsdmf]

I'm going to head up there rob, do you sign up ahead of time for this one?