CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend was an interesting mixture of good and bad. I attended two local club matches. On Saturday I wasn’t mentally into it for whatever reason and this lead to a pretty crappy match performance. I wish that I could put my finger on what exactly went wrong that day from a mental perspective but I can’t. I had fun shooting and hanging out with friends, but I was just not into it from a competitive perspective. Some times its like that I guess. I shot my new gun and the mag button fell off in the middle of one of my stage runs so I had to switch over to my backup gun for the last two stages. This was actually good because I just switched the front sight on my backup gun and wanted to give it a try anyway to see if it was still sighted in properly. The backup gun was dead nuts on and ran great the last two stages. So that is a win. When I got home I looked into the mag release issue on the new gun and my silver solder job on the mag release failed allowing it to break off. I swapped mag releases with my backup gun which has worked solidly forever. Then I decided to build up a new extended mag release button using epoxy. Some more fiddling is needed to build it up properly, but I will be using this on my backup gun.

On Sunday I was back to my normal mental state. I shot a pretty solid match and only had one penalty. I had a procedural for a foot fault on a backup stage where I ended up stepping outside the shooting area on the last shooting position. The only other issue I had was not seating my magazine all the way on another stage during a reload and had to do the “Tap, Rack” action to get it working again. I just replaced all of my magazine springs with new ones and was reloading to a 21 round magazine so its not a surprise that I didn’t get it seated all the way. With new springs you really have to hammer the mags home during the reload to ensure a solid mag catch engagement. Other than these two things I was happy with my performance.

I am heading to the Utah State USPSA match this coming weekend. It is in Salt Lake City and I have not shot at this range before so it will be cool to see a new range and make some new friends. My only performance goal for this match is to stay low in shooting positions as that is my number one technical issue right now. I think a lot of practice is going to be needed to break me of the standing up while in the shooting position issue.

[d_striker]

Are you using low temp or high temp silver solder? What type of gas?

[CHA-LEE]

I was using low temp silver solder with a propane torch. I should have just taken it over to by buddies house and Mig welded a thick bead on it then reshaped the bead to whatever I want. We will see how this epoxy setup works out. I am sure of one thing though, if I use it, I will probably break it. I am REALLY good at breaking stuff

[d_striker]

I've tried the same thing with epoxy. I used some painters tape to form the "mold" and then filled it with the epoxy. It held for a little while but eventually fell off.

JB Weld works much better than epoxy.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I attended the Utah State Championships in Salt Lake City. This is the first time attending a match at this range so it was cool to try out something new. They had 12 large field courses setup for the match which tested a wide range of shooting skills. Every single stage had steel of some kind or another which was also different than most matches. There were lots of steel plate contraptions as well. Several Polish Plate racks, an Irish Plate Rack, a couple of Texas stars, free standing plates and a boat load of big and small poppers. All told there were 63 pieces of steel spread across 12 different stages. That is a lot of steel shooting in a single match.

I did pretty good on the poppers, but the plates all gave me trouble. I was consistently missing low and I think its due to using a 6 O’Clock hold on the plate instead a center of mass hold. My old gun had a .160 tall front sight and with that I would have to use a 6 O’Clock hold to hit dead center on a plate at around 20 yards. I switched over to a .180 tall front sight and now the Point of Aim and Point of Impact is the same at 20 yards but I am still not aiming center on the plate. Its going to take a while to retrain myself to use a center of mass hold instead of a 6 O’Clock hold. A bucket of ammo and a weekend with a plate rack should fix that issue. I am putting that on my practice list when I get another chance to head to the range for some live fire practice.

Other than struggling with the plates at the Utah State match, I felt that I shot a pretty solid match. I didn’t have any major train wreck stages. I did have a few minor execution flaws here and there, but they really didn’t cost me more than a quarter second here or there. I did end up with two no shoot penalties for the match. Both of which were right on the perforation of the no shoot so I ended up getting the hit on the target as well. It sucks to rack up 20 penalty points but when you are racing some fenders are going to get dented once in a while. I wasn’t able to get any of my stage runs on video. We were all too busy working hard and having a good time.

I shot the match on the same squad as Bob Krough and Ron Avery. The three of us were very close throughout the whole match in stage performances. I was in the hunt for the win until I started struggling with the plates. Failing to effectively take the plates off of polish plate racks, irish plate racks, normal plate racks, and texas stars is what really sunk my run for the win. I probably gave away a total of 10 - 15 seconds in wasted stage time screwing around with these plates with excessive misses. On the paper targets and navigating the stages I was right on pace with speed and hit quality. But the hole I dug on the plates couldn’t be overcome by blazing runs on the paper targets. In the end I ended up 3^rd in Limited at 96% of the match winner Bob Krough. Ron Avery was only 15 match points back from Bob and I was 62 match points back from Bob. Bob shot an awesome match and pulled off a solid win even though he battled his gun on a couple of stages.

While heading home on Monday I was thinking about how much my confidence in shooting steel plates has been rattled given the poor execution in the match. But then I remembered that there are NO steel plates at the nationals and was feeling better about my Nationals Prospects. I have very little time to practice between now and the nationals so I will pretty much be going into the match with the skills and bad habits I currently have now. Knowing that I don’t have to deal with any plates at the nationals really puts my mind at ease.

My Nationals Goal is to make it into the top 10 of Limited. I know I have the skills to make that goal a reality, I just have to make it happen.

[-Ace-]

How was the Irish rack? Is there any predictability or gaming to it or are you at its mercy?

[CHA-LEE]

Ace> I didn't get a chance to shoot the Irish Plate rack at this match because it kept failing and they ended up taking it out of the stage due to excessive range failures and reshoots. This Irish Plate rack was preloaded on the left side and held up with a stick. You shot down a popper and it pulled the stick out causing the Irish Rack to start spinning counter clockwise. By the time you got to it in the stage it was spinning pretty good. But as you shot plates off the ends it seemed pretty predictable. I only observed another squad shoot the stage several times and watched it fail a bunch of times causing range failures and reshoots. For some reason multiple plates would fall off when only one would be hit. Some times the plate falling off would fall down onto another plate knocking it off and other times a plate would get shot off, bounce off the support bracket and bounce into another plate knocking it off. I think that a lot of the issues were caused by it being setup in a way where it was already spinning before you got to it.

The only other time I got to shoot an Irish Plate rack was for fun at the Area 1 match. That one was set spinning at the start as well and you had to shoot off only half of the plates because you were shooting against another opponent in a shoot off scenario. When shooting that it seemed pretty stright forward and not too hard. It moved around but it was pretty predictable.

I honestly think that the Poilish Plate rack can be a lot more painful than the Irish plate rack because it can change directions a lot easier and be more unpredictable.

[thermobollocks]

Sounds like an awesome squad -- both of those guys are Cool Dudes.

I've never even seen an Irish or a Polish plate rack around here. Am I missing a range that uses them, or do you only ever get experience on them out of state? That seems like it would be tough.

[CHA-LEE]

There are no Polish or Irish plate racks in Colorado. So no practice for us locally. You have to run it like a rental at the big matches and hope that your strategy actually works out.

[praetorian97]

I was consistently missing low and I think its due to using a 6 O’Clock hold on the plate instead a center of mass hold.

Nice to meet you and put a face to a name! I went from a center hold M&P to the 6 O'Clock hold on my new Tang. The moving targets like the plate rack is where I noticed it the most. Much easier to get a center hold on moving targets than a 6 O'Clock hold. Needless to say I had major struggles with it.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend my wife and I headed up to Steamboat Springs Colorado for our anniversary. Going up to Steamboat for our anniversary is one of our traditions. During the day on Saturday while my wife was getting pampered at the spa I decided to shoot the local club match. The Colorado front range has been getting pounded with rain the whole last week and there was only a little bit of rain in Steamboat. Luckily for us there was only a little bit of a drizzle in the morning of the match and then the clouds parted and it turned into a sunny day. I showed up to the match early to help setup and the setup crew ended up being me, the match director and one other guy. Since we had very little setup help we decided to only setup stages on two bays. The classifier was setup on the first bay and a large field course was setup on the other bay. We were able to create three separate stages out of the one field course by using different starting positions and moving around some targets so we ended up with a four stage match. The match only had 10 shooters so one squad was used and we efficiently ran through the stages and had fun while doing it. I had a lot of fun shooting with friends and shot pretty solid.

I have one more local club match tonight to attend before I head off to the nationals. I have mixed feelings about attending the nationals this year. I want to perform well at the match, but on the other side of the street I really don’t care. Maybe not putting the nationals on a pedestal is the best thing to do so I can simply go out there to have fun and just shoot. We will see how it goes.

[CHA-LEE]

On Monday night I shot the indoor match down in Colorado Springs and had a failure to chamber jam. When I inspected the round I found that the brass had peeled up a small bit of the bullet plating and that kept the round from registering to the front of the chamber like it should. This is a reloading issue on my end with not inspecting my ammo better. When I got home I went through all of the ammo I am taking to the nationals and found two more rounds with the same issue. This was a lucky find for me as I don’t normally inspect my ammo to this extent after reloading it. Having two more of these jams in the middle of the nationals would have sucked. The good thing is that now all of my ammo has been carefully inspected so I shouldn’t have any more jams like this at the nationals.

I decided to give my gun a detailed strip and cleaning while I was at it. Low and behold I found that the trigger return spring had broken one of the legs off of it. The trigger pull weight was down to 1.5lbs due to this. I am not sure when this happened but it had to be recently. I got the gun all cleaned up and replaced the spring, but that was another lucky find right before the nationals. I wasn’t going to fully clean my gun right before the nationals because I had done it not too long ago and it wasn’t too dirty. But replacing the trigger return spring forces you to completely take the gun apart to get to it so I figured why not clean it all up. I am going to try and get some test rounds down range tomorrow after work just to get some run time on it after the cleaning and reassembly. I always have a fear that something will be screwed up or fail right after a detailed strip and cleaning. I am not sure why I worry about it as it has not happened, but I always have the “Don’t kick a sleeping dog” mindset when it comes to doing major stuff to your gun right before a big match.

Hopefully I have caught and resolved all of the gun and gear gremlins lingering in my stuff before I head out for the nationals. I will feel better about it after I give my gun a good shake down run tomorrow.

My overall performance goal for the nationals is to perform solidly on every stage. Hopefully this will net me a top 10 overall finish in Limited. Finishing in the top 10 is a tall order but a doable one if I shoot my own game and simply let the shooting happen at its own pace. I am going into this match with a “Club Match” mental perspective. This match isn’t more or less important than a club match and I am not going to treat it any different than a club match. Priority number one is to have fun and enjoy myself. Priority number two is to let the shooting happen at whatever pace it wants to go. Beyond that, nothing really matters. I can only perform to my current skill level. Hopefully that is enough to achieve my goal.

I am shooting the Limited match and ROing the Open/L10 match. It will be really cool to experience the match from both perspectives. I am assigned to a large field course stage for the Open/L10 match so it will be cool to do that kind of stage. At prior nationals I have been assigned to a classifier style stage and a medium field course without much movement. So it will be cool to RO an run & gun kind of stage. Hopefully the stage has a few different options in the way its shot so I can see how shooters figure it out and execute their plans. We will see how it goes when I get there. Regardless its nice to be able to give back to the sport by volunteering to RO the match.

[Chris iliff]

Kudos to you Charlie for ROing the nationals, it is on my bucket list. I'd like to get to a point where I could shoot it one year and RO it the next. I'm just not cut out for shooting and ROing the same match, but maybe shooting the one and ROing the other like you are doing would be possible.

I did the Florida Open a couple years ago, big run and gun stage. First light to dark, 300 plus shooters and it kicked my ass. Remember, it's just as important to eat and hydrate when you are ROing as when you are shooting, maybe more important.

Good luck and have fun!!!

[thermobollocks]

Good luck, dude. Try the Bushido mentality -- live as if you are already dead.

Do you have a normal replacement interval for all of your springs? If I remember correctly, you eat return springs pretty frequently.

[CHA-LEE]

Good luck, dude. Try the Bushido mentality -- live as if you are already dead.

Do you have a normal replacement interval for all of your springs? If I remember correctly, you eat return springs pretty frequently.

I usually replace all of my springs every 10K.

[MarkCO]

Good luck out there Charlie...just say no to Chuck-O-Rama!

[CHA-LEE]

Chuck-O-Rama rocked the house the other day................ Then I rocked the toilet

[CHA-LEE]

I have completed shooting the Limited Nationals. I am waiting for the afternoon shooters to finish and scores posted. But I know right now that my goal of making the top 10 got blown out of the water. I will probably end up somewhere in the 25 - 30 range. I don't want to go into the blow by blow events of the match right now as I don't have time. But I pretty much sunk my goal on day 1 by racking up 4 misses and 1 No Shoot on one standards stage. Eating 70 penalty points right off the bat is a big spoon full of humble pie. After that I pretty much reverted to "Survival" mode and did by best to not stick my neck out and lose a bunch of points trying risky plans. Even though my performance wasnt the best I can say that I had an AWESOME squad to shoot with. My squad was filled with friends and great people. We all worked together to maximize each others performance on the stages and had fun while doing it. The stages were fun and challenging as well which was nice. Most importantly, I didn't DQ again like I did last year!!! So its a WIN to simply finish the match this year

[CHA-LEE]

I finally have some time to sit down and go over my 2013 USPSA Handgun Nationals experience. My initial goal going into this match was to make the top 10. This seemed like an obtainable goal before attending the match but then reality set in after seeing the very deep talent pool in attendance. The Limited match consisted of 246 competitors. There were 36 GM’s, 41 M’s, 49 A’s, 63 B’s, 38 C’s, 3 D’s and 16 U’s. Breaking the total competitors down by classification the talent pool becomes glaringly evident that finishing in the top 10 at this match would have to be a heroic effort on my part. I feel that I had a fairly solid match with some issues and screw ups. This performance netted me a 29^th overall finish at 84% of the winner Nils Jonason. I was able to watch the super squad shoot a few stages during the match in my off time and it was obvious to me that Nils would be the man to beat. He was able to produce stage winning runs in effortless fashion. Personally, I think he is a robot sent from the future but that is a discussion for another time.

I was able to get all of my stage runs on video which was nice. I have uploaded these to my YouTube page.

During the match I had two primary issues. First, I couldn’t shoot steel worth a crap. Second, I kept having the magazine won’t drop free issue during reloads. The Magazines not dropping free can be fixed by replacing my magazine springs, but I didn’t bring any spares with me to the match. Lesson learned there. As for the steel issues, I had a lot of time to think about this and I believe that I have figured out the root of the issue. I am simply not picking a spot to aim at while shooting steel. I am instead shooting at “White” once my sights get anywhere on the steel. I am going to pick an aiming spot on the steel and test this out the next time I go out for live fire practice.

Both of these issues cost me about 10 – 15 seconds of wasted stage time spread across all of the stages. This in its self was worth about 100 match points, which would have bumped me up into the top 20. The 4 misses and 1 no shoot on the evil strong/weak hand standards stage cost me 70 match points, which would have bumped me up to 15^th. Going from 15^th to the top 10 would have required another 100 match points which I really don’t think could have happened without really risking a lot by shooting super aggressive on the difficult partial shots.

To me, this match was all about having the confidence and skill to crank out solid hits on partial targets rapidly. After racking up 70 penalty points on the first day I totally went into conservation mode and didn’t risk much from a stage plan or aggressive shooting perspective. The crash and burn factor was simply way too high and I didn’t want to dig the hole I was already in any deeper. In the end I finished where I expected to. You only get out of something what you put into it. Shoot conservative and you get a conservative result.

As stated before, the squad I was on was awesome. We all had a great time and had fun while doing it. Hopefully I get to shoot with these guys again some time soon.

Congratulations to Nils Jonason for an outstanding performance in both Limited and L10. Taking home back to back national titles isn’t a fluke. Nils is an amazing shooter and puts a ton of effort into his craft and it shows.

[CHA-LEE]

This past Sunday I was able to shoot a local USPSA match. Four of the 5 stages had poppers so I decided to use this match as an experiment in shooting steel in different ways. On the first two stages I decided to pick a specific aiming spot on the steel which was the center of the circle in the upper portion of the popper. On both of these stages it felt like it was taking forever to aim hard at the specific aiming spot, but I was able to shoot all of the steel one for one and call them good hits before hearing the “Ding”. Since your brain always plays tricks on you with how long things seem to take verses how long they really take I don’t know if it actually took longer or not. I should have videoed the stage runs so I could watch for any obvious or excessive delay, but I didn’t.

On the next two stages I consciously allowed myself to revert back to my old habit of aiming at “White” and breaking the shot as soon as my sights were anywhere on the steel. This resulted in two extra shots needed on each stage. Mentally it felt like I was shooting the steel faster than aiming at a specific spot, but I know for sure that the extra shots needed ended up taking longer.

This was a cool experiment to run during a match and I like the confirmation of results on both sides. I was just lucky to have a local match that had steel on most of the stages. The next time I have a chance to get out for some live fire practice I will setup a bunch of steel and validate these findings on the timer using both methods.

I am sure that picking a specific spot to aim at is better than the “Aim at white” way of shooting steel. I just have to become accustomed to the perceived extra time that it feels like it is taking to aim at a specific spot.

[MarkCO]

If I remember correctly, the "danger targets" are partials, steel and 20 yards plus. So would you look at partials and 20+ the same way?

[CHA-LEE]

If I remember correctly, the "danger targets" are partials, steel and 20 yards plus. So would you look at partials and 20+ the same way?

That is the strange thing. I have no problems with assessing the shot difficulty on paper targets and taking how ever long is needed to break clean shots. I am just being a retard and not applying the same process on steel. I know this gap in my skills is directly associated with my complete distaste for shooting steel matches. I don't practice shooting steel and it's showing in my match performance. It's just another thing to add to the "I suck at this" list so I can work on fixing the issue.

[Sean Gaines]

^{Try pushing your practice targets to 30-40yds and practice getting all "A's" , maybe throw in a steel at distance. Then shoot one of your local matches and see if the steel looks the same size when you shoot it.}

Edited October 9, 2013 by Sean Gaines

[CHA-LEE]

^{Try pushing your practice targets to 30-40yds and practice getting all "A's" , maybe throw in a steel at distance. Then shoot one of your local matches and see if the steel looks the same size when you shoot it.}

The issue is a strategy failure. For whatever reason I thought an acceptible strategy for shooting steel was simply shooting at "White" when my sights were anywhere on the steel. I am finding that this is not an acceptible strategy as it does not yeild consistent hits. I simply have to change my strategy to pick a specific spot on the steel to aim at while engaging steel. This is the same kind of failure mode a lot of shooters have on paper. They shoot at "Brown" when engaging paper targets and don't pick a specific aiming spot on the paper target. I am basically doing the same thing with steel and need to change my ways.

[Sean Gaines]

^{Try pushing your practice targets to 30-40yds and practice getting all "A's" , maybe throw in a steel at distance. Then shoot one of your local matches and see if the steel looks the same size when you shoot it.}

The issue is a strategy failure. For whatever reason I thought an acceptible strategy for shooting steel was simply shooting at "White" when my sights were anywhere on the steel. I am finding that this is not an acceptible strategy as it does not yeild consistent hits. I simply have to change my strategy to pick a specific spot on the steel to aim at while engaging steel. This is the same kind of failure mode a lot of shooters have on paper. They shoot at "Brown" when engaging paper targets and don't pick a specific aiming spot on the paper target. I am basically doing the same thing with steel and need to change my ways.

I know this may sound contrary to what your are trying to achieve, and I have heard it both ways. I typically aim above center on an open uspsa target since the target is fuzzy and I am having a crisp sight picture. I tend to have a slight pause on steel and danger targets. I know it feels slower, but its better than the miss, hit, hit, miss approach. Steel shooting can be the ultimate time sucker, if not shot one for one.

I know of another High Master that is doing what you are saying, and has been successful with it. so to say one is better than the other, really can't be said. What can be said by picking a spot is you put more emphasis on your sights and alignment, which in the long run, maybe beneficial to your overall points and time....the key is getting those eyes to move fast.