CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

I was able to attend a training class from Matt Burkett on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It was a full day of shooting with a lot of activities and information covered. Most of the stuff we went over wasn’t new to me but it was still good to go over to burn in the right way of doing things. The one thing I had a very difficult problem with was shooting at a specific time cadence, such as one shot every second, or every two seconds. I have been shooting as soon as I can call my shot for so long that I don’t think of it as “Waiting” to take a shot, but simply observing until the sight picture is acceptable for a given shot then the shot breaks on its own. I don’t want to sound like I am on an ego trip, but I think my shooting is so far past timed cadence shooting that its now a strange forced “Thing” when I try to shoot at a specific time. The end goal is to shoot as fast as you can call your shots so the cadence stuff that we did in the class seemed like a large step backwards. Maybe I am missing a nugget of good information in that portion of the class? I am not sure.

The huge gold nugget I took from the class was a change in my stance. Up until then I would pick a stance that was pretty flat footed with my weight more on my heels than on the balls of my feet. Matt showed us an easy way to get our weight biased more forward so the majority of your weight was on the balls of your feet and it made recoil control and movement out of the shooting position way more easy. I almost dare to say effortless. Since this was a “New” thing for me it was hard to bias my weight forward for every shooting condition but the times that I remembered to do it made my shooting feel a lot more solid. To me, this single thing learned made the class worth every penny. Having zero expectations going into the training makes a simple light bulb moment like that a nice reward. Its like Christmas a month early

[eerw]

Having zero expectations going into the training makes a simple light bulb moment like that a nice reward. Its like Christmas a month early

that's the cool thing about learning and the small epiphanies. If you attend with an open mind, asking questions and willing to experiment. It's like someone handing you a flashlight and lighting up the corners..and you go.."AHHHHHHH"

[CHA-LEE]

I attended a USPSA match on Saturday. This is one of the matches I help put on so it was a long day with a lot of work. We got some good help in the morning and had some great stages to shoot that were also provided by some of the shooters as well. I worked my tail off all morning getting the stages setup and everything ironed out and didn’t get a chance to look at any of the stages other than the ones that I worked on. But that’s just how it goes for these matches I help with.

The first stage of the day was a medium field course with a couple of different ways to shoot it in the middle. I didn’t have much time at all to look at the stage for break down and just took the battle axe “Keep it simple” approach that didn’t work out so well. I had a miss early in the COF that was due to me moving my head off the target before the second shot broke. AAAAGGGGHHHH!!!! It makes me so frustrated when I do that. Then at the end of the COF there was this SUPER lazy swinger that I gave zero respect because it was so slow and “Easy”. I was rewarded with a miss on the swinger because I didn’t give it the respect that it should have been given. Two misses and a less than optimal plan on the first stage was not a good confidence builder for the day. But I did my best to put it behind me and simply have fun shooting.

The second stage was a medium/large COF with an evil mixture of up close hoser style blasting and some medium distance tight shots that are in that uncomfortable distance where you are not sure if you should shoot it fast or get a solid sight picture for every shot. I decided to remove “Fast/Slow” shooting from my thought process and to simply shoot as soon as I could call my shots. What do you know, I shot the stage pretty good with that mind set. I shot the close stuff solid and fast and I also shot the medium distance stuff as soon as I could call the shots solid. The only error I had on the stage is when I ended up nicking a no shoot on the last string of close targets. The no shoot was up to the right side perforation of the A-zone and my hit just barely nicked the perforation of the no shoot so I ended up with an Alpha/No-Shoot hit. It sucked but I didn’t worry about it too much. I call the shot “Marginal” when it broke and made it up with a center alpha when I shot the COF. Some times you get lucky, and some times you don’t. It’s a simple as that.

The third stage was a mach up of Stage 10 at the Area 2 match with some extra targets added to make it a 32 round COF. The “Spirit” of Stage 10 was in the COF but it was shot totally different than the one in Arizona. You started forward in the COF and had to back up through the stage as you shot. Since I am a tall dude I could see some “options” that other shooters may not have seen and considered taking advantage of it but it made the target engagement order after doing that somewhat confusing. I must have had a severe “Deer in the headlights” look while trying to break down the stage because another shooter came up to me and slapped me back into reality giving me a better stage breakdown plan. This to me was the best part of the match and what I like the most about this sport. It is very cool that everyone is willing to help everyone out when in need, and I sure as hell needed help on breaking down this stage. A HUGE thanks goes out to Todd Snyder for helping a brother out when it was needed most!!! Situations and people like this ROCK!!! I shot the stage exactly how Todd had described and it went smooth and efficient. This was my best stage performance of the match by far. I ended up with a smoking time and was down only a few points.

The fourth stage of the day was the classifier 06-04 called Fluffy’s Revenge 1. This is a super fast blasting classifier. I decided to consciously leverage the forward biased stance I had learned the day before and while shooting the stage it seemed effortless even though the lead was flying with much vigor. I needed a make up shot on one of the poppers and had a shoulder D hit on one of the targets so the hit factor was hurt by both poor points and a less than optimal time due to the makeup shot. This performance netted me a 78% nationally, which isn’t too bad but I knew I could do better. After everyone was done shooting I asked the squad if I could shoot it again just for fun, not for score, to see if I could do better. They all said sure and the RO said jokingly that everyone would have to laugh if I didn’t have a sub 3 second run. I prepared myself for the stage once again, biased myself forward and told myself to simply shoot as fast as I could call my shots. The buzzer goes off, the bullets start to fly and it feels like an effortless no pressure run. No makeup shots needed on the steel and I felt that all of my paper shots were called good. The RO issues me the Unload and show clear command and then turns to the squad and says “Ok guys get ready to laugh!!!” as my time was 3.01 seconds. So close but yet so far. We checked out my hits and I had all my hits except for the first target I engaged where there was a graze hit in the base of the neck on the first target. It was less than half a millimeter from braking the B zone perforation. Otherwise the rest of the hits were A’s except for one C zone hit on the last target. Even though I didn’t shoot the classifier the second time for score it was nice to have such a good run. Knowing that you can produce an almost 100% classifier run when it felt so effortless while doing so is a cool thing to experience!!!

The last stage of the day was a very compressed speed shoot style stage with paper, steel, a swinger, and even a no shoot steel popper. You started standing in a box in front of a barricade with a small port in it. On the right side you had two paper, two plates, a popper that activated the swinger and when the swinger came by you could see the head and shoulders of the target but the rest was blocked by a steel hard cover target. Through the middle port you could only see the swinger and no other targets. On the left side you had one more paper target a plate, a mini popper, another mini popper that was marked as a no shoot, and you could see the same head and shoulders of the swinger as it came by. This was a huge risk verses reward stage where if you went out on a limb you could shave quite a bit of time on the stage by not having to go to the middle port to engage the swinger. My plan was to shoot the right side first starting with the paper then a plate, activating popper, plate then try to get at least one shot on the head of the swinger. Then move over to the left side and get another hit on the head of the swinger as I finished up the other targets. Doing this would have saved at least 2 or 3 seconds on the stage, but it would require very precise timing. Me being who I am would rather go for the gusto verses take the easy way out tried to shoot it that way. Well, it didn’t work out the way I planned. After hitting the activating popper I was suppose to pick off the final plate on the right side before engaging the swinger, but I missed the plate and by the time I broke the make up shot to take out the plate the swinger was already retreating to the left on its first pass. So the critical timing of the stage was blown for shooting the swinger on the outsides and not having to go to the middle port and I defaulted to “Blast the targets” mode for the rest of the stage. I had to engage the swinger through the middle port, which I didn’t plan on doing before so it was clunky and I chose to engage it with two shots on each of two passes. I ended up with all of my hits and four A’s on the swinger but to me I had blown the stage as I could have shot it a lot better/faster if I had not missed the plate at that critical time during the stage run. Its one of those stages where you could shoot it over and over in different ways to see which plan would really be the best.

Overall it was a fun match. I had my fare share of screw ups but I feel that I did better than expected given the conditions of the match with setup and all of that fun stuff. Matt Burkett shot the match as well in Open division but I didn’t get a chance to shoot on his squad because I had to jump over to the squad that had the least amount of shooters to balance things out and make the match run more smoothly. It would have been nice to see him shoot, but it is how it is. I had enough on my plate that day already so I don’t think that I would have gotten much opportunity to really watch him shoot anyway. I just hope that he had fun shooting our match. I didn’t hear any whining through out the day about the stages so I can only assume that everyone had a good time. No news is good new in my book

[MarkCO]

Matt Burkett shot the match as well in Open division but I didn’t get a chance to shoot on his squad because I had to jump over to the squad that had the least amount of shooters to balance things out and make the match run more smoothly.

CHA-LEE, We got Matt on 1-4, missed 5: http://s853.photobucket.com/albums/ab93/Ma...t%20Nov%202009/

[CHA-LEE]

MarkCO> Thanks for the link to the video's of his stage runs. He is a bad ass!!!

[CHA-LEE]

At the Area 2 match I got some UniqueTek upgrade parts for my Dillion 650 Reloading Press. I finally got around to installing them this week. Here is a breakdown of the upgrades.

The first upgrade was the tool head clamp kit. This was easy to install as all you need to do is dill, tap and helicoil the holes that “Pin” the stock tool head into its position on the press. Once that is done you install the tool head and get cases/rounds into every stage and once the ram is all the way up tighten down the screws retaining the tool head to the frame of the press. After installing this it made a big difference in the consistency of the OAL, Crimp, and Bell when you didn’t have all of the stages loaded. Before, if every stage didn’t have a case in it you would get inconsistent results. Now it’s the same every time regardless of how many stages have rounds in them. I think this is a useful upgrade.

The second upgrade was installing the precision powder baffle. This was super easy to install as all you had to do was drop it into the powder hopper and make sure it was laying correctly at the bottom.

The third upgrade was to install the Micrometer Powder Bar kit. I purchased the preassembled kit that included a new powder bar just in case it turned into a disaster and I could throw my stock powder bar assembly back into the press without it being changed. Since I had the preassembled kit the installation was super easy. Just take out the old powder bar and put in the new one. The powder bar block that is above the moving powder bar would shift back and forth before as its only retained in its position by a wimpy plastic nub. So I tapped the hole of the upper block and screwed it into its location to keep it from moving around. This was just an extra thing I did on my own. After installing the micrometer powder bar and reinstalling the powder measure on the press I set forth on fiddling with the adjustments of the powder drop. Per the directions I did about 10 practice drops to make sure that everything was primed then measured the drop. I set the Micrometer to the #1 notch on the shaft and #0 on the rotating dial and did a couple of test drops. They both came out at 3.1gr on my scale. I was in shock as this is the exact powder drop that I need for the .40 minor loads I was working up. VERY COOL!!!. I tested the sensitivity of the adjustment knob and found that one full rotation of the knob equaled 0.4gr change in the drop. With a little more fiddling around I unscrewed the knob to the #2 notch on the shaft and #0 on the rotating dial and the powder drop ended up being 4.7gr, which is exactly what I need for my major rounds. This is super cool. I then went back and forth between these two settings and it was very repeatable and reliable. I just had to make sure to only adjust the knob when the powder bar was in its extended “Drop” position and it didn’t have any powder in it. If I did that I could literally go back and forth between those two powder drops every time without much variance at all. This makes changing the powder drop SUPER easy and accurate compared to the stock powder bar with nut setup that came with the press. This upgrade is well worth its cost. If you don’t have one, GET ONE!!!

I am going to build up a bunch of the Minor .40 rounds later this week so I can get some real work exposure to these upgrades. So far they all seem well worth it though. I like it when upgrades actually work the way they should.

[CHA-LEE]

This weekend the weather isn’t playing nice for the USPSA match as it was canceled on Sunday so I was faced with shooting a steel match on Saturday or not shoot. I really despise shooting steel matches because there is no shooting on the move, just stand and blast stuff. Then out of the blue one of my shooting buddies asked if I would like to go do some live fire practice on Saturday. We got some good practice on Saturday and setup a couple of different stages to shoot. We had a good mixture of up close basting with movement and some long distance steel shots. Needless to say, long distance steel is a humbling thing. It’s always a challenge slowing down to get your hits on those difficult shots. At least it is for me. We each went through about 150 rounds which was a perfect amount of shooting for what we were practicing. Its nice to take time between shooting strings to really break down issues and make some progress against them.

I have loaded up some more .40 Minor ammo for my lady’s gun and am going to give it a run at the indoor USPSA match on Monday night. This should be the last shake down run needed to ensure functionality before I let her loose on it. Hopefully it runs as it should so no more fiddling is needed. We will see how it goes tomorrow.

[CHA-LEE]

Indoor match is canceled tonight due to very poor road conditions. Old man winter is issuing a good smack down to the last couple of matches. Its to be expected though, it is winter after all!!! Looks like I will have to wait until next weekend to give the ladies gun a run for its money.

Maybe I will do some dry fire practice this week instead…….. Maybe……

[CHA-LEE]

Since the Monday night match got canceled and I didn’t get a chance to give the lady’s gun a run I am planning on shooting it this Sunday at the USPSA match. The weather is starting to get a little warmer and the forecast is looking promising so I think the Sunday match will be a go. I am going to shoot Limited and L-10 Minor on Sunday. Limited with my normal gun and then L-10 with the ladies gun. This will be the first large club match (5+ Stages) where I am going to shoot two guns so it will be interesting to break down the stages differently in both divisions due to the mag change difference. It will be a brain teaser for sure.

If the weather is nice enough on Saturday I was also thinking of taking her out to shoot her own gun in a live fire practice session. If we are able to do that then I won’t shoot it on Sunday. Shooting on Saturday is going to come down to it being nice enough to shoot and not freeze while doing it. We will see how it goes.

[CHA-LEE]

I was able to get some shooting in this weekend but it was a little different. There was no match on Saturday so I started calling around to see if people wanted to get together for a practice session. I was able to wrangle up seven shooters and we setup a couple of different stages to shoot. My main focus for the day was getting my lady use to shooting her gun so even though I shot, I wasn’t really into it. The good news is that she really liked how her gun shot and towards the end she was doing well with following the range commands before during and after shooting the stage. This was my main focus for the day with her. I wanted her to do some shooting but focus on executing the range commands properly. She did great with that and on the shooting side by the end of the day she was hitting all of the targets which was good as well. I think it was a good first practice for her. I had the other shooters use her gun for stage runs as well to give it even more of a shake down and for some the gun would have FTF issues so I swapped the slide spring form a 6lb to an 8lb. Once the slide spring was swapped it didn’t have any more issues. I think the FTF issue is strange because when I shoot it, it never fails, but then again when I shoot it I grip it hard enough that it has ZERO muzzle flip so none of the slide cycling energy gets lost in the flip of the gun. Either way the 8lb recoil spring only adds a little bit more to the recoil of the gun and makes it feed correctly with a wide range of shooters so I think that’s where it needs to be. I shot it once through a stage and I could shoot it insanely fast through the stage. With zero muzzle flip you can pretty much shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger because the sight picture is always there. I would venture to say that I could probably shoot this minor gun twice as fast as my major gun, and I am not slow with my major gun. Everyone that got to shoot would laugh after shooting it due to it being such a soft shooter. This minor gun would be a wicked steel match gun.

The USPSA match on Sunday got canceled due to the weather so I was pretty bummed out. I did some digging and found a one off charity match at an indoor range up north. I had never shot at this range or match style before and it was interesting to say the least. The indoor range was awesome. They had state of the art automated target carriers that could move down and back and rotate the target as well. They put a “Shoot” target on one side and a “No shoot” target on the other side of the target carrier. Then they would run the carriers through an automated program of up and back as it would flip the target back and forth between shoot and no shoot sides. This was an odd shooting scenario in its self as I had never done it before. The other thing that was odd is that you would “Go” on the first movement of the target. They would start the targets with it sideways on edge. Then once it moved to either a shoot or no shoot side you could draw and engage it. Not having a buzzer to go on was a strange situation, but cool at the same time. The strings of fire had mandated rounds, reloads and stuff like that and the target presentation program was different for every string. You didn’t get a chance to see the target presentation program before you shoot so it was basically 100% seat of your pants shooting. The basic process was if the targets were further away the shoot side would be presented longer than it being close. If you waited for the target to be really close the shoot side would only be presented for a very short time and you also had to evaluate the target to make sure it was a shoot or a no shoot. So I decided to take the long/harder shots because the targets where exposed longer. Doing this would have me finishing the stage quite a while before everyone else. I am sure there is a better balance of close vs far shooting for this match to get better points, but I didn’t care. I wanted to get the shooting done with as soon as possible. Each stage was a series of 4 – 6 strings of fire with different round counts and or reloads. The last stage of the day was called “Malfunction Junction” where you would start your pistol in varying failed conditions and you would have to recover from the condition before starting the shooting. The target presentation time was pretty aggressive on this stage so if you screwed around with clearing the gun too much you wouldn’t have a chance to shoot the target. This happened to me on one of the strings as my mag wouldn’t come out after we manually induced a double feed failure. It was interesting to run the malfunction stage as it put a good focus on how to recover the issue quickly. I have had very few gun failures in USPSA stage runs so this was some good practice for me. Overall, it was fun doing some shooting as that was the only match shooting available for the day. But I still prefer the run and gun of the USPSA matches. Its not a bad thing to do some abnormal style shooting once in a while to keep you on your toes.

The two really good things to come out of this match is that I was able to get some more CCI primers from the range and I got some custom ear plugs made. I got some custom ear plugs made a year ago by a hearing aid place but never liked them because they didn’t seem to seal in my ear consistently. That and when they were sealed I didn’t like the feeling of hearing nothing. These new ones sealed perfectly to my ear and they have a little channel built into them with a noise canceling choke in it. This channel allows regular voice level sound to get in but blocks out the loud shooting sounds. I used the new ear plugs on the last stage of the day and they work great. It’s a little different to be able to ear quiet sounds good but have the loud ones blocked out but I think these ear plugs will be a lot better than the cheap-o foam ones I have been using.

Well, now its time to wait until next weekend to see if that match will get weather canceled or not. With two matches in a row getting canceled I have a feeling that we will have a match next weekend no matter how crappy the weather is. It does not take too many weekends of not shooting a match for shooters to reconsider how “Cold” is really too cold to shoot.

[CHA-LEE]

I had to use a paddle style Blade Tech holster for the one off match on Sunday instead of my normal CR-Speed holster and I actually liked it quite a bit. I have had the CR-Speed holster jam up on me a couple of times if I have to draw the gun from a crouched stance. I have also forgotten to unlock it between shooting strings many times causing it to jam up even worse. So I think I am going to switch back to using the Blade Tech holster over the winter months. I fiddled with my old Blade Tech holster quite a bit and made it start hanging up on the gun so that was my main reason to switch over to the CR-Speed. But I got a new Blade Tech holster and it works great right out of the box. When I do one shot draws during dry fire the Blade Tech holster feels just as smooth and fast as the CR-Speed. I need to do some back to back timer testing to see which one is better than the other. Even if there is a little speed difference between the two I don’t think its going to make much of a difference in the Winter matches since your fingers are pretty much numb and everything happens slower anyway.

I also think its interesting to go “Back” to the stock Blade Tech holster and not have any issues with it jamming up during the draw. I know that I had a hell of a time with it jamming up the first time I got it and that is why I started fiddling with it to make it “Better”. I am now thinking that my draw has evolved to be better so I don’t have the issues I had before. Interesting stuff like this comes out of pure chance some times.

[CocoBolo]

I had a CR speed that is why I love my Ghost. The CR Speed worked ok on my CZ 75TS and even my Edge, but when I went to open it was the pits. So you get the make ready reach down unlock the holster start trying to get the gun out, after a while the RO goes anytime now sweeheart. No didn't happen had to go to safety area take belt off and dink with it for 10 minutes to get the gun out, borrowed a LimCat bought a Ghost and never looked back.

[CHA-LEE]

I shot a USPSA match yesterday and the weather was great. I got there early to help setup. While setting up I picked up a popper wrong and tweaked my lower back so that made bending over or twisting a painful process. Lucky for me the stages were pretty much setup so you could shoot them as you basically walked through the stage. My back did seize up on me a couple of times during stage runs which killed my smoothness through the stages. I couldn’t transition into a subconscious mode of shooting with the back pain as I always thought about not making sudden movements to cause more pain. So I ended up shooting most of the stages in a tentative commanded pace which didn’t work out so well. Whenever I shoot in a commanded effort I feel like I have to GO FAST and that was rewarded with 5 misses for the day.

This was a pretty difficult match to shoot with the two long COF’s having quite a bit long and tight shots. There were also many ways to shoot these two stages which made it even more challenging to decide on which plan would be best. The only really bad match screw up that I had was to change my stage plan as I was making ready to shoot the stage. This lead to a complete train wreck towards the end of the COF where I had switched up my plan. I was able to shoot the COF again just for fun using my initial plan and I shot that run solidly but it was only a second faster than the screwed up first run. The “Changed” plan for this stage was a better way to shoot it as I think I could have done it 2 – 3 seconds faster than my second slid run. I just didn’t give myself the proper time to program it. Oh well, lesson learned. The rest of the stages were pretty straight forward but I was not able to shoot them as aggressively as I wanted to due to my back pain.

The good news of the match is that I was able to test out my new ear plugs and the blade tech holster in match conditions. It was a little windy out there and my new ear plugs would let me hear the wind buffeting against them. This was really disturbing to me so after a couple of stages I took them out and went back to my normal foam ear plugs. I might have to do some fiddling on the ear plugs to minimize the wind noise. The blade tech holster worked good for the match. It didn’t jam up on me at all. Since it puts the gun in a slightly different location on my hip than the CR Speed holster there was a little bit of fumbling getting to the gun on the draw. But I am not sure if that is due to the different position or me being tentative in fast movements due to the back pain? I will continue to use the Blade Tech holster for a while longer to see how it goes. So far I am happy with how it works and it gives me a lot more secure feeling while the gun is holstered.

By the time I got home from the match my back was killing me and I opted to take some pills and hit the sack. I woke up early the next morning to go shoot the Sunday USPSA match but my back was twice as bad as the day before so I decided to stay at home and rest. It sucks not being able to shoot today as the weather is good for this time of year, but it would have been pure non-stop pain the whole time. I can’t shoot well when my back is hurting as proven by my performance on Saturday. That and there will always be another match to shoot. Time to take it easy and let myself heal up so I can shoot another match down the road.

We will see how my back feels by tomorrow afternoon. There is another match to attend Monday night but if my back doesn’t make a miraculous recovery between now and then I am probably going to miss that one as well.

Edited December 20, 2009 by CHA-LEE

[NickJ]

Ouch...that's why you don't see me carrying poppers anymore. I've done that same back thing too many times. I leave it to the younger guys, like....you.

Edited December 20, 2009 by NickJ

[CHA-LEE]

My back is still wrecked

I can at least get up and move around a little now so its getting better. But I think it will be a while before I can start running around or lift anything. Maybe this is my forced winter break from shooting???

[MarkCO]

Here's wishing you a speedy mending!

[BR]

Charlie-

Rest up and heal. Back strains are a bitch and are easily exacerbated if you don't let them heal fully. Take care and happy holidays.

-br

[CocoBolo]

Motrin.

[NickJ]

My back is still wrecked

I can at least get up and move around a little now so its getting better. But I think it will be a while before I can start running around or lift anything. Maybe this is my forced winter break from shooting???

Nope, this is your intro into directing.."guys, bring that popper over here...no, a little to the right..yep. Ok, now those walls, we need 6 of them down here.." etc. Just don't say anything when your back is better..

[Spikagirl]

RICE - rest, ice, compression and elevation

As a person with chronic neck issues and pain - as painful as the ice initially is, it really does wonders in the long run...

Good luck - get better soon!

LA

My back is still wrecked

I can at least get up and move around a little now so its getting better. But I think it will be a while before I can start running around or lift anything. Maybe this is my forced winter break from shooting???

[redmanfixit]

Conrad Meister mentioned you tweeked your back Sat. Sorry to hear that. We missed you at Weld on Sunday!

SO....Over the nearly 20 years I taught yoga in the public school system, I'd guess about 50 or 60 percent of the people that showed up for my classes were having troubles with back stuff, either chronic or acute. I have a BUNCH of recovery and repair routines for that and I've never killed a SINGLE student. Not one!! Let me show you a couple of things to put in your maintenance kit. I bet I can make you a little faster too! And no you do not have to wear a diaper, eat gruel or sit in a cave all day and meditate to take advantage of greater flexibility and faster injury recovery!!

Remember, no pain, ....no pain!

Happy Christmas!!

[CHA-LEE]

Thanks for all of the good advice!!!

My back is doing much better today. I can now move around and do a little bit of bending for things without the feeling of an ice pick stabbing into my lower back. Even though it feels better I am going to take it easy for the rest of this week to keep from going overboard and making it worse. Back injuries SUCK!!!

On another note, I called and made my appointment for Lasik eye surgery for Jan 29th. I am a little worried about the process but the track record of this surgery is awesome. It will be odd to not need glasses to see.

[CHA-LEE]

Since my back has been ruined I have had nothing better to do but surf youtube for shooting videos. There are a lot of cool shooting videos out there but I latched onto one in particular. It’s the “Fast Reloading” video showing Travis Tomasie doing speed reloads on his open gun. Needless to say watching him do these reloads is wicked. I watched this video at LEAST 50 times studying each aspect of the reload. A huge light bulb went off in my head when I realized he was breaking his strong hand wrist forward slightly AND raising the gun at the same time as he pulled the gun back. He is also not pulling the gun back very far to perform the reload. I have listed the link to the video below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJVoc5uJ2e4

My normal reloads have me bringing the gun back pretty far and keeping my wrist at the same angle as when the gun is fully mounted. Needless to say this created a lot of in and out movement as well as dropping the gun down a little.

I changed up my reload strategy to break my wrist forward slightly and raise the gun at the same time as I pulled the gun back. The reloads just flew into the gun easier than ever and it was way faster from start to finish verses how I have been doing it. I was able to do the reloads at least .1 - .2 second faster than I had been doing them before with the little bit of dry fire I did tonight trying to burn in the mechanics of it. Lots of dry fire practice will be needed to burn in these new mechanics of doing the reload. But so far I am floored at how much easier and faster it is by changing these two things. Maybe this back injury is really a Christmas gift in disguise!!!!

[Spikagirl]

I had LASIK back in April... Love it - where are you having it done! I was nervous too, but all went well.... And it is wierd not to wear glasses.. good luck!

Thanks for all of the good advice!!!

My back is doing much better today. I can now move around and do a little bit of bending for things without the feeling of an ice pick stabbing into my lower back. Even though it feels better I am going to take it easy for the rest of this week to keep from going overboard and making it worse. Back injuries SUCK!!!

On another note, I called and made my appointment for Lasik eye surgery for Jan 29th. I am a little worried about the process but the track record of this surgery is awesome. It will be odd to not need glasses to see.

[CHA-LEE]

No matches this weekend. It has turned out to be a very white Christmas and pretty cold as well so that pretty much kills the outdoor match shooting for this weekend. This is probably a good thing because my back has been getting better all week and I almost feel back to normal today. I know that if I were to shoot a match this weekend I would have taken it too far and reinjured my back. I am like a kid in a candy store when I go to the matches so its probably best that there are no matches to attend. This will give me another week to get it all healed up the way it should.

Since discovering the different method of reloading I have been doing some dry fire practice trying to burn it in. I can do it well if I think about executing it through the whole process. But once I try to perform it subconsciously I revert back to my old method of reloading or worse something half way between the two which ends up being a train wreck. Burning in this new way of reloading is going to take a long time. Its worth it though as it actually makes me motivated to Dry Fire which I have not done much of in the past because it was so boring. I am also getting more use to the Blade Tech holster and don’t think that it has any limitation on speed when compared to the CR Speed holster. I think it’s actually an advantage over the CR Speed because it does not jam up on the gun no matter how funky the draw position is.

I went to a local indoor range looking for some once fired brass and got a good lead on a local guy that sells it for a decent price. I also took a couple of minutes to watch people shoot. I was once again shocked at how poorly people shoot and even worse how lax people are when it comes to safe gun handling. One guy was having jams and when it would jam he would leave it in its jammed state and start looking over the gun. This is normal but then he turns the muzzle of the gun straight up and looks down the barrel!!! My eyes must have been as big as saucers watching this because one of the employees looked at me then spun around to see what I was gawking at. He ran into the range and corrected the safety hazard but even then the guy was giving him a hard time saying “I can do whatever I want with my gun!!!”. I was speechless at what I had seen and the shooters reaction to being corrected.

Seeing all of that makes me all that much more appreciative of how safe match shooting is. I am proud to be part of a shooting organization that puts safety first. All it takes is a trip to the local public range to reaffirm this feeling.