CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

I shot the indoor match last night and had mixed results. For whatever reason I couldn’t focus on my sights very well so I was usually in a situation where I was looking at blurry sights instead of clear sights. I am not sure if this is was a lighting issue, a dirty FO rod in my front sight issue, or simply not trying hard enough see the sights. I was also distracted by actually “Trying” to shoot fast in order to see how aggressive I could run the trigger before a trigger freeze situation occurred. As we all know, any time you “Try” to consciously do something during a stage run everything else suffers. That combined with not being able to see my sights clearly resulted in a boat load of misses and or No Shoot hits. After I train wrecked the first two stages of the match I pretty much gave up on trying to get my hits. I instead focused on trying to run the gun as fast as I could to see if I could induce a trigger freeze issue. I was able to drive the gun really fast and never ran into a trigger freeze so that was cool. I think that the trigger being set right at 2lbs is right where it needs to be right now. As for the match performance, I racked up 5 misses and 1 no shoot over the four medium size stages and those shooting penalties pretty much sunk any chance of doing well overall. Some times it goes your way, and some times it does not. This was one of those times where it wasn’t going my way.

[CHA-LEE]

This weekend was chocked full of shooting and training stuff. On Friday night I did some one on one dry fire training with a junior shooter. This was our second dry fire training session and he is making remarkable progress in a short amount of time. He isn’t held back by years of bad habits that need undone, so his learning curve is exceptionally fast. He is only 12 so I am trying to balance the training between being effective and focused verses trying to cram too much into the training session and he loses interest. I am also trying to make it fun so he will actually do the dry fire practice stuff on his own. So far he is doing great and I am looking forward to seeing his skills progress. We will move up to some live fire training soon so we can work on that aspect of his skill set.

On Saturday I attended the USPSA match at the Aurora Gun Club and it was a brutal day of shooting for me. On Thursday I decided to replace the fiber rod in my front sight due to it getting dull. It has been a long while since I made the bulb in the front large so I figured I would give that setup a try for the match. This experiment back fired on me big time for the first stage of the match. The stage had a bunch of hard cover partial targets and after the buzzer went off and the gun was on target the ONLY thing I could see was a HUGE neon orange Fiber bulb. It was super distracting and I couldn’t see the top and side edges of the actual front sight. So I ended up shooting the whole stage by putting the huge bulb on target and hoping that I got my hits. Well that plan didn’t work out well at all resulting in 4 misses on that stage that I couldn’t even call misses while shooting because I could only see the fiber bulb. Since that didn’t work out I immediately replaced the fiber rod in the front sight to make the bulb on the front the normal smaller size. Even though I fixed the front sight, I continued to have mistakes on every stage. It was just one of those days where nothing went right and there didn’t seem like anything I did would make it better. After screwing up the first three stages I pretty much gave up and didn’t care from that point on. There is no point in getting frustrated over it when the damage is already done. Thinking back on it now, one major difference for that day is that I didn’t get anything to eat in the morning. So I wonder if not eating anything had a bigger impact to my overall mental state and performance than I expected? Probably so.

On Sunday I attended two different matches. The first was an outdoor USPSA match up in the mountains at the Clear Creek range. Since this range is in the mountains this was their last match of the year. The weather gets to sketchy to try and host matches there in the winter months. This morning I made sure to get some breakfast before heading to the range. My performance at this match was a polar opposite of the day before. I shot solidly on every single stage and didn’t have any major issues. Lately I have been trying to focus on performing specific actions like gripping the gun hard with my left hand, but I decided for this match, I would stop trying to consciously command actions and simply shoot. This worked out well for me and I think I need to get back into this mode of shooting even though my left arm is still weak and numb. I seem to have enough grip strength right now to manage the recoil properly in normal shooting positions. The only time it’s really jacked up is when shooting in awkward shooting positions where you do need to muscle the gun to maintain recoil management.

Sunday Night I attended the indoor USPSA match at the Centennial Gun Club. They had four fun stages setup with a lot of running around. The floors are really slick in this range and after falling down during a stage run the last time I was here I purposefully ran around the stages a little more tentatively. The lighting in these bays is not the best, but the club has tried to offset that by setting up flood lights in key shooting areas. This has worked out pretty good but its still a challenge to see your sights properly. The Open shooters have a significant advantage in these lighting conditions with their red dot sights. I shot this match ok but not really good. Not being able to see my sights resulted in more C’s and D’s that I would like and I also had a miss on one stage and nicked a no shoot on another stage, both uncalled. Sometimes you have to shoot these stages leveraging point shooting skills because seeing your sights is not going to happen. In these situations, any hits is better than no hits I guess. For my poor indoor eye sight I really can’t whine too much about how I did at this match.

It was fun shooting two matches in the same day, but it was exhausting. I was totally wiped out by the end of the day. I have been running the bull barrel limited gun exclusively for a while now and it has been running like a champ. It’s been very reliable even when its super dirty so that is a huge plus. This week I am going to give it a detailed clean and get it ready for the Area 2 match in a couple of weeks. After that I have to get a crap ton of ammo loaded so the bulk of this week will be dedicated to the reloading effort.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend I attended the 27^th Annual Area 2 Desert Classic match in Phoenix. This is my absolute favorite match of the year and I look forward to attending all year long. This year the match was once again, AWESOME!!! I didn’t shoot my best due to being sick the whole time, but I got to shoot on a great squad, made some new friends, and had a chance to visit with some old friends in Phoenix when not at the range. The weather was also great in the mornings and in the afternoon. Its like getting an extra weekend of summer weather which never would happen in November in Colorado. I was welcomed back home to Colorado by an artic cold 15 degree snow/ice storm when I drove home on Monday. I think mother nature was jealous of my extra weekend of Summer down in AZ and decided to punish me.

Since I am still battling weakness and numbness in my left arm I really didn’t have much of a performance expectation for this match. Then I started coming down with a cold on Wednesday before the match and it was hitting me full force on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during the match. Battling a cold on top of my gimp arm situation lead to some down right crappy stage runs during the match. I started out fairly solid on the first day, but by Saturday I was pretty exhausted physically and in a total mental fog due to the cold meds I was taking. This resulted in some not too surprising crappy stage performances. I wish that I didn’t have these ailments during this match, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I did my best to push through and do the best I could with the hand I was dealt. This match was very accuracy biased with partial targets all over the place and tricky moving targets to engage. I really didn’t mind the more difficult shots through the match. There were no shots that were impossible or mega difficult. Most of the hard shots were simply risky if you tried to push the aggressiveness too far. While at the range I heard many shooters make negative comments about the overall shooting difficulty of the match, mostly taking the stance of thinking it was too hard or too “Open Friendly”. Personally I think it should be a healthy wake up call for most shooters to realize that maybe the shooting challenges in their local club matches have been biased too far towards being easy shooting. Hosing down a stage full of close targets at Warp 10 is fun, but that really doesn’t hone your overall shooting skills much. Matches like these separate the men from the boys from a fundamental marksmanship skills perspective and that is just how it should be.

I was squaded with Bob Krogh and we both had a great time socializing and running stage plan ideas off one another through the whole match. Its nice to be able to objectively bounce stage ideas off another GM and get an honest answer. Bob is an overall great guy and an awesome shooter as well. He shot a consistent and solid match from start to finish and was rewarded with HOA in Limited, which was well earned. I some how managed to pull together a 4^th overall in Limited finish at 91% of Bob. To be totally honest, I was shocked to see myself that close to the top given how circumvented my performance was due to being sick and having a gimp arm. I guess this just goes to show what can happen if you simply keep tackling each stage with as much effort and focus as you can muster even if the prior stage runs were a train wreck and you feel like crap. For my efforts I was able to pull an STI Frame Kit off of the Prize table and I am looking forward to getting that built up into another Limited blaster to play with. I am not totally sure on what configuration of Limited gun I am going to have built on that frame, but I am sure I will figure something out over the winter months.

I was able to get all but one of my stage runs on video and have uploaded them to my YouTube channel. There is some good, bad and ugly to be seen in those stage run videos. Some people like to hold back the train wreck videos and only post the good ones. I think its healthy for me to post all of the stage runs regardless of how good or bad they were so I can learn from the bad runs as well as the good ones. I am still trying to figure out how I was able to take 8 shots at the final head shot target in stage 11 and STILL have a miss on it. That ultra fail boat situation still has me perplexed.

[Richc2048]

Thanks for the write up. I'm thinking of going to the 2015 one in March. Are you going again in March?

[CHA-LEE]

Thanks for the write up. I'm thinking of going to the 2015 one in March. Are you going again in March?

If I can get in before the cutoff I am going again in March. This match fills up fast so you need to get your entry submitted as soon as they open it up. They said that registration will open up for the 2015 match in December.

[Richc2048]

I registered. I'll see you there.

[CHA-LEE]

I made it into the 2015 Area 2 match as well. I guess it filled up in less than 2 hours.

[Richc2048]

BOOYA!

[CHA-LEE]

Well November has flown by. After attending the Area 2 match the following week I went on a weeklong southern Caribbean cruise with my wife and it was AWESOME!!! We flew into Puerto Rico and got on the ship there and the cruise went south from there. When we left Colorado the weather was very cold in the single digits. During the cruise it was consistently in the 80’s which was a welcomed change. Coming back from the cruise we jumped right into the Thanksgiving week family activities and it was nice to see the whole family over Thanksgiving.

After I came back from the Cruise I started working with Rick on the next Limited blaster so I could have a backup gun that was in the same basic configuration as my primary. We decided to build a long dust cover, bull barrel gun again just like my primary but put a 6 inch bull barrel in the 5 inch slide to see how that would shoot. We got the gun to the same fighting weight as my normal 5 inch full/bull setup (50oz) but the inch longer barrel allowed me to use 0.3gr less powder and still maintain the same velocity. I thought that this setup was going to be better because it did feel like it shot significantly softer than the normal 5 inch setup. But I found that the lack of recoil actually made my target to target transitions a lot slower because I couldn’t leverage the recoil to promote the transition movement to the next target. I had to initiate and drive the transitions by using 100% muscles which was odd and way less consistent. This was an interesting finding as I always thought that a softer shooting gun would be “Better” because there was less recoil to manage. But it’s looking like I need some recoil to assist in the transitioning process. Since the 6 inch barrel idea was a bust, we chopped off the extra inch of barrel to make it back into a normal 5 inch bull barrel setup. This new blaster is in the break in phase and we are fine tuning it as we go to get it functioning as it should be. So far I only have about 400 rounds on the new blaster so its still very early in the break in process but we have done a lot of fine tuning during that time and we shouldn’t have to do much more tweaking to get it 100% reliable. Right now I think it is tweaked up to be 100% reliable and all I have to do is get some more rounds through it to prove its reliability.

I was able to shoot a couple of indoor matches this past weekend and that was the first time shooting matches since the Area 2 match at the start of November. I expected to have more degraded match performances after taking several weeks off from shooting, but I really didn’t have any issues. Shooting the indoor matches is always a challenge with seeing my sights properly so I just took my time and waited to see what I needed to see and this resulted in really good hits for both matches. The winter snowy weather is looking like it will pass us by this week so we may have an opportunity to shoot an outdoor match this coming weekend. We will see how that goes though because you never know what the weather will do here in Colorado. All you can do is keep your fingers crossed and hope that the weather goes in your favor.

In the mean time I will be busy loading ammo and getting my major match schedule figured out for the 2015 shooting season.

[Vanniek71]

I made it into the 2015 Area 2 match as well. I guess it filled up in less than 2 hours.

I was in the process of registering, had to attend to my kiddos, when I came back match was full!

Oh well more time to practice and actually get decent at shooting!

[Richc2048]

I made it into the 2015 Area 2 match as well. I guess it filled up in less than 2 hours.

I was in the process of registering, had to attend to my kiddos, when I came back match was full!

Oh well more time to practice and actually get decent at shooting!

There were a lot of people caught off guard by how early it filled up. I'm sorry to hear you didn't make it. There are members of the range that are very disappointed in how they didn't get in and are on the wait list. They had some server glitches I guess. I entered something wrong when I tried to submit and the site wouldn't let me re-apply. I had to go back to the page to register and enter everything in again (correctly this time) to register. I think a lot of people got hosed because they didn't manually hit the refresh button to gain access to the site. It pulled up the site from their cookies and the error was still in the memory of the page.

[Vanniek71]

I'm just glad to see that an event like this is so much in demand. Sucks I didn't get in but great that this match is in such high demand!

Next year I'll have to make sure im all over it.

[CHA-LEE]

I have had a lot of people ask me about my neck/arm situation so I wanted to post an update. Currently I am not in pain and have full range of motion in my neck without causing more pain or discomfort. This is the good news. If I continued to be in pain I would have to go under the knife to get the ruptured disk removed. Not needing to go under the knife is a very good thing.

The bad news is that I still have numbness in my left thumb, forearm, and triceps. Along with the numbness I still have significant gripping and twisting strength loss in my left hand. My left hand grip strength has leveled out at the 125 – 130lb range, which is still way off from where it was before the injury. Most of November I didn’t try to work out my left arm to regain strength as I just wanted to take it easy and let it heal some more. Right now, it “Feels” like I have regained additional muscle control over my left arm so I am not sure if the current weakness is due to the muscles having atrophied due to being out of commission for a couple of months. It could still be that the weakness is still due to the muscles not getting the commands to move. I have restarted my daily grip and twisting exercises and that should help rebuild the atrophied muscles if that is the current issue. I will stick to this exercise program for a month and reassess my left hand strength level then. But I think that a certain level of grip/twisting strength in my left arm will forever be gone. How much I really won’t know until more time passes.

It sucks to have a sustained injury like this, but it is what it is. Since I have been shooting while in this weakened left arm state my body seems to be readjusting my grip pressure as needed to allow me to shoot and manage the recoil properly. I really don’t notice it as an issue much when shooting with a normal two handed grip. But it’s pretty obvious at how weak my left arm is when I am forced to shoot weak hand only. Hopefully I will get a lot closer to “Normal” left arm strength once the 2015 major match shooting season starts up in February.

[CHA-LEE]

This past weekend was an interesting mix of practice and match shooting. I am still in the “Break In” mode on the new full bull Limited gun and have about 1000 rounds down the pipe. After the last round of tweaks the gun has run flawlessly for the last 500 rounds so I think we have it tuned up the way it needs to be. I did a full tear down and inspection after the 1000 rounds and everything is looking great. I still need to put a lot more error free rounds down range before I fully “Trust” this new blaster, but so far it’s looking like a solid performer. I used it exclusively this weekend during my practice session on Saturday and the local club match on Sunday. I am going to continue to use this new blaster for several more practice sessions and matches until I feel 100% confident in its reliability. In the meantime I am going to tear down my other Full Bull Limited gun so it can get the bare parts coated. I am going to do a mixture of cerakote colors on it with the slide being sniper grey and the frame/grip being burnt bronze. I think that color combination will look pretty cool and more importantly it will keep it from rusting. When I get it all done I will take some pictures and post it up.

On Saturday there wasn’t a local USPSA match so I wrangled up some shooting buddies and we went out to the range to do some stage based practice. The weather was kind of cold in the mid 40’s and overcast but it was windy so it made it feel a lot colder than it really was. Regardless of the weather we setup a large field course stage and had a lot of fun shooting it many times and in different ways. I was more focused on getting rounds through the new gun than anything else to see if it would have issues. As reported before, it ran error free over about 300 rounds in practice. One of my buddies noticed that my strong arm/hand movement as I was exiting a shooting position was placing the gun dangerously close to breaking the 180 while I was aggressively pumping my arm to leave the position. I was dropping the gun too low during the arm pumping movement and changing it up to keep my arm high and using a punching straight forward motion to exit resulted in a totally pointed down range pointing of the gun during the movement. I need to do some dry and live fire practice to burn in this new arm position/motion so I can keep from sending myself home early for making a stupid mistake during a match. Practicing in the colder weather was a good test of “Cold Hand” shooting skills. Everyone was whining about being stiff or having frozen fingers that lead to inconsistent shooting or movement. It was interesting to see how much the cold temp affected the other shooters. It really didn’t affect my shooting performance too much. I had a couple of bump fire shots due to my trigger finger being stiff during recoil, but other than that I was fine.

On Sunday I attended a Local USPSA match at the Aurora Gun Club. For whatever reason the majority of the stages had a stand & shoot with heavy accuracy bias so there wasn’t too much shooting on the move or unloading lead in a fury. On the first stage of the day, I had a hell of a time tracking the front sight and it was returning inconsistently in the notch. About half way through the stage I remembered that I wasn’t gripping hard with my left hand and then the front sight was tracking properly. But by that point the damage was already done and I had racked up a couple of D zone hits and a miss. This failure to grip the gun hard with my left hand was a strange thing to do after not needing to think about doing it for a while. The rest of the stages I consciously told myself to grip hard with my left hand and everything went well. I nicked a no shoot on another stage and that sucked, but it is what it is. This match had a crap ton of hard cover or no shoots on every single stage so ending up with a couple of shooting penalties wasn’t a surprise. Overall I felt that I shot fairly solid. The match results have not been posted yet so I am not sure how I finished overall. The only real competition at the match for overall finish was a handful of Master class Open shooters so it will be interesting to see how the results turned out. The long and tight shots on all of the stages were really biased in the favor of the Open shooters so it should be a close race for HOA. We will see how it ends up once the results are posted.

[Richc2048]

I don't know if I was "whining" about the weather. Just saying the current temperature repeatedly and using that as a reason of why I was sucking.

That was awesome to practice with great shooters. I got a lot of good info/ advice and saw how it can be done! Thanks for the invite!

[CHA-LEE]

I was able to shoot two matches this weekend even though the weather took a turn for the worse on Sunday. On Saturday I went out to the CRC USPSA match and helped setup in the morning. The weather was suppose to get into the low 60’s that day and it did in the middle of the day, but most of the day it was overcast. I was shooting the new Full/Bull limited gun to get some more rounds through it to prove reliability and I am glad to report that it functioned flawlessly. Me functioning properly on the other hand was a totally different story. I performed pretty poorly at this match. Some of it was due to the overcast lighting conditions where I couldn’t stay focused on my sights, some of it was due to the trigger being slightly different in the pull weight and characteristics, but most of it was that I simply wasn’t there mentally. I had good runs and some bad runs mixed in with some bad luck. Overall it was a pretty sucky match for me with way too many shooting penalties or mental errors.

Since a snow front was moving in Sunday morning the Pueblo outdoor match was canceled and the Boulder match was restricted to their indoor range. So faced with the choice of not shooting or shooting indoors I decided to go to the Boulder match and shoot their indoor match. This consisted of 3 stages that we got to shoot twice. I decided to run the primary Full/Bull gun this time as I didn’t want to deal with the different trigger feel during the match. My goal was to attempt to redeem myself after the Saturday suck show, but those hopes were shattered once the buzzer went off on the first stage. The three stages in this match were heavily accuracy biased and that combined with super crappy lighting resulted in me not being able to see my sights at all. This turned out to be a super frustrating day of shooting because I was basically forced to point shoot the whole time because seeing my sights in the crappy lighting wasn’t going to happen. Needless to say trying to point shoot no shoot blocked partial shots resulted in a crap ton of miss/no shoot hits. I completely zeroed two of the three stages on the first go around. On the second go around changed up my stage plans to get closer to the targets while still point shooting and this resulted in better hits, but I still racked up 40 penalty points through all of the stages. This match had 23 targets total and 11 of them were head shots that were mostly surrounded by no shoots. The rest of the targets had the bodies exposed but either had hard cover or no shoots on them. Why the match staff would choose this level of shooting difficulty given that we are shooting in “dungeon” level lighting, I have no idea. But it is their match to run. Nobody shot a clean match so I can’t really whine too much about not getting my hits. I just have to come to terms with not having the physical ability to see my sights in these kind of lighting conditions.

With both matches over the weekend being a bust from a performance perspective it was a frustrating time at the range. Sometimes it goes your way, and sometimes it doesn’t. This was just one of those weekends where it didn’t go my way. I need to brush it off and move past it mentally. I am going to head down to the Whistling Pines indoor match tonight and hopefully things go better there. The lighting isn’t optimal, but its way better than the lighting at the boulder range.

From a gear perspective I have decided that the new Full/Bull Limited gun has proven its reliability and I have taken it apart so it can get some Cerakote on it. I am going to get the slide done in Sniper Grey and do the frame and grip in Burnt Bronze. It should look pretty cool when it’s all done. If it turns out the way I like it, I will get the primary 2011 done in the same color setup. That will give me two 2011 “Twins” for the 2015 shooting season.

Edited December 15, 2014 by CHA-LEE

[CHA-LEE]

I attended the Whistling Pines indoor match last night and had a decent match. The lighting was good so I could see my sights, I was mentally “There” so I could execute my stage plans properly, and I shot pretty solid. It’s nice to have a decent match performance after the back to back train wreck performances during the weekend. We shot four stages that night and most of it was up close blasting type of stuff with a bunch of scrambling around to different shooting boxes or shooting areas. I had one miss for the match and that was during a standards stage that had some strong hand only shooting. I mashed the crap out of the trigger on one of the shots and called the shot a clear miss low left but the stage was Virginia Count so I couldn’t make up the shot. It sucked to have a miss, but it was nice to be able to call the miss because I could actually see my sights. Hopefully I am back in the normal swing of things. I was also able to deploy the different “Gun High” strong arm movement during a couple of the stage runs so that was good as well.

This coming Saturday I have to setup and run the local HPPS match that I am in charge of. The weather forecast is a little sketchy at this point with the high temp in the mid 40’s so it may end up being a little too cold to host a match. But this is Colorado and it is too far out to really know what the weather will be until we get closer to the weekend. That is the double edged sward of Colorado weather. It could end up being a lot better than expected or a lot worse. I hope it works out because we have 6 fun stages planned for the match.

[CHA-LEE]

I got my backup Full/Bull Limited blaster back from RHF after a fresh Cerakote finish done on the Slide, Frame, Grip, and Magwell. The Slide was done using the Graphite Black color and the rest was done using the Burnt Bronze color. This is the H Series of coatings so it should be durable and long lasting. I think it turned out really nice. I really like the two tone look of it with the Silver controls and beaver tail. I am going to get the primary Full/Bull Limited blaster done exactly the same way so I have “Twins”.

All I have to do now with the backup gun is get it sighted in again after removing the sights for the coating process. Hopefully I can get some time this weekend to get it sighted in.

[BritinUSA]

That looks awesome !

[drewbeck]

The polished "whale tale" looks even bigger next to the finished grip! Looks awesome, did he coat the inside of the grip and magwell? If he did I'll be interested to see how it wears on the aluminum magwell whether it dents, scratches, or chips, with reloads.

Did you get the basepads done also?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[CHA-LEE]

I had him leave the inside of the grip bare so it wouldn't cause any magazine friction issues. We did fully coat the inside and outside of the magwell. Since it is aluminum it will get nicked up with use. No coating is going to keep that from happening.

[CHA-LEE]

I didn't do the base pads because they are aluminum and would get nicked up and look pretty bad in no time with being dropped all the time.

[thermobollocks]

You're going to have to post "after" photos in December of 2015 so we see how it holds up

[BeerBaron]

Nice. I'm not sure if you're conscious of this but that colour scheme is just like the tanfoglio stock 3 extreme. Something of a link to the past.

Edited December 22, 2014 by BeerBaron

[Smitty79]

Cha-lee, What would you recommend to help someone,just starting to shoot 40% classifiers, call shots at speed.