CHA-LEE's Tale

[RangerTrace]

Nice review. After reading that, I should probably just sell my guns and take up Yoga!

[CHA-LEE]

Nice review. After reading that, I should probably just sell my guns and take up Yoga!

Why would you give up shooting??? You were rocking it on several of the stages and even won stage 8 which was one of the hardest shooting stages in the match. You did great!!!

[thermobollocks]

What was the deal with stage 8? According to the results page, it looks like you and Paul both had a tough time on it.

[CHA-LEE]

Stage 8 was a small field course that forced you to shoot strong hand only through the whole stage while holding onto a rope with your support hand. The paper targets to engage on this stage were not too hard of shots but the widow maker on this stage was a single 6 inch steel plate at about 15 yards. That plate ate a lot of shooters lunch trying to take down strong hand only. Paul and I both wasted a lot of time missing that pesky little plate during our stage runs.

[MarkCO]

And since that 6" plate ate so many lunches, I swear it was a 16" plate by Sunday. Stage 8 was the first stage, and I could tell Charlie was off his game by maybe 5 to 10% just watching him.

[RangerTrace]

Nice review. After reading that, I should probably just sell my guns and take up Yoga!

Why would you give up shooting??? You were rocking it on several of the stages and even won stage 8 which was one of the hardest shooting stages in the match. You did great!!!

I'm kidding of course!! But, when you see someone like you who isn't very happy with their performance and you still beat me by 21%.......you get what I mean. But to be honest, I've shot so little the last 18 months, I'm really thankful that I finished as well as I did. I had several major mental mistakes (forgot to reload once and reloaded to an empty change a few more) I really didn't think I'd make the top 20. Anyway, back to you...thank you for the compliment and congratulations on another good showing!!

[thermobollocks]

And since that 6" plate ate so many lunches, I swear it was a 16" plate by Sunday.

So it was easier for the Sunday shooters? Shenanigans!

[MarkCO]

I'm kidding of course!! But, when you see someone like you who isn't very happy with their performance and you still beat me by 21%.......you get what I mean. But to be honest, I've shot so little the last 18 months, I'm really thankful that I finished as well as I did. I had several major mental mistakes (forgot to reload once and reloaded to an empty change a few more) I really didn't think I'd make the top 20. Anyway, back to you...thank you for the compliment and congratulations on another good showing!!

One of the attributes of Charlies shooting/coaching that I appreciate is his ability to separate match placement from shooting performance. Even if Paul had not been at the match and Charlie was first, for the most part, his evaluation of his own shooting would have been about the same. If he shoots to the best of his ability and is 5th, or wins a match by 20%, consistent self analysis and criticism based on his own skillset will occur. I don't know if that is a skill or a personal characteristic, but it certainly must be beneficial in the mental game.

[CHA-LEE]

I'm kidding of course!! But, when you see someone like you who isn't very happy with their performance and you still beat me by 21%.......you get what I mean. But to be honest, I've shot so little the last 18 months, I'm really thankful that I finished as well as I did. I had several major mental mistakes (forgot to reload once and reloaded to an empty change a few more) I really didn't think I'd make the top 20. Anyway, back to you...thank you for the compliment and congratulations on another good showing!!

One of the attributes of Charlies shooting/coaching that I appreciate is his ability to separate match placement from shooting performance. Even if Paul had not been at the match and Charlie was first, for the most part, his evaluation of his own shooting would have been about the same. If he shoots to the best of his ability and is 5th, or wins a match by 20%, consistent self analysis and criticism based on his own skillset will occur. I don't know if that is a skill or a personal characteristic, but it certainly must be beneficial in the mental game.

Are you reading my mind again??? You hit the nail on the head. Continuous evaluation of performance is needed to improve, regardless of where you may have finished in a match.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I attended the Area 1 match in Benton City Washington. I flew to this match and the closest airport was 200 miles away in Portland. I went to this match with my friend John and we both enjoyed the scenic drive from Portland to Benton City. We flew in on Thursday and got to the range at around 3:30 PM so we only had an hour and a half to check out the stages. We didn’t get to look at all of the stages before the range closed but we did get to check out quite a few of them. All of the stages we did look at were fun and challenging with a wide range of shooting and movement skills being challenged. Many of the stages had targets arranged so you had the choice of shooting them from a standing position or to push the envelope and shoot them on the move. I thought that this was really cool and allowed for a lot of creativity in stage plans based on your skill level. This match used a three half day shooting schedule and I was on the PM/AM/PM schedule. John and I were on squad 29 and were the only Americans. The rest of the squad was from Canada and they were great to shoot with. Everyone on the squad was nice, worked hard, and had fun. You can’t really ask for much more than that. Hopefully I get a chance to shoot with these Canadians again in the future.

With 14 stages to shoot including chrono there was a lot of entertainment to be had over the three days of shooting. John was able to get most of my stage runs on video and I have uploaded those to my YouTube channel if you want to check them out.

My match performance was fairly solid when my gun was working. Unfortunately my gun wasn’t working for about half of the match. I experienced the same strange failure to feed and failure to go into battery jams as I did in Texas at the Oil Field Classic match. All told I had jams on 7 different stages. It would only jam once during a stage run, but a jam still wastes time no matter how quickly you can clear it. I guess one positive outcome to this is that I have gotten pretty good at clearing jams fairly quickly on the clock. I guess my switching to a silicone spray for the magazines wasn’t a solid solution to the issue.

Shooting matches is hard enough when your gun and gear is working properly. Its exponentially harder when you are battling your equipment as well. I tried my best to stay in a positive mood through the match even though my gun was only 50% reliable. I found the hardest part in NOT being distracted by wondering if the gun was going to jam or not during a stage run verses just shooting the stage and not worrying about it. I know that I shot a few of the stages way too conservative because I was basically expecting my gun to fail yet again. On the last day of the match my gun jammed on the first stage we shot and I lost my temper mid stage run and allowed myself to angrily blast at “Brown” targets through the rest of the stage netting 5 D’s and 2 misses. It sucked to lose my cool like that but I had simply had it with the bullshit jams through the whole match. Luckily my gun ran jam free the last two stages. I am not sure how well I would have dealt with the situation if it continued to jam.

Since I had given up at least 10 seconds in stage time due to jams I knew that it would dramatically impact my overall match finish in a negative way. I thought that I would be lucky to finish in the top 5 of Limited given the circumstances. When the results were posted I ended up 3^rd in Limited at 87% of match winner Travis Tomasie. I stuck into 3^rd place by a miniscule 2 match points over Steve Shroufe. I will take 3^rd place at this match even if I feel like I didn’t earn it. It just sucks to know that if my gun simply didn’t jam I could have been at about 95% of Travis. This would still have put me in 3^rd place, but it would have felt like a well earned 3^rd place finish.

[CHA-LEE]

When I got back home from the Area 1 match on Monday I focused my attention on trying to figure out why my gun keeps having these inconsistent jams. I totally cleaned the slide and did a bunch of test feeding of rounds through the gun. I noticed that there was some excessive friction in the forward motion of the slide right after the barrel is raised up to the “Locked” position then it loosened up as it completed the forward slide movement. I took the barrel out and looked at the Kidney cut out on the bottom of the barrel that is used to time the locking and unlocking of the barrel. I noticed that the back portion of the kidney cut were the barrel is locked up but not fully into battery was not level compared to the fully into battery portion. I carefully took some material off of the unlevel portion of the kidney cut to make it an even plane from initial locking to fully into battery and tested it out again. This helped remove the excessive friction during the forward slide movement at the initial locking up portion of the feeding process. But then I noticed that there was another friction point when the rim of the case gets pushed up under the extractor hook.

In the past, when I setup the extractor hook depth I would always set the depth so that the tip of the hook was pinching the rim of the case into the side of the breach face. I thought that maybe I had set this depth too deep and it was creating excessive friction as the rim of the case gets pushed up under the extractor hook. I reworked the extractor depth so there was just a slight amount of retaining pressure on the rim of the case but not enough so that it was actually deflecting the extractor hook when the round is chambered. After doing this there was zero extra friction during the barrel lockup process.

Since I had eliminated both excessive friction points during the barrel lockup process I thought that I should have the feeding issues resolved but then found another issue. I was using a totally dry magazine and super clean ammo while doing this testing and if I pulled the slide back and let it go slowly the recoil spring didn’t have enough tension to strip the top round out of the magazine. I thought that this was strange so I tried the same thing on my backup gun, which has a 10lb recoil spring and the same failure mode existed. There was so much friction between the feed lips and the brass of the round that the recoil spring didn’t have enough strength to pick the round out of the magazine. Perplexed by this excessive friction, I sprayed a few rounds with a Teflon based dry lubricant and let it dry. Then I tried the slow feeding process again and it worked smooth as silk every time. If I held the slide back and simply let go to feed the round from a slide lock type of position it would feed the rounds flawlessly with zero “clunk” feeling as the round is stripped from the mag, chambered and locked up. Intrigued by this I threw a 6 lb recoil spring in to see if it would still feed properly and sure enough, it would still feed smooth as silk. Since I prefer the felt recoil and sight tracking of the 8lb recoil spring I put that in and tested it again manually and all it was still feeding properly.

Given that all of this testing was done on the bench doing manual feeding tests I don’t know if this new optimized setup will actually work properly in live fire. I am planning on heading to the range some time this week to give it a try though. I used the Teflon dry lube on the inside of my magazines and followers, then also sprayed down about 300 rounds of ammo. This “should” eliminate most of the feed lip to brass friction and also eliminate the ammo to inside of the mag body friction. I am looking forward to testing this new setup out in live fire to see if the issue is actually fixed or if more tweaking is still needed. Either way I think that my magazine bodies may be worn out causing too much friction. It may be time to decommission these magazines and build up some new ones.

[thermobollocks]

It's tough to imagine brass on steel taking away steel. Or is the issue that the feed lips have spread too much?

[CHA-LEE]

It's tough to imagine brass on steel taking away steel. Or is the issue that the feed lips have spread too much?

Regardless of metal types, if you rub two metal components together long enough wear will occur. I have used these same magazines bodies for an unknown amount of tens of thousands of rounds. I also maintain strict control of the feed lip width. Every time I clean the magazines I use calipers to measure the feed lip width and adjust them to the proper width as needed. I also don't reuse a magazine that I drop in the dirt while at the range. If I drop it in the dirt, I decommission the magazine and put it in my range bag. Then I clean, inspect, and adjust it when I get back home from the match. I have used this magazine maintenance/use process for years and it has worked for many years, so I don't think that is the root cause of the issue.

[Vanniek71]

Sounds like you need some "mag repair kits" those May be getting worn out.

If you adjust the metal back and forth after a while it won't hold shape anymore, and could even break!

You probably already know that but just figure id point it out!

[CHA-LEE]

Sounds like you need some "mag repair kits" those May be getting worn out.

If you adjust the metal back and forth after a while it won't hold shape anymore, and could even break!

You probably already know that but just figure id point it out!

You are correct, they can only be "Adjusted" so many times. I may be forced to replace all of my magazine bodies due to them being worn out. But I find it hard to believe that all 10 of my magazines have all failed the exact same way at the same time. If there was one magazine that failed more than another then sure, it could be a specific mag issue. But I have been keeping track of the magazine associated with the jam issues and there is no trend pointing to a specific magazine. The jams are happening on all magazines randomly. I also want to point out that these funky jam issues only started with the latest gun I am using. Hopefully the issues I found and fixed this last go around will resolve these jamming issues. I am going to see if I can do some shooting tonight or tomorrow after work to see if this new setup works properly or not.

If it still jacks up, I am going to ramp up the build of my next Limited gun and get that pistol up and running to take over as primary blaster duty.

[Vanniek71]

If it's random across all mags, it's likely in the gun.

[thermobollocks]

Gotcha. We were wondering what was up Monday night -- you missed out on a couple of best 3 per target stages.

[BritinUSA]

Did you check the magazine release? If it's worn or otherwise out of specification then it could affect feeding as the magazine would not be in the optimum position.

[CHA-LEE]

Gotcha. We were wondering what was up Monday night -- you missed out on a couple of best 3 per target stages.

Sorry about missing the Monday night matches. I flew back from the Area 1 match on Monday morning so I was too worn out to go down to Colorado Springs for the evening match.

[CHA-LEE]

Did you check the magazine release? If it's worn or otherwise out of specification then it could affect feeding as the magazine would not be in the optimum position.

That is a good point. Its been a while since I took a close look at the mag release catch verses a new one. I will check that out as well. I moved the mag release from the old gun to the new gun and the old gun didn't have any feeding issues. But maybe the hole cut in the frame for the mag release is slightly different than the hole in the old frame putting it at a different, less than optimal height?

[thermobollocks]

Gotcha. We were wondering what was up Monday night -- you missed out on a couple of best 3 per target stages.

Sorry about missing the Monday night matches. I flew back from the Area 1 match on Monday morning so I was too worn out to go down to Colorado Springs for the evening match.

No worries dude -- it's major match season. This was a time when a Charlie walkthrough would've helped me avoid having to declare a Forbidden Action. But, I got to declare my first Forbidden Action.

[CHA-LEE]

Gotcha. We were wondering what was up Monday night -- you missed out on a couple of best 3 per target stages.

Sorry about missing the Monday night matches. I flew back from the Area 1 match on Monday morning so I was too worn out to go down to Colorado Springs for the evening match.

No worries dude -- it's major match season. This was a time when a Charlie walkthrough would've helped me avoid having to declare a Forbidden Action. But, I got to declare my first Forbidden Action.

Some lessons can only be learned the hard way. All you can do is experience the situation, deal with it, and try to avoid it from happening again in the future.

[-Ace-]

Are you shooting the Northern AZ Classic this coming weekend?

[CHA-LEE]

Are you shooting the Northern AZ Classic this coming weekend?

Nope. I signed up for it too late and got onto the Wait List. I chose to attend a local Steel Challenge State match that same weekend with my wife instead. Then last week I got called from the Northern AZ Classic match director asking if I wanted to take a slot that had opened up, but it was too late for me to change my plans. I wish I could have gotten into the Northern AZ Classic when I first signed up for it, but I delayed to long in signing up and didn't get in. I will have to keep a better eye on the registration opening up next year. That is one of the matches I am making a priority to attend in 2015.

[CHA-LEE]

Last night I was able to get some range time at a local indoor range to test fire my Limited gun. I was only able to shoot 100 rounds through the gun but did various different shooting drills and shooting speeds. The good news is that the gun ran flawlessly, even with the 8lb recoil spring. While shooting I couldn’t feel any evidence of a “Clunky” feeding of the rounds which is usually a tell tale sign of nose dive issues. I observed the ejection of the brass and it was throwing the brass a little less consistently than before but all of it was getting ejected solidly and being thrown out of the gun at a high velocity. This change in ejected brass trajectory is due to the changes I made to the extractor depth and I am assuming that the slightly inconsistent angle of where the brass is being thrown has to do with the dramatically reduced amount of “pinch” on the rim of the brass between the side of the breach face and extractor hook. I am not too worried about the slightly inconsistent angle of brass ejection as long as it is getting flung out of the gun at a high velocity.

100 rounds is not a lot of testing to prove that this new setup has actually fixed the issues, but its at least a good start. I need to shoot a LOT more ammo through this gun in this configuration to confirm reliability. I am planning on doing some more live fire testing along with several matches this coming weekend. Hopefully by early next week I can get at least a thousand rounds through the gun. If it functions solidly through 1000 rounds that will make me a lot more comfortable in confirming that the jamming issues are resolved.