CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

Here is a picture of the Limited Major M&P 40 I have been working on....

[DerrickJ]

Looks good Charlie, you need to being that to CRC next weekend!

[partyboy424]

Gun looks great, slide lightening came out really well. Thank you for the pic of the follower, I didn't realize they were that thin and couldn't grasp exactly why you needed the screw until I saw it. Will be ordering a set of those with some springs later on. I'm surprised you haven't done the FSS trigger, any plans of adding it in the future?

[CHA-LEE]

Gun looks great, slide lightening came out really well. Thank you for the pic of the follower, I didn't realize they were that thin and couldn't grasp exactly why you needed the screw until I saw it. Will be ordering a set of those with some springs later on. I'm surprised you haven't done the FSS trigger, any plans of adding it in the future?

I have the APEX FSS Trigger kit and it just does not feel right to me. The face of the trigger is too blocky and how my finger lays on the face of it It does not press the safety lever back consistently. That and its a huge hunk of Aluminum with is a lot heavier than the stock plastic trigger.

[CHA-LEE]

I was able to run 350 rounds through the M&P today and it ran flawlessly the whole time. I started off the day with the 15lb recoil spring and that made the recoil feel strange. It felt like the gun would displace during recoil then not return to where it was when the shot broke. I shot about 60 rounds of stage runs with the 15lb recoil spring and just couldnt get use to how it recoiled. I swapped over to the 13lb recoil spring and that worked a lot better. The slide would snap back forward properly and it didn't feel over dramatic during the recoil like the 15lb spring felt. I shot the remaining rounds using the 13lb recoil spring and it worked great with the reduced power striker spring. I had solid primer hits on all shots so I think that the reduced power striker spring will be good enough to set off the Winchester primers.

The night sight setup was quite different to work with while shooting. The front sight is too wide for my liking and it created a strange sight picture on target. With it covering up more of the target than I am use to I felt many times like looking around the sights so I could see the target properly. I think that the .120 wide front with .150 wide rear sights are just too big. I am going to order up some different sights from Dawson Precision to try a FO on the front and back with a .105 front and .145 rear to match the size of my EAA setup. Being able to try different sights is the whole reason why I switched over to this platform so the testing process is going to churn for a while.

I am happy with how the Limited Major M&P performed today. I have confidence in how it functions so I am going to use it at the match tomorrow. We will see how it goes.

[CHA-LEE]

The USPSA match today was FRICKEN COLD in the morning. When you get to the range and its 11 degrees with a slight wind you know its going to be a cold day of shooting. It was a good test of frozen finger shooting with the M&P. I know that the plastic frame is a lot nicer to handle when its cold verses the steel frame of the EAA!!! Whining about the cold weather aside, it was a fun match and did warm up by the end of the match.

The M&P ran flawlessly through the whole match from a functionality perspective. I even started one stage with 21+1 just to test it out. Just like in practice yesterday I noticed that I had to consciously grip the gun harder to get it to track properly while shooting fast. I think this is just part of shooting a much lighter gun. The bays at this range face south and this is slightly facing into the sun. The Night Sight setup was not good at all in this kind of lighting condition. Yesterday I was able to call my shots pretty good with the three dot night sights but then again the sun was at our backs while practicing. Today the sun was slightly in front of us and it put most of the targets in a heavy shadow. I struggled hard to call my shots effectively while shooting at speed. For the match I had three misses and only one of them I actually called a miss but was already leaving the shooting position when I called it. The other two were misses from attempting to point shoot at targets because I couldn’t see the sights properly in the lighting conditions. The other thing that is also really strange is the bigger size of the sights. I am not getting use to that at all.

I am planning on keeping the night sights on the slide for the match tomorrow night. This is the indoor match that has marginal lighting and I always struggle with seeing the FO front and black rear sight setup. It will be interesting to see if the night sights actually make a difference in this kind of lighting. We will see how it turns out tomorrow night.

In the mean time I ordered a set of Dawson sights, this time with Fiber Optics in both the front and the back. I also ordered a Warren Tactical rear sight with night sight inserts. The inserts on this sight are further away from the left and right edges of the notch so it may make it easier to see the notch when shooting in normal lighting. The current Dawson rear sight I am using with tritium inserts have the inserts right next to the left and right edges of the notch. This is because I had to cut the notch wider to work properly with the wider front sight. Having the inserts right on the edges of the notch is distracting and I have a hard time processing the light gap on either side.

As I said before, I have a lot of sight combo’s to try on this M&P. It will probably take a while before I find a happy medium that works well both in optimal lighting and in marginal lighting. The cool thing is that I at least have sight options to work with now. Trying out new stuff is a lot of fun!!! I just hope that the new sights I ordered come in some time next week so I can try them out next weekend.

Edited January 7, 2013 by CHA-LEE

[CHA-LEE]

I attended the indoor USPSA match last night. The night sight setup was a big fail in the lighting conditions of the indoor range. I could barely make out the white rings around the front night sight insert and couldn’t see/process the rear sights at all while shooting. This forced me to point shoot everything on both stages. I ended up with two misses on the first stage which wasn’t a surprise given that I was point shooting at partial targets. On the second stage which was the classifier I got my finger caught between the magazine base pad and mag well during one of the reloads which resulted in a good finger crunch and the mag dropping on the floor. After that I pretty much gave up on the classifier and just took my time getting my hits as I didn’t want to add to the miss count I already had.

The good thing about this is that I was able to test out the night sight setup in multiple shooting and lighting conditions. This setup will not work mainly because the white dots are not bright enough to bring my attention to them while shooting fast and the lighting conditions never got dark enough to actually use the glowing tritium inserts. If I had to shoot in a dark very low light shoot house, these sights would probably be the best. But they are not going to work in the shooting conditions that I will be using the gun in most of the time.

I am still waiting for the sights I ordered to come in and probably wont get them until next week. So I am going to take the .105 FO front sight and solid black .145 rear sight off of my Limited Minor slide and put them onto the Limited Major slide. This sight setup should be exactly the same as my EAA’s current configuration. I will use this setup for this coming weekends matches. When the new sights come in I will swap out the solid black rear sight with the FO rear sight and do some testing with that.

The good thing is that I have almost 1000 rounds through the gun right now and it has had zero functionality issues. Its nice to not have to battle functionality issues while testing with a new platform!!!!

[CHA-LEE]

I got the Dawson FO and Warren Tactical rear sights along with the KKM 5.75 inch barrel yesterday. The Dawson FO rear sight has a .125 wide rear notch and the FO rods are really close to the edges of the notch. I had the notch opened up to .130 wide and .130 deep. Since this rear notch is .010 narrower than I normally use I had the front sight cut down to a .090 width. Using the “Smaller” sight setup will be an interesting test. It has been a long time since I have shot a 90/130 sight setup so it will be interesting to see if it works or not. Since it has FO on the front and back maybe it will work better than the last time when I shot this setup with black on black sights? Either way I am going to test it out and see how good/bad it works out. The rear sight came with neon green FO in it and I had Neon Orange in the front. When dry firing this setup the different FO colors seemed more distracting than I liked. So I switched out the rear FO with the Neon Orange and with all FO rods the same color the sight picture seems a lot more normal. I suspect that the Neon Orange FO will be too distracting in full daylight, but I need to start somewhere. I do plan on trying different color FO setups to see what works best overall.

I also installed the KKM 5.75 inch barrel and it looks kind of funky with the end of the barrel sticking out past the end of the slide. My primary worry with the barrel sticking out beyond the slide was having it hang up in the blade tech holster during the draw. I cut a hole in the bottom of the holster so the barrel could stick out through the bottom then did a bunch of dry fire and didn’t even notice a difference. Evidently I am already pulling the gun up out of the holster high enough during the draw stroke to clear the longer barrel. I have attached a picture of the new barrel installed to this post.

I need to load some more ammo for this thing to test out the difference between the barrel lengths. With the 5 inch barrel I am using a 4.8gr drop of WST. I am going to build up some 4.6 and 4.7gr loads to see if those match the same velocity as the 5 inch 4.8gr setup. Once I get the velocity the same between the two barrels then do some back to back live fire testing to see how differently it shoots.

As always, there is a bunch more testing to get done before I get settled into a final configuration.

[MarkCO]

Hmm. I wonder if mounting the sight on the end of the barrel would help with accuracy?

[CHA-LEE]

Not sure about helping with the accuracy, but it would make getting the barrel in and out of the slide a hell of a lot harder to do

[MarkCO]

Anything to slow you down.

[CHA-LEE]

An arctic blast of cold weather has canceled the match this Saturday but that didn’t keep me from going out to the range in 9 degree temp and testing out the new M&P goodies. The first thing I tested was the 5.75 inch barrel verses the 5 inch barrel. The 5.75 inch barrel produced about 20 fps faster velocities on average. Knowing that the longer barrel would be faster I built up some 4.7gr loads and chronoed them through the 5.75 inch barrel. These rounds were producing the same fps as the 4.8’s with the 5 inch barrel. The 4.7gr rounds also feel slightly softer while shooting. I am going to consider the 5.75 inch barrel project a step in the right direction. I didn’t have time to do extensive back to back barrel testing from an overall muzzle flip feel difference. I was struggling to keep my hands from freezing while shooting so I don’t think I would have been able to “Feel” much difference between the two anyway.

I also sighted in the FO .090/.135front/rear setup. I was able to shoot a 2 inch group at 15 yards while shivering in the cold with the 5.75 inch barrel so I think the accuracy is good as well. I will test the accuracy stuff again when its warmer out from both freestyle and benched positions to see what the actual accuracy is at 25 yards.

I tried several versions of FO rods keeping all of them the same color each time. The results pretty much matched what I have observed when testing this in the past when it comes to FO brightness and being overly distracting. I didn’t get a chance to try out every single color I had as it was too cold to keep fiddling with the gun between tests. But I have settled on a new FO color that I have not used in the past. I first tried Neon Red and that was WAY too bright and distracting. I then did Neon Orange and it was a little less bright but still way too distracting. I know that Neon Green is my preferred color so I went one step lower to the Neon Yellow. The Neon Yellow was very nice. Bright enough to pull my attention to the sights but not so overwhelming that I can’t make out the edges of the sights. I did some rapid fire testing with this FO setup and I could call my shots very well and stay on the front sight pretty easy. I am going to leave the Neon Yellow FO in the sights and see how it does in match conditions. I also want to test out how well it works in marginal lighting conditions.

There “Might” be a match tomorrow. The high temp is currently forecast as being in the low 20’s. If they hold the match, I will go just because I want to give this new barrel and sights a run in a match to see how well they work. As a backup I scheduled some indoor range time on Monday to test out the FO sight setup in marginal lighting conditions.

If this new sight setup does not work out I am going to order a .100/.145 FO setup from Dawson. They make a new “Charger” style rear sight that comes standard with a .145 wide rear notch and FO inserts. This sight is taller than the normal fixed sights so I would need to get a .200 tall FO front sight to match with it. I want to give this current setup a solid testing effort before I consider it good or bad and invest another $100 in a different sight setup. My main worry is with the .090/.135 setup being smaller than what I am use to and not being able to see it properly while shooting fast during a match. We will see how it goes.

[CHA-LEE]

No match today. The temp peaked out at about 20 degrees today so that is probably a good thing. Since no shooting could be had today I instead worked on my shooting gear, ammo and also did some dry fire. I was able to convert my Safariland mag pouches to work with the M&P magazines by installing bigger rollers inside the pouches. I really like how the M&P comes out of the holster during the draw. It never hangs up like the EAA would some times and I can grab for the gun very aggressively. During dry fire I was able to crank out some really aggressive and solid .6 - .7 draws. I want to get a chance to test this out in live fire on Monday. The new sight and FO setup looks really good during dry fire, but without the recoil and muzzle flip of live fire I am only able to practice half the process.

I ordered another M&P to setup as a backup gun. This one is a 4.25 inch barrel 40 with a thumb safety. With the thumb safety I can pin back the trigger shoe safety and have it still be legal. I will have to order another 5 inch slide from S&W, KKM 5.75 inch barrel and all the supporting upper parts. But that will have to wait until later this week. Having two guns setup really close to one another will allow me to do more effective sight testing back to back. Right now its looking like I will be shooting the M&P for the 2013 shooting season so I have to get geared up to support that platform.

[CHA-LEE]

Live fire practice today was interesting. I was able to get 100 rounds down range on the new sight setup. The lighting in there was marginal so seeing the edges of the iron sights was pretty much impossible. I was able to see the FO rods on the front and rear sights but my focus was still being pulled to the target instead of the sights. So the FO color is probably not bright enough to pull my attention to it in this lighting condition, but I was at least able to see some kind of sighting reference in order to call the shots. Seeing three blurry FO dots dancing around while shooting is better than seeing nothing I guess.

I was also able to test the draw to first shot times to see how they compare to dry fire. I did about 20 one shot draws and all of them were under a second with solid hits on target. My best time was a .75 with an average of about .85. The vast majority of the times were in the .8x range with a few in the .7x and only a couple in .9x range. Being able to grab for the gun aggressively and letting my hand settle into the grip while its coming out of the holster is probably where a lot of my time was saved. I also don’t have to worry about the gun jamming up in the holster while grabbing for it aggressively, unlike the EAA.

I think the 100 rounds was well spent today. But I still was not really able to give the sights a solid work out given the marginal lighting. I will have to wait to do that this weekend during the club matches. Either way, I am excited to learn how to run a new blaster this year.

[partyboy424]

Would you happen to have a product# for the 5.75 barrel? I've got the 5.5 threaded one, but haven't chrono'd it and it's dedicated to the Open slide I'm working on.

[CHA-LEE]

I don't have a part number. Just call KKM and ask for one. From what I understand they make all of the m&p barrels in a 5.75 inch length to start off with because that is the size of the blank. Then they cut them down to the size that is needed for the different versions they make.

[partyboy424]

Thanks! Just got off the phone with them, super easy transaction and they priced it the same as the stock barrels. Can't beat that!

[CHA-LEE]

I did a crap ton of shooting this weekend both in matches and in practice. In this new year I stepped up to be the Club President for the High Plains Practical Shooters USPSA club. Our prior club president stepped down along with our score keeper so I have been in scramble mode trying to backfill their shoes. This past Saturday was our January match and I served as the Match Director & Score Keeper. We also use this match to test our proposed stage use plan for the Mile High Showdown. I was running around with my head cut off most of the day trying my best to make the match happen as planned. I believe that the match its self was a success. My shooting performance on the other hand was not good at all. I didn’t get a chance to look at any of the stages before the match from a competitor perspective so I pretty much had to figure them out as we got to them during the match. This combined with focusing on ROing and Score keeping to keep the squad churning through the stages efficiently pretty much took my focus completely off of even trying to perform well while shooting. The only good thing that I got out of the match from my shooting was the confirmation that the .090/.135 sight setup was too small. I also found that the rear FO was way too distracting. I ended up blacking out most of the rear FO rods to dim them down as much as I could, but it was still too distracting. I couldn’t call my shots very well with a neon three dot sight picture and it showed in my poor hit quality. For the match I had 12 D’s and 4 misses. I chalked up the poor hits to the less than optimal sight setup and not having time to break down the stages properly. When I got home I swapped out the sights and installed a .105 FO front, and a .145 non-FO rear. This sight setup matches what is on my EAA so I know it at least works for normal daylight shooting.

On Sunday I attended another USPSA match north east of Fort Collins. My goal in this match was to consciously grip the gun harder to see if that helps return the gun to the same place after each shot. With the .105/.145 sight setup I was able to call my shots which was nice, but my on target hit quality was very inconsistent. Some stages the hits would be exactly where I expected them, and other stages would have surprise poor hits on good called shots. The other thing that I ran into is the sun glaring off the back of the slide below the rear sight. At this range the bays face north and the sun was at our backs creating really bad glare off of the rear of the slide. There were a couple of stages where all I could see was the sun glaring in my eyes off of the slide instead of the actual sights. This didn’t help with getting quality hits on target either. The thing that was really frustrating is that anything beyond about 20 yards was a crap shoot on getting good hits. It didn’t seem like I could get good hits on target no matter well I aligned the sights or squeezed off the shot. The combined crappy hits resulted in a crappy match performance. I ended up with 7 D’s and 4 misses for the match. I knew that some of the D’s were due to the sun glare situation but overall my hit quality was really inconsistent.

Since I had Monday off for a holiday I blacked out the rear of the slide so the glare wouldn’t happen anymore and then I packed up my EAA gun and gear so I could do some good back to back testing. With both guns having the exact same sight setup it would be a really good test of seeing the difference in sight and whole gun displacement on target when shooting either gun. We setup a 20 round practice stage with a good mix of movement and fast/slow shooting. I shot the M&P through the stage a couple of times, then did the same thing with my EAA a couple of times. I could shoot the stage with both guns in the exact same time. But the hit quality on my EAA runs were WAY better. The main difference I noticed on the M&P runs was that the whole gun would displace and stay displaced while shooting fast. The sights would return to an aligned state properly but where the aligned sights returned on target was different. This “Staying Displaced” situation got exponentially worse the more circumvented my shooting stance got while leaning hard around walls to engage targets. I then did some group shooting testing between the two guns. Using the EAA I could shoot a 1 inch group easily at 10 yards. With the M&P I could barely produce a 4 inch group. Knowing that the M&P was having some mechanical accuracy issues I did some longer distance shooting from a supported position and at 25 yards I couldn’t hit a 12 inch plate more than 2 times out of 10 shots. With the EAA I could hit it all 10 times off hand unsupported.

Doing this back to back testing between the guns allowed me to identify two significant issues on the M&P. First, with it being so light the gun simply does not stay in the same location well enough while shooting super fast. I hope that adding more weight to the frame by swapping the Aluminum magwell with a Brass version will help. The other thing that I may have screwed up is taking too much weight out of the slide. Maybe the extra 2.5oz in a stock slide is needed to keep the gun tracking properly and not displacing? Without changing any existing components I was going to redo the back to back testing while using Minor power factor ammo in the M&P. My thought is that the minor Power Factor ammo will not produce as much muzzle flip or gun displacement while shooting fast. If it does track better with the minor PF ammo then I pretty much proved that the gun needs to be heavier to work properly with the major PF ammo.

The Second issue is the poor mechanical accuracy. The only thing that I can think of that would cause such poor mechanical accuracy is a slightly inconsistent lockup of the gun when it chambers a round after firing a shot. I might have created this poor mechanical accuracy by taking 2.5oz out of the slide. The lighter slide could be keeping it from snapping back forward with enough force to reproduce a consistent lockup of the chamber to the slide. The other thing is that I am using a 13lb recoil spring and the stock one is a 15lb. The extra 2lbs of recoil spring force may be needed to properly lock up the chamber between shots.

When I get the new M&P with the thumb safety my plan is to build it up using an unmodified 5 inch Pro slide and put a brass magwell on the frame. Both of these combined should add at least 5oz more weight to the gun. I will redo the back to back testing between my EAA and the new M&P to see if it has improved both in displacement while shooting and mechanical accuracy.

Until I get the new M&P built up and tested out I will be using my EAA at the matches. I know it works well for my style of shooting and it is dead nuts accurate. It may take me a couple of months to get the new M&P built up and ready to rumble since I have to order a bunch more parts for the build. At this point I am starting to second guess dumping a bunch more money into the M&P Limited project without really knowing that it will make much more of a different than what I have setup already. But, this is an interesting project to work on so I think it is worth the cost/effort for the learning factor alone.

[d_striker]

Cool project with the M&P. It'll be awesome seeing you kill it with a service pistol.

You should have gone back to the good stuff and tricked out an XDm though!!!

[Not-So-Mad Matt]

Since I had Monday off for a holiday I blacked out the rear of the slide so the glare wouldn’t happen anymore and then I packed up my EAA gun and gear so I could do some good back to back testing.

Wait, isn't the rear of the slide already black? What did you do to make it really black?

[CHA-LEE]

Since I had Monday off for a holiday I blacked out the rear of the slide so the glare wouldn’t happen anymore and then I packed up my EAA gun and gear so I could do some good back to back testing.

Wait, isn't the rear of the slide already black? What did you do to make it really black?

I got the slide hard chromed so its shiny silver instead of the standard black color. I did a quick fix of using a sharpie to black out the back of the slide to cover up the shiny hard chrome.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I attended a local match at the Aurora Gun Club. Since I am waiting on more parts for my M&P project I shot the match with my EAA. This was going to be a good test of the frame rail welding that I got done on it. Unfortunately by the end of the match the crack started to reappear so I have to get it welded again. The never ending battle of keeping competition guns in top performing condition is an endless churn. The good news of the day was that I had a pretty solid match. No shooting penalties during the match. I did have a bad magazine fumble on an unloaded start stage which cost me about 3 seconds to recover from. Then on the last stage of the day I went into hoser mode trying to point shoot a bunch of close targets and ended up with three D zone hits. I don’t think I will ever fully learn the lesson that point shooting does not work out too well from a hit quality perspective. I every once in a while I try it and expecting it to yield a better result than simply watching my sights. Oh well, we all have our stupid moments.

On Sunday I presented a competition pistol training class with four students. It was fun to do some training with my friends. It’s really cool to watch peoples skills improve as the day goes on. Right now the class that I present is stage based. We setup a specific stage that has a lot of different shooting challenges and forces you to use many different skills. This stage is a good tool for me to quickly find the short comings the students have in whatever skill they are trying to execute. This kind of class is more of an “Advanced” skills class. I have been thinking about creating a different training course that is more shooting fundamentals based. Then combine both classes into a two day class. That way we could have the first day focused on the fundamentals and the second day focused on the stage based stuff. We will see how it goes in the future.

[MarkCO]

Thanks for the class! I've taken, and taught many courses, learned more in a short time than any other...6 hours of always on learning. WIN!

[CHA-LEE]

Thanks for the class! I've taken, and taught many courses, learned more in a short time than any other...6 hours of always on learning. WIN!

I am glad that you enjoyed the class. Hopefully we can get together again to do some more training in the future.

[CHA-LEE]

I shot a USPSA match this past Sunday. I am still using the EAA as I am waiting for more M&P parts to show up. The match went well and my wife shot the match with me. She had fun and did really good for her second match of 2013. She hasn’t been dry firing at all and its really showing in her gun handling. If she wants to meet her goal of baking B class in Production this year she is going to have to make a dedicated effort to getting better. I don’t want to pester her about it. She needs to step up and make it happen.

I am going to be shooting the Florida Open with my EAA instead of the M&P. I don’t have enough time to get the M&P ironed out before I head off for the Florida Open. The good news is that my thumb safety M&P 40 finally came in on Friday. Now I have to wait the 6+ days for the background check to complete before I can actually get it.

The good news about the up coming Florida Open match is that the Colorado winter shooting season has been very easy on us. Very few club matches have been canceled so we have been able to shoot through the winter pretty much. This is good as I know there will be quite a few guys attending the Florida Open as their first match after a winter break. I am scheduled to shoot the whole match on Friday and its looking like most of the top dogs are shooting that day as well, so we should all be in the same boat. I am shooting the whole match on Friday because my wife and I are planning on jumping on a Caribbean Cruise that Sunday for a week long trip. Its going to be fun to shoot a match then go on a cruise vacation for a week.