I did a fair amount of shooting and reloading this last month. I have a big backlog of match reports to do. Not sure if I will get around to all of them but the reloading report is quick and easy.
I only reloaded .40 S&W. Last month my total .40 reloads were 46549 rounds. So I reloaded 1899 rounds. There was one primer that got mangled otherwise it would have been an even 1900 rounds. 1099 of those rounds were with The Blue Bullets for steel matches. The other 800 rounds were with 180 grain Montana Gold JHPs for practice at indoor ranges. Montana Bullet has a, “Mix And Match Promo” on cases of bullets going on right now if you are interested.
For those of you who might considering participating here are the details:
Match starts: June 18, 2016 @ 8:00 AM · Match ends: June 18, 2016 @ 6:00 PM
Location: Ephrata,WA,98848
The annual steel shoot is here! Come join us for 8 stages of steel targets that will be set in arrays that will entertain and challenge you. As in previous years this will be a trophy match with trophies through at least third in each category and division. Lunch will be catered in and is included in the match fee. Shooters fees are $60 for the first gun and $20 for the second. Juniors (under 18) shoot for $30 for the first gun and $20 for the second. Register early, we sold out last year!
General match, with the following divisions: Ladies, Juniors, Senior(55-64), super senior(65+), defender
It is one of the most fun and enjoyable shooting events you can attend in the world.
LRRPF52 Message posted on AR15.com on March 2, 2016. [He was referring to Boomershoot. I haven’t attended enough different types of shooting events to confirm this but I’m willing to entertain the hypothesis. You should attend next year to test this hypothesis for yourself.—Joe]
I have often wondered about the polymer tipped bullets from various manufactures. I have read of people seeing wisps of lead on paper targets that apparently came from lead tipped bullets that melted in flight. If the heat at the tip of a bullet can melt lead then the type of plastic used for bullet tips needs some serious consideration. But, I figured the bullet manufacturers knew a lot more about this than I did and had it all under control.
the Hornady engineers observed a convex hump form when charting the new bullet’s drag. The hump was relatively small and usually occurred within the first 100 to 200 yards of flight, and following the hump the drag curve returned to its expected concave climb and drop. The irregularity may have been small and short-lived, but the shift from concave to convex, and back again, seen on the Cd vs. Mach Number graphs could only have one explanation: The bullet itself was changing shape in flight.
It did not take long for the Hornady team to realize it was not the whole bullet changing shape, only the non-metal component—the polymer tip.
The solution, of course, was to find a new polymer:
New polymers were tried and tested, and one was found that met the company’s criteria. With the new material, the Heat Shield Tip was born. Molded as precisely and consistently as previous polymer tips, the Heat Shield Tip boasts glass transition and melting points hundreds of degrees greater than the previous generation’s—475° F and more than 700° F, respectively.
This resulted in higher ballistic coefficients (BCs) which translates into less windage and drop.
My favorite bullet for .30 caliber long range shooting has been the Berger 210 grain VLD bullet. It has a G1 BC of .621. The Hornady 30 Cal .308 208 gr ELD™ Match bullet has a BC of 0.670. From 700 yards away with a .300 Win Mag with Boomershoot conditions this increases the velocity by 60 fps and decreases the drop by 2.6 inches. This isn’t enough of a difference to throw away my existing bullets but I think this is what I’m probably going to replace them with.
Barb is a very happy person and expresses this in many different ways. One of the ways is that she makes funny sounds at various times.
She works from home nearly all the time and sometimes when she “commutes” from the bathroom to her desk in the bedroom 15 feet away she will make sounds. Along with the hand motions of driving a car she will make sounds like, “Putt, putt, putt…”.
Yesterday she was kneeling on the floor next to a dresser as I was about to walk past. The area was a little tight for her kneeling at the same time I was walking through and as she shuffled back to get out of my way she started making the sounds of a truck backing up, “Beep! Beep! Beep!…”.
I couldn’t tell you how many different sound effects she has implemented. I just know they all make me smile and laugh. But I do know my favorite so far.
Last night she told me that sometime during the day she put on her holster and was practicing drawing and dry firing as it was suggested in class and the sounds sometimes just spontaneously came out during the practice session. The sounds? It was that of the spurs she imagined she was wearing, “Ching! Ching!”
When you put your crosshairs on a small little target 400-700yds away, break the shot, and feel the earth shudder under you, your pants start to get kinda tight…
It should be obvious that choosing ammo carefully is important. But I hold the opinion that what we carry and shoot in a crisis has a lesser importance than how well we shoot it. In the final analysis, we are all pre-occupied with the wrong ammunition. We should be far more concerned about the ammo we did not fire in practice sessions that precede the day we have to shoot for real.
I attended the Steel Challenge match at the Renton and Fish and Game Club today. I’m moderately satisfied. I was first in Iron Sighted Pistol (ISP). But there were only three of us in that division. I came in 5th out of 13 in Rim Fire Pistol Iron (RFPI) sighted. I had two jams with the rim fire pistol. I called mulligan with one of them and got to shoot that string over. I was 12 seconds down from the next higher scoring shooter. The four shooters above me are all in the super squad of junior shooters who won nationals last year so I don’t feel bad getting beat by them. They are out of my league.
Compared to last month my ISP time went from 91.41 seconds to 78.37 seconds. I was shooting the reduced power Blue Bullets which almost for certain accounted for some of the improvement.
Comparing my RFPI time to last month I went from 64.47 seconds to 66.19 seconds. This difference is in the noise because we were shooting different courses of fire. These differences will easily account for the differences in time.
Steve, from work, showed up and watched the first stage we shot. He also took some great pictures of me. My favorite is this one:
Although there is one picture with brass in the air and another with the gun in recoil that are also pretty cool.
Today and tomorrow Barb is attending Insights General Defensive Handgun class. I’ve been teaching her how to shoot and she does well with basic shooting. She just got her holster on Thursday so I have not taught her much about the draw and only the basics of defensive shooting. But I think she is more than adequately prepared for the class:
Prerequisites:
CONCEALED WEAPONS PERMIT or documentation of good character AND BRING THOSE DOCUMENTS WITH YOU TO CLASS. You must be totally familiar and comfortable with your handgun. If you have never shot before or wonder how your gun works we recommend our Handgun Safety and Marksmanship class or our Basic Handgun Safety and Responsibility class.
Required Equipment:
Reliable, functional semi-automatic handgun; Belt holster (rigid) with sturdy belt; pants with belt loops; 600 rounds of brass-cased, FMJ ammunition (minimum); minimum of 2 magazines and a magazine pouch; Concealment clothing; Hearing and eye protection.
I think she may be a little bit nervous. She didn’t sleep particularly well last night and said she was thinking about the class a lot. But the clincher was that as she was just going out the door she noticed she was wearing her holster upside down.
The total for the year is 5196. For all of 2015 I reloaded 9531. I’m on track to reload about four times as many in 2016 as I did in 2015. I expect, at a minimum, I will exceed 80,000 rounds for my lifetime total.
Both Barb and I like the color blue. But that isn’t the reason I bought a bunch of The Blue Bullets:
I originally bought 250 of them last August because I saw someone else shooting them at a match and I checked out the price and found them to be a good value. I reloaded some and found they were essentially identical in terms of velocity for a given powder charge as other polymer bullets I have been using.
I have reloaded and shot thousands of polymer coated lead bullets. They were always accurate and probably most importantly, with no copper jacket, there is almost nothing coming back at the shooter, range officers, and spectators when shooting them at steel targets in good repair.
Previous to the Blue Bullets my most recent purchase of polymer coated bullets were about 10000 “Master Blaster” bullets I purchased in 2006 or 2007 just as they were going out of business. I have been shooting those in outdoor matches (the indoor ranges won’t let me shoot them) since then. I loaded up the last of those recently and was going to use The Blue Bullets to replace them.
But I got to thinking about it and decided I could use them a little differently. So I purchased a case of bullets from Black Bullets International to replace the Master Blaster bullets for USPSA matches. They are essentially the same price as The Blue Bullets but they are, as you might imagine, black in color like the Master Blaster bullets. All of my Master Blaster bullets are loaded to make major power factor for USPSA matches and I’ll continue to do that with bullets from Black Bullets International.
So what about The Blue Bullets?
I shoot a lot of steel matches. For Steel Challenge matches they don’t specific a minimum power factor (I thought it was 125, but I couldn’t find it online in their rules) for centerfire pistols. For The International Steel Association the rules say a minimum power factor of 120 is required. When I’m shooting USPSA matches I’m shooting ammo with a PF of 175 or more. I could switch to 9mm for steel matches as a lot of other people have done, but I decided to keep using .40 S&W and just make lighter loads. Remember the low recoil loads I was making for new shooters? I’m going to use those research results to give me a low recoil load for shooting steel. And to make it easy to identify which ammo I have in the magazines and ammo boxes I’m going to use The Blue Bullets exclusively for the low recoil loads.
Saturday Barb, Max, and I went to a steel match at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club on Whidbey Island. Just Max and I were shooting this time. This was the first time Max had ever shot in a match. I suspect Barb will try it sometime, but not yet.
The weather was better than last time but still not exactly warm. The ferry ride was pleasant with a nice view:
The weather was good enough that our friends Elizabeth, William, and Finn also came out to watch. William and Elizabeth have been telling me for months they were going to watch sometime and they finally made it. They live on the island only about a 10 or 15 minute drive from the gun club. It was Barb attending that made the difference. After the end of the match William shot Steve’s rifle on one stage just to see what an open class rifle is like. Then Elizabeth, William, and Finn checked out the rest of the range. The next day Elizabeth texted me:
We had fun yesterday! Actually considering a membership! Lol. Who knew?!?
Thanks again!
Ahhh yes… More people firmly on our side of the gun issue.
Here are Barb and Elizabeth (the quality sucks because it is a frame grab from my video glasses):
I have been having problems with the front sight on my STI DVC again (first time details). The plastic shim lasted several hundred rounds so then I got some “Liquid Metal” built up the base of the sight, sanded it down to where it was a tight fit, then used high strength, high temperature LockTite to hold it in place. That lasted for many months and many thousands of rounds. Then it fell off again last week. I tried just the LockTite. That lasted less than a hundred rounds. I then tried just the liquid metal, building up a layer on either side of the sight. That survived a couple hundred rounds at the practice range on Friday and survived the entirety of the Saturday match. Barb and I met some friends at the indoor range Saturday afternoon and the front sight slid way to the left on the first shot. At least it didn’t fail me while at the match.
Sunday I folded up aluminum foil, put it under the sight, such that it made for a tight fit and put LockTite between all the layers, on the base of the sight and on the sight groove. I haven’t taken it to the range for testing yet but will do that sometime this week. I want this problem permanently solved.
Two of the stages were very challenging and I lost a lot of time with my centerfire pistol on them. I did okay with rimfire despite having three failures to feed during the match.
The following stage is evil. You have to hit the white plate four times then hit the yellow plate once. If you miss the white plate and hit the yellow plate your shots stop counting for hits but they do count for time. Suppose your first shot is a miss on the white plate, hits the yellow plate then you continue to shoot the white plate four times, then the yellow plate for a total time of five seconds. You are scored for four misses with a penalty of three seconds per miss which gives you a time for that string of 5 + 12 => 17 seconds.
I had at least two strings with the centerfire gun and one rimfire gun string with penalties.
The stage below is not exactly easy either. The yellow swingers are for rimfire and the white swingers are for centerfire. The large yellow plate in the center is the stop plate. The two swingers must change side to count as a hit, and must be hit twice. The swingers are small and a centerfire swinger would sometimes change sides from the impact of the other plate changing sides. I lost a lot of time on the centerfire portion of this.
Of course the stages were different but I’m pretty sure my rimfire shooting is getting much better and I think the centerfire is better as long as I take enough time to get hits instead of something approximating “spray and pray”.
The forecast was for 100% chance of precipitation for every hour of the match at Renton today. Although the sun did break out for about 45 minutes of the hour from 12:00 to 1:00 the forecast was technically correct. They had canopies over the shooting areas, I wore a good hat, rain pants, and a waterproof coat so I stayed dry. But I didn’t wear warm enough clothes and I got rather chilled. And once I spent a few minutes in the car to warm up. Next time I’ll bring more clothing options.
I hadn’t practiced all this week and the first few stages I shot (my stage shooting order was 2, 3, 4, 1) demonstrated this.
Still, I had fun.
The Leprechaun
Final
Name
SCSA
Class
Division
Time
String 1
String 2
String 3
String 4
String 5
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
8
Huffman, Joe
29386
U
RFPI
13.53
5.01
3.93
3.36
3.24
3.00
15
Huffman, Joseph
U
ISP
18.99
7.08
3.94
3.55
4.71
6.00
4.42
Lucky Charms
Final
Name
SCSA
Class
Division
Time
String 1
String 2
String 3
String 4
String 5
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
13
Huffman, Joe
29386
U
RFPI
13.69
3.56
3.60
3.57
2.96
3.87
3.00
29
Huffman, Joseph
U
ISP
22.49
4.57
7.24
6.08
6.84
5.00
Renton Plate Rack
Final
Name
SCSA
Class
Division
Time
String 1
String 2
String 3
String 4
String 5
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
12
Huffman, Joe
29386
U
RFPI
17.65
5.07
3.64
4.41
4.90
4.70
18
Huffman, Joseph
U
ISP
24.35
8.05
5.46
6.85
6.34
5.70
Saving Ammo
Final
Name
SCSA
Class
Division
Time
String 1
String 2
String 3
String 4
String 5
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
Raw
P
17
Huffman, Joe
29386
U
RFPI
19.60
3.77
2.95
6.00
3.75
13.53
3.13
25
Huffman, Joseph
U
ISP
25.58
4.83
9.00
7.53
6.15
5.09
6.81
My guns worked well except for one failure to properly strip a round out of the magazine with my .22.
The guy or girl who holsters a .45, or a Beretta, or a Glock, or an M&P, or a Chief’s Special five-shot revolver, for that matter, and closes the book on pistol selection can get on to the more serious business of pistol training and practice. The principle resource that satisficing can buy you is time, which is the one resource you can’t buy or produce more of, and the one resource that is ever in short supply.
If during the time you were reading the latest “stopping power” article you were instead practicing to save your life you would be far, far ahead.
You should spend far more of your time and money budgets on training and practice than on your equipment. I know this is difficult and it’s easy to run down the equipment rabbit hole but try to avoid it.—Joe]
Powder: 3.9 grains of Bullseye
Primer: WSP
OAL: 1.132
10 shots over the chronograph from 10 feet away.
Minimum velocity: 814 fps
Maximum velocity: 864 fps
Mean velocity: 838.1 fps
Standard deviation: 15.5 fps
Power Factor: 150.86
The water filled milk jug test was to determine if the bullets would expand at this relatively low velocity. The 0.401 bullet expanded to just under 0.6 and retained nearly 99% of it’s mass:
This is very good.
Brother Doug was a little worried that with the lower velocity perhaps a non-expanding bullet would be better for self defense because of the better penetration. Would it penetrate deep enough to “do the job”? I didn’t have any ordinance gelatin but my guess is that it penetrates just fine. They fully traversed three one gallon milk jugs filled with water. This is just under 18 inches of water.
I didn’t expect it would penetrate that far and for my first shot I only used two jugs for depth and put one on each side of the rear jug in case the bullet didn’t go straight after hitting the first jug:
It fully penetrated the two jugs and I was unable to find the bullet in the berm.
The second time I changed the configuration to just three jugs lined up in a row:
Again the bullet penetrated all the jugs but I found the bullet just sitting on the ground behind the jugs.
I didn’t load quite as many rounds as I expected I would this month. I have about 400 practice rounds left over from the class I took and enough match ammo such that I’m not feeling any pressure.
Saturday I went to a steel match at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club on Whidbey Island. It was raining in Bellevue when I left home but as I got on the ferry the rain had stopped, the fog was lifting, and the cloud cover was breaking up. I had forgotten my coat and was extremely pleased with the change of weather.
As is usual the stages were well done and interesting:
My .22 worked well. I had one failure to feed but other than that it was great.
My STI DVC Limited gun broke the ejector and when I took the slide off to clean it Friday night the ejector fell on the floor. The front peg had broken off flush with the frame. I didn’t have a spare ejector so I ordered an ejector, ejector pin, and a special ejector drill bit from Dawson Precision. Of course I wouldn’t have it in time for the match the next day so I had to use a backup gun. It worked fine until the fourth stage when it locked up and wouldn’t cycle. I removed the slide but couldn’t see anything wrong even though, at first, it wouldn’t work right even with the recoil spring and barrel removed. Then it started working, I put it back together and finished the stage. Then on stage five the hammer started not resetting. The first time it happened I racked the slide again and continued without incident on that string. Then on the next string it happened twice and I just thumb cocked it. It was almost as if I were shooting single action in a cowboy match—without ever practicing that way.
Yesterday I cleaned and examined my backup gun. I think the disconnector was worn so I replaced it with a spare I had. I’ll take it to the range and test it soon.
Even with the gun problems I shot well enough to win in both classes (I was the only shooter with a iron sighted rimfire pistol, so that doesn’t really count even though I had a good time):
RF-RI-O: Rimfire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rimfire Pistol Optics
RF-I: Rimfire Iron sights
PCC-O: Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
RF-RI-I: Rimfire Rifle Iron sights
CF-I: Centerfire Iron sights
PCC-I: Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron sights
In the video below I only included one of the better runs for each class of gun I shot on each stage except for when I shot the string cocking the hammer by hand. I edited one string of fire to included a comment from the Range Officer after I finished which Barb liked. I’m hoping this will be a more interesting video and not so long and boring. Also seeing things mostly done correctly is probably better than seeing a lot of errors.
