Richc2048 Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I like the look of your black slide and burnt bronze frame. Looks tough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatJones Posted April 2, 2015 Share Posted April 2, 2015 Charlie from what I've seen in the shop, I'd want IonBond on the slide and NP3 on the frame. The NP3 is really slippery stuff, I wouldn't want it on my slide. It's electroless nickel impregnated with Teflon. It feels slippery to the touch, so a 2011 with it's separate grip is perfect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thermobollocks Posted April 2, 2015 Share Posted April 2, 2015 The nitride Sig uses is fairly resilient and non-slip. Plus, it makes your gun look like Batman. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 I like the look of your black slide and burnt bronze frame. Looks tough. It does look cool. I might stick with that color scheme even though it wears off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 Charlie from what I've seen in the shop, I'd want IonBond on the slide and NP3 on the frame. The NP3 is really slippery stuff, I wouldn't want it on my slide. It's electroless nickel impregnated with Teflon. It feels slippery to the touch, so a 2011 with it's separate grip is perfect. I am leery of the Electroless Nickel as I did a slide with that a few years back and it immediately started showing wear with very little holster work. It may be slippery, but if it wears off easily then what is the point? The decision on coating choice really comes down to time and cost. IonBond would probably cost $350 - $400 and take 6 - 8 Weeks to get done. Hard Chrome will cost $100 and takes 1 week to get done. The Cerakote costs about the same as the Hard Chrome and the time line depends on how busy Rick is with his skiing schedule If I could get the IonBond done in only a couple of weeks it would be a done deal. But I don't want to have this blaster out of commission for 6 - 8 weeks just to get coated. The last time I sent something off for IonBond coating (Some iron sights) it took 13 weeks to get done. That is a retarded amount of time to wait for something to get coated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 The nitride Sig uses is fairly resilient and non-slip. Plus, it makes your gun look like Batman. BatPanda Blaster...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stician Posted April 2, 2015 Share Posted April 2, 2015 (edited) Where is a hard chrome place that is one week? The plating place Cheely uses is 6-8 weeks. Black Nitride shows wear too but so far my hard chrome finish is not wearing. I use a DAA Race master and the bottom leading edge of my frame wears against the aluminum on the holster. Maybe kydex is more forgiving. Edited April 2, 2015 by Stician Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 Where is a hard chrome place that is one week? The plating place Cheely uses is 6-8 weeks. Black Nitride shows wear too but so far my hard chrome finish is not wearing. I use a DAA Race master and the bottom leading edge of my frame wears against the aluminum on the holster. Maybe kydex is more forgiving. There is a local industrial metal finishing place here in Denver that does Hard Chrome. The turn around time is usually less than one week. Not needing to ship it anywhere saves a lot of time. This place in Denver also requires that you disassemble the gun and prep the surface as you want (Polish, sand blast, etc) before getting it to them. So all they have to do is throw the stuff in the plating soak tank. Them not needing to prep or disassemble your gun saves a lot of time as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 From what I understand for the "Ship it out" type of coatings that most gunsmiths do, the majority of the delay is them sitting on the guns and parts until they have a sufficient quantity of stuff to get coated at the same time to save the cost. Every coating company has a minimum charge for "Tank Time" and its in the best interest of the people getting stuff coated to fill the tank up to spread out that minimum charge as much as possible. This is exactly what happened to me when I had to wait 13 weeks to get some sights IonBonded. The Gunsmith sat on the parts until he had a sufficient amount of stuff to send in at the same time. If I would have known that up front, I would have gone another rout. But some times you have to learn the lessons the hard way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thermobollocks Posted April 2, 2015 Share Posted April 2, 2015 ....Hydro dip it Resilience factor: ???% Boss factor: 200% Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 Hydro Dipping does look super cool, but is mega weak sauce from a durability perspective. That and the coating is SUPER THICK so it will jack up all the parts fitting tolerances. Hydro Dipping a holster or mag pouches would work great. A tightly fitted 2011, not so much. That and a Kydex holster would OWN that coating in about 25 draws, so it would look like a dookie rocket pretty quickly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thermobollocks Posted April 2, 2015 Share Posted April 2, 2015 Then you start with the dookie rocket pattern Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 2, 2015 Author Share Posted April 2, 2015 Then you start with the dookie rocket pattern Run with that project on one of your blasters and report back with the results Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 5, 2015 Author Share Posted April 5, 2015 No match on Saturday so I went out and got some live fire practice in with friends. I wanted to give my new blaster a go and had some good and bad results. The good is that it ran for about 100 rounds without any drama. The bad is that the point of impact is still about an inch low at 10 yards. I hoped that the .180 tall front sight would be short enough, but it isn’t. I took a file to it while at the range and ground it down to a .170 but that still wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to grind it any lower as it would have started to get into the fiber hole. Using a .160 tall front sight is no good as its too short and I see too much of the slide at the bottom of the sight with my deep rear notch. So I will need to get a taller fixed rear sight and go from there. Either way I shot this blaster for about 100 rounds doing the practice stage several times and it functioned flawlessly. I kept having to completely cover the small plates to take them down so I decided to put the new blaster away for the day as I didn’t want to build any bad “Steel Aiming” habits. I am already battling trying to pick an aiming spot for the steel and don’t need to add any more confusion to the mix. I put the new blaster away and broke out my tried and true primary gun. I fiddled on the trigger some more with the Primary so I wanted to make sure that it was still going to work and not hammer follow. We setup a large 34 round field course with 10 pieces of steel (Plates & Poppers). This was a position to position type of stage with lots of hard aiming required. I ran the stage three times with my new blaster, then switched to my Primary blaster. The first three runs were filled with misses on steel because I wasn’t aiming high enough. After switching to the Primary and aiming in the “Normal” place on the plates I could hit them pretty good. We ran this 34 round field course about 6 times then switched it up to a slightly different configuration. I shot the different configuration of the stage two times and on my second run my Primary gun failed at the end of the run. The slide wouldn’t cycle after breaking the shot. I could get it to unlock and cycle back if I pushed down on the hood of the barrel so I knew there was a barrel link issue. I took the gun to the safe area and sure enough the barrel link had broken in half in the middle of the smaller hole that attaches to the barrel. This is the first barrel link failure that I have experienced myself so it was odd. I don’t have too many rounds on this primary gun, maybe 15,000 so it’s a premature failure for sure. When I got home to check it out I didn’t see anything odd that would attribute to it failing and the lower barrel lugs are carrying the weight of the lockup. I had Rick check it out and he was puzzled by the failure as well. Maybe it was just a bad link? We put a new link in it and double checked the lockup to see if it was still good. Everything checked out so it “Should Be” back in action. I didn’t get a chance to test fire it so I really don’t know if it’s going to work or not. I will find out tomorrow at the match. I will see if I can get some test blasting done with it before the start of the match to make sure that it actually still works and the bullets are going where they are intended to go. I will bring by backup gun just in case the drama continues. Either way, this type of failure is exactly why I need three blasters to leverage. There will probably always be a primary, one that is broken or has just been fixed but not fully tested, and a viable backup that is known and proven to work well. This puts more importance on getting the new blaster running and proven functional before the busy summer major match schedule starts. Hopefully I can get the new gun flushed out and proven solid by the end of the month. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 6, 2015 Author Share Posted April 6, 2015 I attended the Aurora match on Sunday and the weather was great. We are finally settling into spring and it’s awesome to shoot in decent weather without freezing. I didn’t get a chance to test fire my primary blaster before the start of the match to test out the new link but I figured it was a club match and I would just wing it. The gun functioned great the whole match. I think the link may be too short and that is what caused it to fail. Further fiddling and testing will be needed to get that figured out. I don’t want a situation where I am feeding links to this thing every 15K – 20K. I shot the match pretty solid on all but one stage. One of the stages was a lateral movement setup with every single target having some hard cover or no shoots on it. It was laid out in a way that had you traversing the full width of the berm and you could choose to stand and blast from several different locations or try to shoot the difficult partial shots on the move. These difficult partial targets were just outside of my shooting on the move comfort zone but I figured I would give it a go. I failed to take notice that the targets were also in the shadows and this made calling my shots more difficult than normal. I shot the stage on the move and racked up 2 misses and one no shoot. Both of the misses were on the same head shot and I sent three rounds at it and barely missed all three shots. One hit was just outside the perf on the left side of the head and the other two hits were only about 2mm below the head in the black. The no shoot was entering the final position too bouncy and I broke a shot as I was stepping hard and bounced the gun down into the no shoot as I broke the shot. My stage time on this was about 13.5 seconds and would have been a fairly decent run if I wouldn’t have racked up all of the shooting penalties. I decided to shoot the stage again for fun from three stationary positions and haul ass between positions. This resulted in all solid hits and a time of 12.5. Once again I proved to myself that in these type of stage scenarios stationary shooting positions yields better hits and a faster time. Verses poking away at the targets slowly on the move and still not hitting them. The rest of my stage runs were pretty solid. I wasn’t burning anything down, but not wasting too much time either. Other than the one stage I screwed up by trying to shoot it on the move, I was happy with my performance. It was fun shooting with friends and the weather was great. I am looking forward to settling into the summer shooting schedule. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 7, 2015 Author Share Posted April 7, 2015 Last night I shot the Whistling Pines indoor match down in Colorado Springs. They had four fun stages that tested aiming hard and blasting super fast. These stages seemed to be eating everyone’s lunch as they were either not aiming enough on the hard shots or trigger freezing on the fast blasting stuff. I took my time to ensure my hits on the difficult shots and did my best to relax and let the lead flow at whatever speed it wanted to on the fast shooting stuff. Overall it worked out good and I didn’t have any shooting penalties or D hits. The only issue I had during the match was on the classifier during my reloads. On the first reload I pinched my finger between the magwell and base pad. Then on the second reload my grip was slightly off and I couldn’t reach the mag release button until I shifted my hand. Both of these issues are pure gun handling issues that I need to fix in dry fire. The good news is that the primary gun continues to run with the new barrel link so that issue should be resolved. Rick is working on the sights for the new gun so hopefully he will have that done and ready for me to test out this coming weekend. The blaster fiddling never ends. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thermobollocks Posted April 7, 2015 Share Posted April 7, 2015 That match really showed that the difference between 60% and 90% on a stage was refraining from screwing up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 13, 2015 Author Share Posted April 13, 2015 This past weekend was another busy one. I did some training for a shooter on Saturday which was fun. It’s always cool to see the “Light Bulb” go on when they discover a new skill or way of doing things. I got a chance to do a little bit of shooting that day but not too much. I double checked the sight in of the new gun after the raising of the rear sight. At 15 yards the point of impact was now 1 – 2 inches high, so the .180 tall front sight is now too short. I need to put the .200 tall front sight back on it to see where if that brings the point of impact back down to where it should be. My next big match is the Texas State Open in a couple of weeks and the match director sent out an e-mail stating that one of the stages would have some 40 yard plates. It’s been a while since I did any steel plate work at that distance so I set that up on Saturday at the end of the training to see where I needed to aim on the plate to get hits. I used some of the smaller 6x6 inch square plates which are tuff shots at normal distances to make it about as painful as it could be for the match. I found that I had to aim slightly above the plate where my sight picture was obscuring the whole plate to hit them consistently. Using an aiming process of coving the whole plate is disconcerting so I tried using a sight alignment where my front sight was high and used a 6 O’Clock hold on the plate. I could see the plates in this sight picture but I couldn’t consistently replicate the front sight high sight picture. I scrapped that idea and went back to the normal sight alignment and covering the whole plate sight picture and my hits got a lot better. I was never able to shoot them one for one which was frustrating, but I could at least hit them. I am going to set this up again next weekend and do some more work on it after the Saturday match. On Sunday I attended the local USPSA match down in Pueblo. The weather was great but I had a little bit of a mental fog at the start of the match. I didn’t drink any coffee that morning so I am thinking that is what did it. I ended up being the first shooter up on the first stage of the day which was a classifier and I was still in a fog. I did some stretching and run around the stage right before shooting it to at least get my physical body loosened up and ready to rumble. I shot the stage clean, but it felt like I wasn’t at 100% alertness which lead to some slower than normal shooting. I battled this slight mental fog through the first three stages of the match. The second stage of the match I shot it aggressively but had an uncalled miss. Then on the third stage I had a huge mental error in doing an extra reload during the stage run which wasted time on the standards type of stage. The last three stages I shot pretty solid and finished the match strong. I ended up with 1 D zone hit for the match and 1 miss. But the really bad thing is that I shot the steel like total crap. I had too many extra shots because I was blasting at “White” instead of picking an aiming spot on the steel like I should be. I blame this on my mental fog during the match and reverting back to my old habits. I am blaming my mental fog on being a little too tired from staying up too late the night before and not taking enough caffeine in the morning to fully wake up. The good thing is that I kept well hydrated during the match which allowed me to eventually snap out of the mental fog by the middle of the match. After the match I got a chance to test out the new blaster with the .200 tall front sight and the point of impact was right were it should be at 15 Yards. I am glad to get the sight heights figured out, but now Rick has to weld up another rear sight to make it work properly. The current rear sight has some welding pockets on the front surface which are distracting to look at while shooting. So he is going to weld up another one to the same dimensions as the test one to make it perfect. Once the new rear sight is done this new blaster should be 100% ready to rumble for some serious break in shooting and testing. It probably won’t be ready for prime time until next month. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 20, 2015 Author Share Posted April 20, 2015 The weather gods worked against us here in Colorado this past week and weekend. We had a decent rain/snow storm for 3 – 4 days straight leading up into the weekend. This turned the outdoor ranges into a muddy mess which lead to the canceling of the local club matches. It sucks to not be able to shoot any club matches this past weekend, but it’s better than slopping around in the cold muddy range conditions. Since the local matches were canceled I decided to focus on reloading ammo as I have been putting that off for a while. I was able to get about 4,000 rounds loaded and quality checked over the weekend so that will keep me going for a while. Spending that much time behind the press wasn’t fun, but a necessary evil. On Saturday afternoon I was able to do a little bit of shooting at an indoor range with a co-worker that is getting into pistol shooting. I used that opportunity to bust out my M&P .45 that serves as my home self defense blaster. We had a fun time blasting at the indoor range, mostly shooting groups and basic shooting stuff like that. My M&P .45 ran like a well oiled machine and was fun to shoot as well. I should break that thing out more often. Having the weekend “off” from club matches due to the poor was a bummer but it comes with the territory this time of year. I am heading out to the Texas State Open match this coming Friday so I am looking forward to that. They have been getting a lot of rain down there and there is more rain in the forecast this week. The Match Director said to bring your “Rain Gear” just in case. I will bring my rain/mug gear but I hope that this match doesn’t turn into a mud bog match. Slopping around in the mud all day long over the weekend does not sound like too much fun. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and hope that the range conditions are not super crappy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkCO Posted April 20, 2015 Share Posted April 20, 2015 Was in Texas this past weekend...some gully washers every day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 20, 2015 Author Share Posted April 20, 2015 Was in Texas this past weekend...some gully washers every day. Bummer...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CHA-LEE Posted April 27, 2015 Author Share Posted April 27, 2015 This past weekend I headed down to Houston Texas to attend the Texas Open match. I got there on Friday to check out the stages and the match staff was shooting the match and reported that they were shooting in the rain during the morning stages. Evidence of the rain could be seen everywhere in the form of mud. By the time I got there the shooting areas in the stages were fairly dry so I didn’t have to muck around in the mud to check out the stages. All of the stages looked fun to shoot and had several choices in how to tackle them. I figured out some solid stage plans and then headed to my hotel to get ready for shooting the next day. Saturday morning I was woken up by a loud thunder clap and the sound of pouring rain just outside my door. I took a peek out the window and sure enough a full force down pour was confirmed. I was glad that I brought my rain/mud gear as it was going to be needed that day for sure. I drove to the range in the rain and waited in my rental car to see if they were going to delay the start of the match until the rain at least stopped. Well the rain didn’t stop by 8AM and the match director said that we had to start shooting at 8AM so that is what we did. The first stage of the day wasn’t actually too bad from a traction perspective as it was still fairly watery verses sloppy mud. By the second stage the dirt in the shooting areas had been effectively churned into thick heavy mud that stuck to everything. My Salomon Speed Cross 3 CS shoes did awesome in keeping the water and mud off of my feet inside the shoe, which was awesome. But the aggressive cleats quickly clogged with sticky mud making each foot gain at least 10 pounds of extra mud weight. Mud on Mud traction isn’t very good and you had to be careful in how aggressive you ran around the stages or changed directions. We lost one of our shooters on the first stage of the day due to slipping, falling and breaking the 180 while falling. That was a bummer, but a sobering reminder of how slippery the conditions were. I did my best to navigate the stages without slipping but it was a hard not to. I had a few slipping and sliding moments but nothing too bad. The extra weight on my shoes was a lot more distracting than anything else. It made shooting on the move a lot harder because it was nearly impossible to take steps smoothly without clomping around like Frankenstein or slipping because you were being too aggressive. I changed a couple of my stage plans from shooting on the move to stationary positions to minimize the risk of falling down or getting misses as I tried to shoot on the move. By the third stage of the match the rain had stopped for the day and the sun came out which was welcomed. But it took until the 6th stage of the match for the shooting area’s to dry up enough to keep the mud from sticking to your shoes. We were supposed to shoot 8 stages on Saturday then four more on Sunday. Since the weather forecast for Sunday was looking sketchy as well, the match staff directed everyone to try to shoot all of the staged on Saturday if we could get it done. My squad kept chugging along and got through all of the stages. But I was running out of gas both mentally and physically by the time we had two stages remaining. I didn’t bring enough food or water as I didn’t plan on shooting all of the stages that day so I had pretty much screwed myself. My last two stages of the match were not that solid, had some issues, but were not complete train wrecks. I survived!!!! Holly COW I was beat by the end of that day. Slogging around in the mud all day long then shooting in the 90 degree heat had really whipped my ass. Needless to say, I slept like the dead that evening. Since I had shot all of the stages I could sleep in the next morning and head to the range just before lunch time. When I got to the range there were only a few shooters still completing their final few stages and I pitched in and help tape and set steel so they could focus on shooting. It was really overcast and threatening to rain some more so the shooters were all motivated to get the stages done before the rain started again. We waited for the scores to be tallied and awards ceremony to start so I spent that down time reviewing my stage run videos and editing them. I squaded with my buddy Brandon DuBois and he filmed all of my stage runs. He did an awesome job with the videos as I barely had to do any editing. Thanks a TON Brandon for the video help!!! I have uploaded all of my stage runs on my YouTube channel if you want to check out the muddy mess. Once all of the scores were tallied I had won HOA in Limited. I was worried about how I would do given shooting in the rugged conditions, but I guess everyone else had their own battles with it as well. For Winning Limited division I won a Springfield XDs pistol which was cool and unexpected. Instead of me taking the pistol home I decided to donate it to the High Junior in Limited. It felt a lot more rewarding to me to give the XDs to the High Limited Junior, verses bring another pistol home that will just sit in the back of my safe. That and we have to keep these Juniors interested in the shooting sports as they are the future. Hopefully someday many years from now he will be able to do the same for another Junior shooter. Now it’s time to rest and recover from this exhausting weekend of shooting……. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ogiebb Posted April 27, 2015 Share Posted April 27, 2015 Congrats on the HOA Win Charlie and Kudos for donating your winning to the Juniors Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkCO Posted April 27, 2015 Share Posted April 27, 2015 Congrats, Awesome donation too. Guess Texas was the place to be this weekend. 5 majors in the state. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frunkenstein Posted April 28, 2015 Share Posted April 28, 2015 I represent that "Frankenstein" remark. Very cool to give the High Junior the pistola. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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