CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

jkatz44> Here are some pictures of my primary competition pistol, holster and stuff like that. I don't have any pic's of my backup pistol yet as its still in pieces. Once I get it all together I will take some pictures of it and post them up. Are these the kind of pictures you were looking for?

[jkatz44]

jkatz44> Here are some pictures of my primary competition pistol, holster and stuff like that. I don't have any pic's of my backup pistol yet as its still in pieces. Once I get it all together I will take some pictures of it and post them up. Are these the kind of pictures you were looking for?

nice blaster!

[CHA-LEE]

I took the chance of venturing up to Steamboat Springs Friday night and was rewarded with a pretty easy drive. The roads were clear most of the way until we got close to Steamboat and then it was only a little rainy and wet. Saturday morning it was a brisk 35 degrees but it wasn’t raining/snowing and even though the sky was overcast for most of the morning there wasn’t a breeze so the cold temps were not too bad. It heated up a little as the day went along and ended up in the low 50’s by the time we were done shooting.

The stages for the match were fun and challenging. I shot a few sections within stages a little too quickly and was rewarded with some D’s and three misses for the match. My nemesis these days seem to be the full open targets. I tend to get suckered into shooting them too fast. I didn’t give them the respect they deserved and got stung by it. I only had one minor stage plan fumble where I entered a shooting position pretty fast and chose to engage a head shot only target first instead of a fully open target next to it. This made me stall for a second to let the sights settle down for the tight head shots when I could have been shooting a lot sooner if I engaged the open target first instead. But that was the only planning error of the match. There was a very limited amount of shooters at this match and they wanted to have dedicated RO’s for the two squads that we had since there were some new shooters attending. I stepped up to RO my squad and ended up running the timer on just about everyone except for myself on all of the stages. Doing this really didn’t give me much time to plan the stage runs so I can see how the target engagement order fumble happened. I really rocked the house on one stage though. It was an 18 round stage with a Texas star, five poppers and four paper targets. I shot the star quickly, one for one and it didn’t even get a chance to move. I had one make up shot on a popper but mowed down the rest very quickly. I felt like I moved though the stage well and was shooting the whole time. Its nice when a stage run happens the way it should.

It was a fun day of shooting and I am glad that I made the trek over the mountains to attend their last match of the season. They are a bunch of great guys to shoot with and I look forward to shooting out there again next spring.

Section Qualifier match tomorrow down in Pueblo. I have decided that I am going to shoot a 100% solid match tomorrow. No “I Hope”, “Maybe”, or “Luck”. I am just going to do it, no excuses or bullshit to not do it, just do it.

[CHA-LEE]

The USPSA match was canceled today due to the cold weather. It would have been nice to shoot, but it was nicer to not have to freeze my ass off while doing it. The winter matches are here and some cold shooting is to be expected from here on out.

[SA Friday]

I took the chance of venturing up to Steamboat Springs Friday night and was rewarded with a pretty easy drive. The roads were clear most of the way until we got close to Steamboat and then it was only a little rainy and wet. Saturday morning it was a brisk 35 degrees but it wasn’t raining/snowing and even though the sky was overcast for most of the morning there wasn’t a breeze so the cold temps were not too bad. It heated up a little as the day went along and ended up in the low 50’s by the time we were done shooting.

The stages for the match were fun and challenging. I shot a few sections within stages a little too quickly and was rewarded with some D’s and three misses for the match. My nemesis these days seem to be the full open targets. I tend to get suckered into shooting them too fast. I didn’t give them the respect they deserved and got stung by it. I only had one minor stage plan fumble where I entered a shooting position pretty fast and chose to engage a head shot only target first instead of a fully open target next to it. This made me stall for a second to let the sights settle down for the tight head shots when I could have been shooting a lot sooner if I engaged the open target first instead. But that was the only planning error of the match. There was a very limited amount of shooters at this match and they wanted to have dedicated RO’s for the two squads that we had since there were some new shooters attending. I stepped up to RO my squad and ended up running the timer on just about everyone except for myself on all of the stages. Doing this really didn’t give me much time to plan the stage runs so I can see how the target engagement order fumble happened. I really rocked the house on one stage though. It was an 18 round stage with a Texas star, five poppers and four paper targets. I shot the star quickly, one for one and it didn’t even get a chance to move. I had one make up shot on a popper but mowed down the rest very quickly. I felt like I moved though the stage well and was shooting the whole time. Its nice when a stage run happens the way it should.

It was a fun day of shooting and I am glad that I made the trek over the mountains to attend their last match of the season. They are a bunch of great guys to shoot with and I look forward to shooting out there again next spring.

Section Qualifier match tomorrow down in Pueblo. I have decided that I am going to shoot a 100% solid match tomorrow. No “I Hope”, “Maybe”, or “Luck”. I am just going to do it, no excuses or bullshit to not do it, just do it.

Pink Elephant

[CHA-LEE]

AAAAHHHH...... You got me

[CHA-LEE]

Time for some more match shooting this weekend. I am planning on shooting two USPSA matches this weekend, one on Saturday and another on Sunday. The weather is looking great for the weekend as well so we shouldn’t run into any issues due to bad weather, unlike last weekend. I have been working on my backup gun most of this week and its almost done. I am waiting on a couple more parts to come in before I can complete it though. Hopefully the parts will be in the mail when I get home today so I can get it finished up and ready to test out this weekend. I am sure some minor tuning will be needed to get it fully ready to rumble, but so far, its looking really nice.

I started reading “With Winning In Mind” again last night and am glad that I decided to go through it again. I had forgotten a couple of things in the book that are very important to mental preparation and look forward to putting those things to use in this weekends matches.

[SA Friday]

Time for some more match shooting this weekend. I am planning on shooting two USPSA matches this weekend, one on Saturday and another on Sunday. The weather is looking great for the weekend as well so we shouldn’t run into any issues due to bad weather, unlike last weekend. I have been working on my backup gun most of this week and its almost done. I am waiting on a couple more parts to come in before I can complete it though. Hopefully the parts will be in the mail when I get home today so I can get it finished up and ready to test out this weekend. I am sure some minor tuning will be needed to get it fully ready to rumble, but so far, its looking really nice.

I started reading “With Winning In Mind” again last night and am glad that I decided to go through it again. I had forgotten a couple of things in the book that are very important to mental preparation and look forward to putting those things to use in this weekends matches.

I mark in books I own, highlighter, underlining, write in the margins. Makes finding the gold in the stream easier.

Edited October 16, 2009 by SA Friday

[CHA-LEE]

SA Friday> Good advice, I will have to do that.

[CHA-LEE]

Fun match today. I went out early and helped setup a stage. It as really windy today though. The temperature was decent, in the mid to high 50’s in the morning, but the wind took a lot of the heat out of you. I ended up wearing my winter coat almost all day due to the wind.

The first stage of the day felt pretty clunky and fumbled. I didn’t feel like I was in the zone for the stage and it showed. I had the stage programmed down but ended up shooting it from a complete commanded state which had me over analyzing certain sections of the stage as I shot it. I shook it off and was back in the saddle on the second stage.

I shot the stage pretty fluidly and but was shooting a little too fast on some of the partials and had to make about three makeup shots that I called Marginal. Even though I had to take some extra shots for the marginal called shots I am glad that I did because all of the marginal’s were D’s that I made up mostly with A’s. I ended up with a miss on the last target of the first string of fire simply because I moved my head towards the second string as I was breaking the last shot as I moved my head. Stupid mistake. I still have some more work to do on keeping my head on target until the shooting is done for that target.

The third stage of the day was the most challenging of the match for me. It was a 22 round COF with five fully open targets on both the left and right sides ascending down range. Then some barrels and no shoots blocking two poppers and two swingers that both triggered off the first popper. Since both swingers started off at the same time you had to come up with some creative target engagement order to keep you shooting the whole time and not have to wait on the swingers. That and it was a 22 round COF so I could load up to 22 rounds in the gun and go for it with no reload. I executed the front half of the stage well and did the swinger/popper timing section good but ended up a little behind the ball on the second round of the second swinger. My second shot just barely nicked the target just a tad bit away from the perforation. While I was shooting it, since I felt like I was behind schedule after the second swinger I shot the left side targets a little too fast and ended up with an alpha mike on one of the targets. I simply didn’t call those two shots and wasn’t surprised to see a miss. But I completed the stage in a very fast time, shot the whole time not having to wait for the swingers or steel, and didn’t have to perform a reload. Even though I had two misses I still felt like it was a great success to get the timing of the swingers down almost perfectly.

The fourth stage of the day was classifier 03-03 called Take em Down. I shot it with a lot of restraint so I would get good hits but still had a make up shot needed on the steel at the end of the stage. Even though the stage run was less than optimal I ended up with an 85% result, which was nice.

The last stage of the day was a 30 round COF that had one open target and the rest were mostly covered up with hard cover in all kinds of different angles. The targets were setup in a half mood formation in front of you. You started with your unloaded gun on a barrel and then had to load, rack and engage the targets from pretty much a stationary position. I knew that this stage would make or break a lot of peoples match because of the shot difficulty and the target distance was right in that uncomfortable zone of being close, but just far enough away that you needed to give the shots some patience. Then the liberal amount of hard cover on the targets made it even more difficult. I shot the stage pretty conservatively and waited for the sights to settle to call every shot good. At one point in the stage though I turned the afterburners on for one target and instantly had to slow back down to ensure my hits. It was really hard for me to restrain the speed of my shooting but I did pretty good with it and was rewarded with all of my hits.

After the match I got a chance to shoot and sight in my freshly built backup gun. I had the slide lightened by an ounce so it recoils quite differently than my primary gun. It has a far more sharp recoil. It feels like a 9mm type of recoil instead of a .40. It ran well though with no issues. I was going to chrono some rounds though it to see how it compared to my other gun but the constant wind all day sapped my ambition to shoot any more.

It was a fun match, I relearned some lessons and had a good time shooting with friends as well. I need to STOP moving my head off target before I am done shooting. I thought I had that solved, but it is creeping back into my shooting here and there. I have another USPSA match tomorrow so it will be interesting to see if I can champion this challenge or continue doing it. Some times you never really know what is going to happen when the subconscious auto pilot takes over after the buzzer goes off. I think a lot of conscious practice not doing it is going to be the long term solution though. Rome wasn’t built in a day right?

[CHA-LEE]

Great match today. A crew of great Limited shooters were in attendance at this match and it made the competition stiff. Just the way I like it!!! On top of that the Weld County Practical Shooters club setup some great stages that were both fun and challenging.

The first stage of the day was a completely new challenge for me. You had to stand on a moving platform that was hung by chains and would move about a foot in any direction depending on how you moved around on the platform. At the start you faced up range and had to turn and engage a bunch of targets through ports in three separate walls and some extra targets to the sides and in front of you. Any body movement sent the platform swaying all over the place. You also couldn’t shoot all the targets from one place on the platform. You had to shuffle around a little bit to get to all of the targets through the ports. So basically you were forced to shoot while swaying around as you moved a little here and there. Very interesting stage to shoot. I didn’t struggle with the movement much and just kept a wide stance and went with the flow of the platform movement. I was rewarded with a decent time and all of my hits with no penalties so I was happy.

The second stage of the day was a run and gun 32 round COF that had a good mixture of long distance and close up shots. I shot the stage differently than most shooters because I felt that it flowed better for me and allowed me to be more aggressive with my movements through the stage. Towards the end of the stage there was a string of targets that were about 25 yards away. Three paper and two poppers. I shot the paper too fast and had some called marginal shots and made them up instantly but had to take an extra two shots on the string. I am glad that I made up the marginal shots though as the targets that I did shoot at three times only had two hits on them. I think I only lost about a quarter to half a second with the extra make up shots but it was well worth it due to making up misses.

The third stage of the day was a speed shoot style stage and had you starting off with a plastic sward in your strong hand and a fake head on a stool next to a bucket. At the start you had to knock the head into the bucket with the sward and have it land in the bucket. If the head did not fall in the bucket you had to retrieve it and place it in the bucket or you would incur a procedural per shot penalty until the head was placed in the bucket. For the most part this was easy and most shooters make the head fall in the bucket without issue. But the few people that did bobble it and had to retrieve the head were in a world of hurt. Well after the head stuff it was a fast run and gun with a lot of fast blasting. I started off the stage well shooting and moving good. I went to do my reload and the magazine slipped out of my hand before getting to the gun and I ended up slapping it against my belly fumbling with it trying to recover. I finally got the mag in and kept blasting to finish the stage, but the damage was done. With this being a speed shoot and me giving away about 2 seconds with the magazine fumble my stage run was going to be hurt but I was not sure how much.

The fourth stage of the day was a speed shoot with a mixture of paper and steel with a bunch of blocking no shoots setup in a kind of wall. You started facing up range with your elbows on a barrel and your hands touching your chin. You basically turn and blast as you bob and weave through the no shoot wall from a single position. The buzzer went off, I turn and grab the gun to draw, but my gun was stuck in my holster. I was crouched down quite a bit and if the gun is canted in towards my body it tends to get hung up in the holster and takes a lot of effort to get it out. After wrestling the gun out I got blasting and shot the stage pretty good. I got all the points on the stage and shot at a decent speed. But the hurting draw put a decent dent in my stage time. Oh well, next and final stage.

The last stage of the day was the classifier 99-52 called Cash ‘n’ Carry. This was a difficult classifier to really hit a home run on. You start in a box and have to engage three targets, two open ones and one that has no shoots up to the middle A zone on both sides. They are also set out at a decent distance so patience is needed for the shots. After that you move to another box and have to engage a popper on the way. Then in the final box you have to engage two more paper and another popper from one side of a barrel or another from a kneeling position under a board placed on top of the barrel. I knew going in that this stage was not going to be able to shoot it as aggressively as I would like simply because my right knee is not in the best of shape and going down hard on it into a kneeling position after running is asking for a boat load of pain. So I was forced to ease into the kneeling position the best I could. Luckily I was able to borrow a knee pad from another shooter on the squad and I didn’t hurt my knee while shooting the stage. When I got done shooting the stage I was very surprised to see that one of my shots on the no shoot blocked target in the first box position was about 2 inches into the no shoot. I had taken my time to call both shots good, but one was obviously not. That is the first time in a long time that I was surprised to see a poor hit on a target where I called the shots solid and good. This miss/no shoot blunder were the only penalties of the match for me. That mixed with my ginger entry into the kneeling position made my stage time pretty lack luster was a tuff blow to my stage run. Oh well. I would rather blow a stage and save my knee to fight another day than go full bore, blow out my knee, and end up with a crappy run anyway because of the miss/no shoot.

When I was done shooting for the day I felt like I had a decent match. I did have a couple of blunders here and there but when I was hitting on all cylinders my stage runs were pretty solid and competitive with the other top shooters in Limited. The results have been posted and I ended up 6th out of 17 shooters in Limited. Finishing 6th isn’t so good but I also finished at 90% of the Limited winner!!! Now that I think about it, I will take ANY position number and still finish 90% of the division winner. I really, really like the fact that we have so many good Limited shooters to make this situation possible. Tight competition like this is all that much better for making us all raise the bar of our shooting performance. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to shoot with such a great group of shooters on a regular basis. I know that I would not have been able to raise my own skill set this fast/well if it wasn’t for this level of competition locally. Now I have to polish up those rough edges in order to bring my own game to the next level. The process of skill building and experiencing never ends!!!

[CHA-LEE]

Indoor match tonight. This is the one off match using ICORE targets instead of the standard USPSA ones. I am not super excited about the actual match due to it not being a USPSA match but shooting is shooting and the more ammo sent down range in any kind of match style condition is better than not getting any trigger time. I am going to shoot my backup gun tonight to run it through its paces in match conditions to make sure that its up for the task. It will be interesting to see how or if the difference in how it shoots compared to my standard pistol affects my stage runs. My main concern is if the different recoil will change how the sights return post shot. If the sights return to where they should be, then no matter how the recoil “Feels”, I should still be able to shoot it the same as my other gun. I am still going to bring my regular pistol in case some catastrophic failure happens on the new one. We will see how it goes.

My hope is that the backup gun runs like a champ and I can put it away to use as a backup for the Area 2 match next month. It will be nice to have that task checked off the preparation list for the Area 2 match.

[CHA-LEE]

I shot the indoor ICORE style match last night. I shot it like a USPSA match as I didn’t care about the ICORE scoring. That hurt my overall match performance due to the extra time penalties but I didn’t care. The backup gun ran well with no issues. Since the slide is lightened by 1oz on the front it recoils quite different than the stock gun. When the slide comes back forward after the shot it does not force the front of the gun down as much as the stock gun so your second shot tends to go higher than normal. I used the different stage runs to test out some different grip pressures and if I gripped the gun harder the sights started to return to where they should post shot. Is it better or worse? I am not sure. All I know is that it requires a different grip pressure to shoot the way I want it to. The good news is that it runs fine and goes “BOOM” when the boom lever is pushed. It will suit its purpose as a backup gun for the larger matches. Some time next year though, I will probably get another EAA Witness Limited and not lighten the slide to replace my current primary blaster. Then put my current primary gun into the backup gun roll.

May lady has shown some interest in wanting to shoot and I think that the lightened slide gun will work better for her shooting minor loads. After I get back from the Area 2 match I will start working on a minor load for it and take her out to the range to see what she thinks. She is fairly recoil sensitive so I have my job cut out for me on making a really soft shooting pistol.

[CHA-LEE]

USPSA Match yesterday. This is one of the matches that I help put on so there was a lot of work to be done before and after the match. We got a lot of help setting up which was awesome and all of the stages were setup and ready to go ahead of schedule. One of the stages that I brought to the match ended up being the last stage to be built and we had to set it up a little differently due to some range rule limitations. We had to change the position of some targets to make it work but I think it actually turned out better than I had originally thought it would. I got a chance to check out the other stages a little bit before the match and that was nice as I usually don’t get to do that when I help setup.

The first stage of the day was a 16 round stage with half steel poppers and the other half were paper targets with “Zebra” hard cover on them blocking all but the A zone from top to bottom. To make it more interesting you started with your gun unloaded and your first magazine was in a pumpkin bucket in front of you. At the start you grab your mag load and rack as you are running up to the first door. Open the door and engage an array of 8 poppers that were set in two rows. The poppers were a mixture of tall and short ones with some of the small ones behind the tall ones so you had to engage the tall ones first to expose the small ones behind. Once you were done with the steel you ran to the right and opened another door so you could engage the four paper targets with Zebra hard cover. I shot the steel section really well and fast with only one makeup shot. On the paper though I was shooting too fast as I kept calling one shot on each target “Marginal” and ended up needing to make it up. I made up the shots quickly and got all alpha hits in the end, but I could have achieved the same thing by slowing down my shooting speed a little bit and saved the time of the 4 extra make up shots. I think shooting the steel super fast got my brain into hoser shooting speed and I couldn’t ratchet it back down on the paper.

The second stage was a speed shoot with an evil clam shell target. You started the stage with a rope in your strong hand and pulling the rope would activate the clamshell. The clamshell has blown out shocks on it so the movement of closing isn’t slowed down at all. You pull the rope and BAM its closed. Since the clamshell was acting funky like that we decided to cut the head off of the blocking no shoot so you were left with a head shot on the scoring target when the clamshell was closed. This was my first blunder of the day. I got so wrapped around the axel on how I could engage the clam shell target before it closed I went with a very marginal stage plan. I knew it was risky but I figured, what the hell. My plan was to hold the rope in my strong hand and in my weak hand, then at the buzzer I would let go of the rope with my strong hand and draw my gun as I was drawing my gun I would pull back on the rope and shoot the clamshell target and the one next to it strong hand only. I ended up with an Alpha, Mike, No Shoot on the clamshell target because my second shot was a little wild and too slow shooting strong hand only. I thought that I was over the “Hero” strong hand only shooting but I guess not. All I could say to myself after shooting the stage was, “What a dumb ass, you knew that wasn’t going to work”. Oh well, some lessons are harder than others. After the match I got a chance to shoot the stage again just for fun to see if my alternate plan would have worked better and it was WAY better both in time and hits.

The third stage of the day was another speed shoot. Simple stage with a step pad that activated a drop turn target and there were two sets of barrels so you had to move some to get to all of the targets. Second pair of blunders for the day were had here. The first problem came from shooting the previous stage and staying hot as you move over to the next stage. We normally do this on this particular berm because it moves the shooting along faster and its only like a 15 yard walk from one stage to the next. Its all done safely so it works out well. I have made a good habit of locking my holster when I reholster my pistol. BUT this bit me in the ass because I “Made Ready” for this stage at the end of the last stage and holstered and locked my holster to walk over to the next stage. I forgot to unlock my holster before starting the next stage. So the buzzer goes off, I grab for my gun and what do you know, its not coming out and I am already stepping down to activate the drop turner. I wrestle the pistol out of the holster and with an overwhelming sense of being “Behind Schedule” I shoot the stage like a crazy angry Panda. In the fury of shooting one of my shots went through the corner of a barrel and ended up being a miss instead of a hit. So at this point I had screwed the pooch on both speed shoot stages due to retarded mistakes. Needless to say my moral was starting to sink, but then I remembered one of the comments Saul Kirsch said in his book “Forget your mistakes and focus on the things you did right instead”. After doing that and thinking about the “Good” things in my match so far my attitude was on the positive side again.

The fourth stage of the day was the classifier 99-47 called Triple Choice. This is a three string of fire stage with one shot on each target each string. The first string being freestyle, the second string being strong hand only, and the final string being weak hand only. With it being a virginia count stage no make up shots could be made and all of the shots were fairly tight. My focus was on getting solid hits and forcing myself to wait until I had a solid sight picture until I broke each shot. The free style and strong hand only strings were fine and I didn’t feel they were an issue. The weak hand string was agonizingly slow for me though. Waiting for the sights to settle down between each shot felt like it was minutes of waiting. I was rewarded with all of my hits and I felt that I had a good solid stage run. The only screw up was a D hit on the final shot of my freestyle string. I looked up the hit factor and it ended up being an 82%. Given how much trouble this stage was giving the other shooters, either really slow times or misses, I was shocked that my solid run was only an 82% nationally. You would have to shoot this classifier completely out of your mind and hope that your hits were there to hit a home run on this classifier. At least I would have to.

The fifth and final stage of the day was the stage that I brought to the match. It was a 10 target stage with one wall that had two ports in it on either end. The targets were presented in a fashion that did not allow you to engage them all from a single position but also didn’t force any one shooting position over another. To make it even more interesting it was setup as a three shots per target stage making it a 30 round COF. There were so many ways to shoot the stage it was mind boggling for a lot of shooters. Everyone on my squad shot the stage in a different way as well which showed how variable the stage plans could be. I went with the KISS (keep it simple stupid) stage breakdown method that had my gun running almost the whole time except for when I did my reload and also kept my shooting positions down only 2. I shot the stage at a good even pace and the finniest thing was that I had gotten a super locked in grip on the gun and that was the only thing I thought about while shooting the stage. I clearly remember thinking “WOW!!! My grip is so solid the gun isn’t even flipping at all!!!”. That was the ONLY thought I had during the stage run. All of the shooting just seemed to happened on its own. I know I was calling my shots because I made up a D hit with an A towards the end of the stage run. So my brain was processing the sight picture and calling the shots as it should be. It felt like kind of an out of body experience really. One thought process was fully focused on the shooting and running the stage, and a second thought process was thinking about how solid my grip was and how neat that was. I thought about that stage run the rest of the day as it was an interesting experience to say the least.

Overall the match was fun, the two speed shoot blunders hurt my overall finish though. The results have been posted and I ended up 2nd in Limited at 96% of the winner. Without the blunders I would have won the match, but I also wouldn’t have had the chance to experience those blunders and learn the lessons from them. I am willing to pay the price to gain the experience so it’s a good tradeoff to me.

The Sunday match got canceled today due to the weather. Winter is here and the weather isn’t always going to cooperate with the match schedule. I might have to resort to dry firing instead…….. I hope it does not come down to that

Edited October 25, 2009 by CHA-LEE

[CHA-LEE]

I finally got my backup gun completed and tested out. I had the slide sent off to take one ounce out of the front and then had the slide and frame coated with Bear Coat. This was an interesting experiment on both sides. You can really feel the difference the lightened slide makes when shooting. The recoil is a lot sharper and it takes a stronger grip to return the sights to where they should be post shot. The Bear Coat looks decent but since its some kind of coating it made reassembly somewhat a pain in the ass. It tightened up the fit of some parts too much and quite a bit of work was needed to get it loosened up again. That and its really not that durable of a coating. I can see spots where the coating is wearing off or chipping off from the little bit I have used it. The main reason why I wanted to get it coated was due to getting the slide cut and I didn’t want exposed untreated metal exposed to rust. I think that if I get a gun coated again I will try the IonBond instead. The guns that I have seen IonBonded don’t look like its an additional coating that is added to the guns dimensions. And the tuffness of the IonBond has already made a name for its self in the gun industry. Oh well, you live and learn I guess. It was fun building up the gun though and I spent a lot of time making the trigger exactly like my primary gun so it does not feel strange to shoot back to back against my primary gun. I have listed below all of the after market parts I used on the build of the gun along with some pictures.

EAA Witness Limited .40

Henning XL Firing Pin

Henning Black Checkered Grip Panels

Henning Torx Grip Panel Screws

Henning 10.75lb Recoil Spring

Henning Sear Pin

Henning Hammer Pin

Henning Pin Pin

Henning TightFit Slide Pin

Henning .090 iFiber Front Sight

EGW Sear

EGW Hammer

Canyon Creek Custom Magwell

Bear Coat flat black

Front of slide lightened 1oz

[CHA-LEE]

Well………. Winter is delivering its first serious snow storm here in Colorado today. It has been snowing like gang busters all last night, today and now they are talking about tomorrow as well. Even if it stopped snowing tomorrow there would have to be a dramatic warm up to expect that any outdoor matches will be happening this weekend. It makes me put on the Sad Panda face for sure…..

[SA Friday]

Well………. Winter is delivering its first serious snow storm here in Colorado today. It has been snowing like gang busters all last night, today and now they are talking about tomorrow as well. Even if it stopped snowing tomorrow there would have to be a dramatic warm up to expect that any outdoor matches will be happening this weekend. It makes me put on the Sad Panda face for sure…..

With the amount of snow that's fallen, I doubt the berms at Aurora will be dry enough. We'll see, but I doubt it. I'm pretty sure the Saturday Boulder match will have to be scrubbed. They got hammered over there as bad as those of us living in the Palmer Divide.

[CHA-LEE]

SA Friday> The only thing that Boulder has going for it right now is its indoor range. They could do some stages indoors but I am not sure if they have done that before as a contingency plan to the weather being crappy. Otherwise there is NO WAY they will be shooting on Saturday. I also agree that with the amount of snow that has fallen so far the berms at Aurora will also be swamped even if the snow melts by Sunday.

I am not holding my breath on shooting this weekend. I don't think its going to happen with the weather we are getting. There is always the indoor match at WP on Mondy though. I will for sure be going to that one. You in for some blasting at WP?

[eerw]

Looks like you're on for saturday.

[NickJ]

Start position- standing under shelter, facing downrange, snow shovel in strong hand.

[SA Friday]

Start position- standing under shelter, facing downrange, snow shovel in strong hand.

Better bring a bucket and a gallon of water. Can't brush mud out of a mag after it hit's the inches of mud. I'm gonna dedicate that day to fun and adventure with my son. I won't be there. (Kinda pissed about the section meeting being on a holiday for kids...)

Might be in for WP. I'll let you know.

[CHA-LEE]

Start position- standing under shelter, facing downrange, snow shovel in strong hand.

That would actually be a fun start to a stage........hhhhhmmmmmm

(That faint clunking/grinding sound you hear are the gears turning in my noggin)

[NickJ]

On the start signal, shovel your way to box A...

[Tom Freeman]

On the start signal, shovel your way to box A...

Charlie volunteers to go first.

[CHA-LEE]

Sure, I am always ready to go first. As long as I get to blast, how bad can it be?