d_striker Posted June 11, 2013 Share Posted June 11, 2013 You need to fire the camera guy...It'd be one thing if he missed filming due to RO'ing or keeping score. I think I saw him sitting in the shade sipping ice cold Gatorade and eating pizza. On a side note, are you uploading your vids as HD? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 11, 2013 Author Share Posted June 11, 2013 You need to fire the camera guy...It'd be one thing if he missed filming due to RO'ing or keeping score. I think I saw him sitting in the shade sipping ice cold Gatorade and eating pizza. On a side note, are you uploading your vids as HD? I noticed that the videos are not as clear as they are on my phone or PC before I upload it on YouTube. I have been uploading the videos as normal. The next time I upload a video I will see if I can do it in "HD" mode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 12, 2013 Author Share Posted June 12, 2013 The 2013 Mile High Showdown starts tomorrow. I am the match director for this event and preparing for this event over the last 8 months has been a fun challenge. As far as I know everything that I can think of has been accounted for and a plan devised. Now it’s up to executing on the plan and dealing with the unknown issues that come up as the match runs. I am suppose to be able to shoot this match at some point but it will be a fragmented process. I will have to slip in here and there to get the stages shot as time permits and if I don’t get around to shooting all of the stages, then it is what it is. I really don’t care about my shooting performance at this match anyway since I am tasked with serving as the match director. I would much rather pull off a well run, drama free, match verses shoot it well. So we will see how I end up in the results. We start setting up the stages tomorrow then three days of squads shooting. The next four days will be a lot of work but I am sure it will all be worth it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sleepswithdogs Posted June 12, 2013 Share Posted June 12, 2013 Your gonna' do a great job and have a very successful match because you've put a lot of thought and time into it. Wishing I could attend. Perhaps next year! Tar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmike283 Posted June 12, 2013 Share Posted June 12, 2013 I look forward to shooting it Friday. Thanks for all of the hard work you're going to, and have already, put in. We'll see if I can implement some of the stage execution ideas that you gave us a couple weeks ago. See ya Friday! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 17, 2013 Author Share Posted June 17, 2013 (edited) The 2013 Mile High Showdown is now over. It was a long four days at the range but we got it all done with very little actual match issues. Our primary issues were all associated with the weather. Super windy condition on Thursday caused a lot of havoc while setting up the stages. Then we had to stop shooting towards the end of Saturday due to a rain storm that rolled in. Then on Sunday, when all of the shooting was done thank god, a HUGE wind/rain micro burst storm ripped through the range and pretty much destroyed most of the stages. I was so thankful that there were no scoring issues that would require a reshoot because there was no way that would have been possible after that micro burst did its damage. All of the match staff worked hard to make the match happen smoothly and on schedule. It is awesome to work with such a great group of people. Being surrounded and supported by friends that all have a common goal of making the match happen to the best of its ability is a really cool experience. I am truly honored to be part of such an awesome group of people!!! Being the Match Director had me being pulled in multiple directions and solving minor issues all day long each day. So the only way I was able to actually shoot the match was to jump on a stage here and there when I had a moment of down time on Sat/Sun. This in its self was a very interesting experience. I was forced to basically walk up to a stage slip into the shooting order and about 5 minutes later shoot the stage. Given the very limited time I had to look at the stages from a competitor perspective I went with pretty basic stage plans or just asked fellow shooters what their recommended stage plan was and shot it that way. My only focus during the stage runs was to simply call my shots and follow the stage plan. Very much to my surprise I shot a very solid match. I only had a few small bobbles or issues like a slightly missed position or things like that. But I stayed on my sights calling every single shot, let the shooting happen at whatever pace it wanted to and it resulted in a high overall finish. I know I could have been more aggressive on some of the stages to get a better stage time, but I didnt want to worry about stage times while shooting the match. I went with the shoot only as fast as you can call your shots and the result will be whatever it is approach and it worked out. Mission Accomplished on both fronts!!!! Edited June 17, 2013 by CHA-LEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 20, 2013 Author Share Posted June 20, 2013 (edited) I am almost fully recovered from the Mile High Showdown. Putting on that match really took it out of me and I needed a couple of days to rest. I have gotten a lot of really positive feedback about the match so its looking like the match was a success. There are a few lessons learned during this match that I will be applying to the next major match I decide to be the Match Director on. There is always something that can be done better and the only way to really figure it out is to experience the failures first hand. Given the crazy magazine laws that will go into effect on July 1st, I am not sure how viable hosting a major match will be in 2014. The magazine laws have a lot of gray area and until that stuff is ironed out we really cant ask out of state shooters to come into the state with their high capacity magazines and risk breaking laws. We will have to wait and see how it goes. On another note the Colorado State USPSA Championships are happening this coming weekend in Gunnison. It has been several years since I had a chance to shoot at this range so it will be cool to check it out again. The last time I was there they use a lot of Cow Boy props for the stages which made it really interesting. The match is only a 7 stage match all shot in one day so the plan is to head down on Friday, check out the stages, then shoot it on Saturday. I am going with my buddy Conrad so it will be a fun drive down and back. It will be fun to attend a match as a competitor instead of being the Match Director or part of the match staff. I will try to get my stage runs filmed by my squad mates. We will see how it goes. Edited June 20, 2013 by CHA-LEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 24, 2013 Author Share Posted June 24, 2013 (edited) This past weekend I had Tour of Colorado shooting experience. On Friday I drove down to Gunnison which is about 200 miles south west of my house. The High Country Practical Shooters club was hosting the 2013 Colorado State Championships. They had seven fun stages setup which were mostly long field courses except for a single classifier which was good old El Presidente. The club put a ton of effort into setting up some pretty sweet field courses and they were all fun to shoot. Unfortunately the attendance of this match was way down at only 37 total shooters attending. I am not sure if the low quantity of stages or limited advertising caused the low attendance, but the people who didnt come really missed out on a fun and challenging match. With so few shooters we were able to get all seven stages shot by about 1PM then broke for lunch and did the awards after that. We decided to shoot all of the stages without a break because the weather called for high winds in the afternoon. This ended up being a really good plan because the wind did come up by the time we were tearing down the stages after the lunch break. I think that the HCPS club did a good job of hosting the event. My own shooting at the match was not very consistent. I shot a three good stages then screwed up three of them pretty bad. I had a total of four misses for the match which was pretty crappy in its self. The cool thing is that my squad mates helped with filming my stage runs and I was able to get them uploaded to YouTube directly from my phone. Technology for the win!!! Listed below are the stages in the order that I shot them. Stage 7 This was the first stage of the day and it was the classifier. I have shot this classifier a bunch of times and it usually takes a mid to low 5 second run to burn it down. With this being the first stage of the match and I didnt want to start off with a bunch of crappy hits or no hits I shot this stage pretty conservative. My time was in the low six second range with ok hits so I was happy with the result. My slow surrender turn draw cost me a good half a second on this one. I hit the reload though so that was nice. Stage 1 This was a really fun stage that had a great mixture of easy and hard shots. You really had to mix up your shooting speed and sight picture refinement while shooting this stage. The steel through the ports was a big popper in front of a small popper so the plan was to engage the big popper first, then the two low paper then finish on the small popper before leaving the shooting position. Being patient for the small popper was the whole key to this stage. This was probably be best stage run of the match. Edited June 24, 2013 by CHA-LEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 24, 2013 Author Share Posted June 24, 2013 (edited) Stage 2 This was a super long field course stage. You started way at the back then had to run about 40 50 yards down range to get to the front section. The right side targets on this stage were in a heavy shadow and I was having a hard time calling my shots. I ended up with two Ds on the right side targets and it sucks because I called them good and they ended up being Ds. I hate shadow targets. My only other blunder on this stage was missing the single plate and having to go back for it which cost me about a second of wasted time. I shot the end portion of this stage differently than most as I was tall enough to see a plate between the wagon wheel and hard cover steel. I am not sure if this plan really saved any time or not after looking at the video. But it was fun to shoot it this way. Stage 3 This was a fast shooting stage with hoser blasting on both ends and some tricky stuff in the middle. The middle port had two poppers, one of which activated a clam shell, and two other static paper. The timing was good to shoot the activating steel, static paper, clam shell, other popper, then the last static paper. This plan was good, but I overshot the middle port by a step then tried to jump back and went a little too far. All of my weight was on my right foot in the middle section and it made managing the recoil a lot harder and thus the shooting slower than it should have been. At least I burned down the left and right sides, which was a lot of fun. I didnt notice it until now but there is some funny commentary in the video on this one. Edited June 24, 2013 by CHA-LEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 24, 2013 Author Share Posted June 24, 2013 Stage 4 This is a high round count stage with 35 rounds of blasting. The stage layout was awesome but unfortunately for me it was a disaster of a performance. My stage plan had me shooting 22 rounds of paper targets then reloading before I got to the plate rack. This plan got blown out of the water when I needed a make up shot in the first array because I didnt go deep enough into the shooting area to see all four targets. After that I was busy thinking about where to do my two unplanned reloads and this resulted in a ton of make up shots needed on the plate rack. Then my mag didnt want to drop free after the plate rack section so I had to shake it loose before I could complete the reload. Some how I ended up with a miss on the clam shell which was a complete surprise to me. After watching the video I think that the head of the clam shell may have flopped forward just as I broke my first shot on it and it was folded down as my shot passed where the head should have been. Oh well, some times it happens like that. Stage 5 This was an interesting stage that had you doing all of the shooting confined to a Room with two different doors. There were a bunch of different ways to shoot this stage and I figured that going in a U through the stage would make the most logical sense. The hardest part of this stage was the middle section through the second door. It had a pretty far swinger that was pretty fast. I thought I burned this stage down solidly but was surprised to see that I had a miss on the second target I engaged after the reload . I shot at this target pretty deliberately because it was another Shadow target but it evidently didnt help because there was clearly only one hole in the target. This target was half blocked by a no shoot so I can only assume that I favored the no shoot too much and then mashed the shot pulling it off target? Shadow targets for the loss from a shot calling perspective. Stage 6 This stage was an interesting stage with two swingers and some complicated shooting positions. The swingers were fairly close but the static targets around it were not very close or were kind of hard shots. My intent was to shoot the activator steel then jam in two static targets then engage the swinger on its second pass. For both swingers this was too much time wasted on engaging the static targets and I ended up needing to wait for a second pass on both swingers which gave away at least 2 3 seconds of stage time. This and I still ended up with a miss on one of the swingers. Then I had another miss on one of the far targets that were partially blocked by hard cover. I shot really deliberate at this target as well and ended up with a miss so I am not sure what is going on there. Maybe I should just shoot these things at normal speed and make up the shot if I call it marginal? Taking two deliberate shots is obviously not getting the job done for some strange reason. This was a train wreck of the stage and I didnt get it on video, which is probably a good thing. It was painful enough experiencing it the first time. When all of the scores were tallied I ended up winning Limited division by 20% over second place. Given that I had four misses I was surprised that I won by that much. With there only being 16 shooters in Limited and me being the only GM I guess I had quite a bit of buffer over the rest. If the Normal local heavy hitters in Limited were attending this match I would have been beaten solidly given all of the screw ups I had. But a win is a win I guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 24, 2013 Author Share Posted June 24, 2013 We spent Saturday night in Gunnison after the Colorado State match then drove up to Clear Creek Sunday morning to attend a local USPSA match that was a section qualifier. We had to get up at 4AM on Sunday morning so we could make the 180 mile drive up to the Clear Creek range in time to sign up. We didn’t hit much traffic at all so we got there well before the sign up cut off and helped setup stages. I was pretty tired from the day before, getting up really early, then driving 180 miles to the match so I was lacking a bunch of energy this day. I reverted to “Stay on the sights and don’t worry about going fast” mode and it worked out really well. My shooting and mental state reflected what I felt at the Mile High Showdown. I need to replicate this more often as the results speak for themselves. All I have to do is simply let the shooting happen at whatever pace it wants to go and not try to introduce unneeded urgency. My buddy Dominic was able to video my stage runs and its pretty cool to see the shooting happen at its own pace. The only stage that I screwed up was stage 3 which had two swingers and four small plates. I felt that I shot all of the paper solidly but then went to war on the last two plates. I also had a miss on the left swinger, which I called the shot marginal but it wasn’t worth waiting for a second pass to make it up. Here are the stages for your viewing entertainment. Stage 1 Stage 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 24, 2013 Author Share Posted June 24, 2013 Stage 3 Stage 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 24, 2013 Author Share Posted June 24, 2013 Stage 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaylanGivens Posted June 26, 2013 Share Posted June 26, 2013 On stage #2 it looks like you deliberatelt took three shots at the right side paper target... Did you do this because it was hard cover specifically? I know you call your shots, but it seems incredible to "see" a bad shot and shoot a third round at the targer in that short amount of time... I always learn from your videos... Thanks for posting them... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 26, 2013 Author Share Posted June 26, 2013 On stage #2 it looks like you deliberatelt took three shots at the right side paper target... Did you do this because it was hard cover specifically? I know you call your shots, but it seems incredible to "see" a bad shot and shoot a third round at the targer in that short amount of time... I always learn from your videos... Thanks for posting them... I called my second shot a miss in the hard cover so I made it up. The second shot ended up being good, it was in the A zone right next to the black hard cover about a 1/4 inch away. So in the end, it was a wasted extra shot. But I would rather take the time to make up a shot I call marginal or bad and end up with three good hits verses not making it up and eating a miss. The .15 - .20 of a second it takes to make up a shot impacts the Hit Factor a lot less than ending up with a miss. That and more importantly, making up the shot and KNOWING that I have at least two good hits on the target remove that target from my mind to worry about. Worrying about targets that you have already shot but are not sure about the hits can be very distracting during a stage run and negatively impact everything else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 26, 2013 Author Share Posted June 26, 2013 Last night I made some serious headway on the new Limited gun build. This is a Tanfoglio branded Limited gun which are few and far between here in the US. I got the magwell welded on and then did a bunch of dremeling to blend the magwell to the frame and smooth out the sharp edges all around the gun. About a month ago I had the slide lightened to 10oz and I completed the final dremeling on it as well to smooth everything out. I had the bulk of the slide weight taken out of the back of the slide this time so it will be interesting to see how it feels when I shoot it. Tonight I will get the frame and slide sand blasted and prepped for Hard Chrome. The plan is to drop the slide and frame off at the coating place tomorrow for Hard Chrome and it should be done some time next week. If all goes as planned I could have this blaster back together and ready for action late next week. This is good because I am currently using my backup gun and don't have anything to use as a backup at big matches. It will be nice to have a fully functional backup gun to take to major matches again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaylanGivens Posted June 26, 2013 Share Posted June 26, 2013 On stage #2 it looks like you deliberatelt took three shots at the right side paper target... Did you do this because it was hard cover specifically? I know you call your shots, but it seems incredible to "see" a bad shot and shoot a third round at the targer in that short amount of time... I always learn from your videos... Thanks for posting them... I called my second shot a miss in the hard cover so I made it up. The second shot ended up being good, it was in the A zone right next to the black hard cover about a 1/4 inch away. So in the end, it was a wasted extra shot. But I would rather take the time to make up a shot I call marginal or bad and end up with three good hits verses not making it up and eating a miss. The .15 - .20 of a second it takes to make up a shot impacts the Hit Factor a lot less than ending up with a miss. That and more importantly, making up the shot and KNOWING that I have at least two good hits on the target remove that target from my mind to worry about. Worrying about targets that you have already shot but are not sure about the hits can be very distracting during a stage run and negatively impact everything else. Tremendous reflexes and training... Difficult to access the situation (right or wrong) and make a third accurate shot in .15 of a second. Last night I made some serious headway on the new Limited gun build. This is a Tanfoglio branded Limited gun which are few and far between here in the US. I got the magwell welded on and then did a bunch of dremeling to blend the magwell to the frame and smooth out the sharp edges all around the gun. About a month ago I had the slide lightened to 10oz and I completed the final dremeling on it as well to smooth everything out. I had the bulk of the slide weight taken out of the back of the slide this time so it will be interesting to see how it feels when I shoot it. Tonight I will get the frame and slide sand blasted and prepped for Hard Chrome. The plan is to drop the slide and frame off at the coating place tomorrow for Hard Chrome and it should be done some time next week. If all goes as planned I could have this blaster back together and ready for action late next week. This is good because I am currently using my backup gun and don't have anything to use as a backup at big matches. It will be nice to have a fully functional backup gun to take to major matches again. Any pictures of the process? Sounds like a neat build... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 26, 2013 Author Share Posted June 26, 2013 Making up shots usually happens faster than normal shooting splits anyway because your brain knows immediately that the called shot is bad by processing the sight picture as the shot breaks and triggers the reflex to make it up. I say "Processing" in a nebulous sense because processing the sight picture to determine the shot being Good/Bad/Marginal is all done at the subconscious level. I am not consciously assessing the sight picture, making a decision to make it up, then performing the makeup shot. I am also not making a conscious decision to break any shot. Once the sight picture is valid the shot breaks on its own. Some people like to call this "Looking the shot off". My job is simply to present the sights on target as soon as possible so the shot can break as soon as possible from a subconscious level. There is no time in this game to think about or perform actions in a conscious manually commanded fashion. You need a lot of confidence in your skills to allow yourself to simply let go of conscious control and let your subconscious take over and get the job done. This ability to "Let go" is a major roadblock that many shooters can't seem to overcome. I would venture to guess that this single skill is what separates the majority of the GM's from the rest of the shooters. As for the gun build pics I will see if I can take some pictures tonight after I get the sand blasting done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkCO Posted June 26, 2013 Share Posted June 26, 2013 This ability to "Let go" is a major roadblock that many shooters can't seem to overcome. Quit talking about me! Seriously, your help in the past few months has worked some of the time, so thanks! Now I need it work all of the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted June 27, 2013 Author Share Posted June 27, 2013 (edited) Attached to this post is a pic of my new Tanfoglio Limited gun. This picture shows it gleaming from WD-40 as its ready to drop off at the metal finishing place for a fresh coat of hard chrome. I dropped it off today so hopefully I will get it back next week. So far this is what I have done to it......(1) Cut the slide weight down to 10oz. This time I had the majority of the weight taken out of the back of the slide.(2) Welded on the Canyon Creek stainless magwell.(3) Did a crap ton of dremel work on it to smooth out all of the sharp edges, blend the magwell to the frame, open up the ejection port on the slide, etc.(4) Sand blasted the whole frame and slide to further smooth out the dremel work and give it a dull finish.When I get it back from Hard Chrome I will put it all back together and finish the trigger job. It should be ready for some test fire runs a few days after getting it back from hard chrome. Edited June 27, 2013 by CHA-LEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaylanGivens Posted June 29, 2013 Share Posted June 29, 2013 Looks like a beauty... Thanks for the picture... Will be interesting to see it all put together... and shoot it, I'll bet... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted July 1, 2013 Author Share Posted July 1, 2013 (edited) This past weekend I attended a Manny Bragg class. I coordinated the training event so Manny could present a 2 day Standard class on Friday/Saturday, then a 1 day Advanced class on Sunday. I didnt participate in the 2 day class as I have taken this class many times already. Since I was at the Ben Lomond Gun Club range for the class I spent the first two days cleaning up and reworking props from the Mile High Showdown. I put in a solid 8 hours of work on Friday getting everything cleaned up and fixing what I could. MAN that is a lot of work. But I am glad that I spent the effort doing it as it will make the next club match go a lot smoother. I did a little bit of shooting on Saturday with the class but nothing special or focused, pretty much just having fun doing some shooting. On Sunday we did the advanced class. I was really interested in seeing what Manny would be able to pick apart in my shooting and movement skills. We setup a 32 round stage and he had us all shoot it with the same plan. He did this to forcing us to perform difficult actions in specific locations to highlight deficiencies. My initial stage run was 14.69 with 95% of the stage points. After all of the students shot the stage, Manny shot it in 13.13 so we could all observer how it should be done. We then broke down the stage one section at a time to see where we were losing time. For me there wasnt a single thing costing way more time. I was literally losing a tenth of a second her or there that all added up to taking 1.5 seconds longer. This I was not surprises to discover as I know this game is all about a slow death of 1000 small cuts. There were three main things that were costing me time though. The first was my bias towards not wanting to shoot on the move. There was a section in the stage that pushed your shooting on the move to its limits so I chose to not shoot it on the move and run, stop then start shooting. Doing this cost me about half a second verses shooting it on the move. The next thing was how I handled my foot work on the middle of the stage where you have to engage targets on the extreme left and right of a port. He showed me a cool foot work trick that helps you exit the shooting position way faster and keep shooting aggressive while you are in the port. Lastly I was standing up a little bit after entering a shooting position. I didnt realize how much standing up affected my ability to transition aggressively but it was painfully obvious once we started comparing transition times on the clock. After fixing these three issues and reshooting the stage I was able to shoot it in 13.55 seconds with the same 95% of the points. This is also with a slow 1.11 draw to first shot and a make up shot on a hard cover target that added at least .30 to the stage time. Another issue we found is my over use of keeping my head locked up with my arms. On wide transitions this is really slowing down my transitions because I was not moving my head to the target first then bringing the gun to my head. This seems to be only applicable to transitions that are wider than my normal cone of fire. If a target is beyond my normal cone of fire if I turn my head to the next target I am able to transition to the target much faster and stop the gun on target a lot smoother. This is something that I will have to do a bunch of dry fire practice with to make the change. I think that me keeping my head straight to the gun all the time is a training scar from turning my head to the targets and getting crappy hits on the last target in the array back when I was trying to get out of B class. I have the visual patience to complete the shooting before moving my head now, so I need to explore moving my head to the next target on really wide transitions. The class was well worth the time and effort. I came away with four things to work on improving which will ALL improve the consistency of my performance. It will take time to get these four things trained and burned in as the Normal way of doing things but once I get it down my overall shooting performance should bump up at least a few percent overall. Having an opportunity to net a solid 2% to 3% bump in performance may not sound like much, but at my skill level I feel that its a HUGE bump. Hopefully it will only be a death by 970 small cuts after I get these new skills deployed Edited July 1, 2013 by CHA-LEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanniek71 Posted July 2, 2013 Share Posted July 2, 2013 Charlie where are you getting your Tanfo's? I want.....NEED one and am having a hard time finding them anywhere. Got a lead from a place online, but they say call to verify stock, and of course whenever I am looking at them it is 10:30pm lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted July 2, 2013 Author Share Posted July 2, 2013 Charlie where are you getting your Tanfo's? I want.....NEED one and am having a hard time finding them anywhere. Got a lead from a place online, but they say call to verify stock, and of course whenever I am looking at them it is 10:30pm lol That is a good question. I will send you a PM with a couple of suggestions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blu46and2 Posted July 2, 2013 Share Posted July 2, 2013 What kind of gun are you shooting in the video's here? I understand that you'r building a new one but just curious if it is a Tanfo in the video's. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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