Category Archives: Gun Fun

The Gun State

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Interesting. Idaho is state most dependent on gun industry, report finds:

Idaho depends more on the gun industry than any other state, according to a study by the financial website WalletHub. Idaho ranked No. 1 among states and the District of Columbia based on firearms industry activity in the state, gun ownership and overall prevalence, and gun politics — specifically, contributions by gun control and gun rights groups to members of Congress.

Idaho, The Gun State*. I could live with that.

* Idaho’s official nickname is The Gem State.

Quote of the day—Bubblehead Les

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Do you realize that Obama has more time at the White Board diagraming Saul Alinsky’s “Rule for Radicals” than he has Trigger Time?

Bubblehead Les
February 2, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Sebastian
[After spending 20+ hours (about 2000 rounds in the Intensive Handgun Skills class) of “trigger time” this last weekend my mind is stuck on “trigger time”. I’m constantly amazed at how fast, and accurately, people can put lead downrange.

At Boomershoot people can and do put bullets into seven inch square targets at 700 yards on nearly every shot. I know people who can hit eight inch steel plates 25 feet away at a rate of six to seven rounds a second—with a 12 gauge shotgun! With a pistol (concealable, as opposed to a long gun) people put bullets into different eight and 12 inch circular targets from 25 feet away at the rate of two to three rounds per second. At conversation distances it’s eight to 10 rounds per second.

Every day of the week during normal wake time hours you can go to the local range here in the Seattle area and see people practicing. On the weekends and many week days you can find competitions where people hone and display their skills to levels that are mind bogglingly sharp even by my standards of being a competition shooter for over 20 years.

There are roughly 80 to 100 million gun owners in this country. That “extremist organization”, the NRA, has “more than five million members”.

People “White Board diagraming Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rule for Radicals’” as they plot to destroy our freedom don’t realize just how dangerous a fire they are playing with. As I pointed out in this post about the number of Al Qaeda members:

According to intelligence estimates reported by the New York Times in 2010 the answer is “fewer than 500” in Afghanistan and “more than 300” in Pakistan. A 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal put the number in the range of 200 to 1000 with “affiliated fighters or funders” making up thousands or tens of thousands.

Since allied forces in Afghanistan haven’t “finished the job” after more than a decade against less than 1000 poorly trained and funded fighters which side do you bet on if they were fighting a few million well trained and well funded fighters? If the would-be tyrants push us too far, just how much trigger time do each of five or 10 million people, skilled with the tools of freedom, need to put an end to the threat? Do the arithmetic.—Joe]

Speer Gold Dot Short Barrel

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As I mentioned a couple times before Speer makes a self-defense bullet intended for lower velocity loadings. They call it “Gold Dot® Short Barrel®”. I needed these for handgun students with difficulty handling factory loads. I loaded 301 rounds (I purchased three 100 round boxes and ended up with 301 bullets) over 3.9 grains of Bullseye and delivered 100 rounds to one of my students last Saturday.

Here is what the 180 grain bullets look like in .40 S&W:

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I’m expecting a velocity of about 850 fps at the muzzle with my STI DVC (5 inch barrel). This compares to about 1025 fps with 180 grain Winchester Rangers out of the same gun. The difference in recoil is significant.

I’ll run them over a chronograph and do some water jug testing (only valid for simple expansion testing) the first chance I get.

A pleasant introduction to competition shooting

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Via Eric:

 

Good choice in her handgun (she uses the same make and model, perhaps in 9mm instead of .40 S&W, as I do).

Steel challenge match results

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I participated in a steel challenge match today. It was raining but there was no wind and it wasn’t very cold so with the right clothes it wasn’t bad even if looks really bad in the pictures.

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Stage 1: Smoke and Hope

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Stage 2: Four Corners

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Stage 3: V for Victory

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Stage 4: Force Awakens

When practicing recently I have been shooting my “new” .22 that I have had all the problems with for so long. As of yesterday I had shot about 500 rounds, without cleaning, with only one failure to feed near the end of the sequence. And most of that was with standard velocity ammo (the manufacturer recommends high velocity 40 grain ammo only). With that sort of success I figured I could shoot a match with CCI Mini-Mags (recommended by the manufacturer) and have complete success. The first two stages I shot (Stages 3 and 4 below) it functioned perfectly. On Stage 1 it had two failures. On the last stage I shot, Stage 2, it again worked fine. Of course it happens on the only stage used for classification purposes with SCSA.

I did reasonably well anyway. In the Rimfire Pistol Iron (RFPI) sight division I came in second only to Christian. Christian is like 14 years old, just the sweetest kid, and an awesome shooter. He claimed second place overall in this division at the Washington State Championship last year.

RFPI
Final Name SCSA Class Division Time Stage 1: Smoke & Hope Stage 2: 4 Corners Stage 3: V For Victory Stage 4: Force Awakens
1 Sailer, Christian A86982 U RFPI 37.92 8.76 8.33 11.40 9.43
2 Huffman, Joseph U RFPI 57.00 15.09 11.59 17.11 13.21
3 Komatsu, Jeff U RFPI 72.39 12.27 23.75 18.43 17.94
4 Mortell, Jeffery U RFPI 74.37 16.97 17.51 22.91 16.98
5 Morris, David U RFPI 82.49 10.91 21.22 30.18 20.18
6 Meboe, Joey U RFPI 87.72 12.73 21.80 25.98 27.21
7 Kim, Conner U RFPI 104.38 30.42 22.47 23.24 28.25
8 Meboe, Isabelle U RFPI 107.42 16.39 36.94 25.44 28.65
9 Nakashima, Daniel U RFPI 121.30 22.38 34.17 37.22 27.53
10 Kim, Nam U RFPI 215.31 42.65 53.80 71.12 47.74
11 Wood, Sabrina U RFPI 224.81 30.47 88.34 63.02 42.98
12 Meisner, Matthew U RFPI 244.96 49.68 33.42 91.43 70.43

I was the only participant in Limited division but for a Steel Challenge match Production division is very close so for comparison purpose I mentally inserted myself in the Production results which put me in second place. Again this was behind Christian.

Also of interest to me is that my centerfire gun malfunctioned with failures to eject on two rounds. One of those was, again, on Stage 1 just like with my other gun. Both guns were cleaned and lubricated the night before. Both guns had shot many hundreds of rounds without failures in the week prior. But as the RO asked when I whined about my malfunctions, “When you shot all those rounds without any failures were you shooting on the clock?” Yeah. I know. That has to be the reason. It was important to me so they malfunctioned.

LTD
Final Name SCSA Class Division Time Stage 1: Smoke & Hope Stage 2: 4 Corners Stage 3: V For Victory Stage 4: Force Awakens
1 Huffman, Joseph U LTD 74.17 15.75 17.57 21.78 19.07
PROD
Final Name SCSA Class Division Time Stage 1: Smoke & Hope Stage 2: 4 Corners Stage 3: V For Victory Stage 4: Force Awakens
1 Sailer, Christian A86982 U PROD 53.62 11.13 12.99 15.11 14.39
2 Meboe, Greg U PROD 83.31 16.73 19.86 26.03 20.69
3 Komatsu, Jeff U PROD 85.56 17.74 24.10 22.03 21.69
4 Soraparu, Heather U PROD 86.28 17.21 20.54 28.34 20.19
5 Roe, Shawn U PROD 86.55 17.60 22.42 25.39 21.14
6 Rabino, Tony U PROD 90.37 16.27 25.51 24.33 24.26
7 Harding, Matt U PROD 90.77 15.92 23.23 27.72 23.90
8 Mortell, Jeffery U PROD 91.85 20.76 24.49 26.51 20.09
9 Taeschner, Monica U PROD 93.01 16.94 19.52 31.99 24.56
10 Meisner, Mike U PROD 94.93 14.94 29.71 24.45 25.83
11 Morris, David U PROD 103.80 19.34 28.25 29.84 26.37
12 Yi, John U PROD 106.20 18.66 32.47 30.48 24.59
13 Hong, Robert U PROD 107.27 19.13 27.82 30.70 29.62
14 Kenny, Dan A23624 U PROD 108.68 20.19 35.50 28.16 24.83
15 Pacczosa, Dan A492542 U PROD 117.58 18.35 33.37 38.94 26.92
16 Heinz, Jeff U PROD 117.70 21.46 26.65 40.51 29.08
17 McKenzie, Don U PROD 120.72 24.18 37.54 30.62 28.38
18 East, Susan A77097 U PROD 132.06 24.16 31.57 40.62 35.71
19 Femino, Jason U PROD 152.14 21.88 63.26 37.43 29.57
20 Wood, Ken U PROD 164.85 26.71 41.04 55.06 42.04
21 Dickerson, Terry U PROD 202.81 28.82 42.06 79.89 52.04
22 Morris, Dave U PROD – – 56.79 – –

Quote of the day—Caleb

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Today’s post has been brought to you by Captain Obvious needs content.

Caleb
February 3, 2016
Training doesn’t always equal skill
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Rounds in the last month

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As I reported earlier this month I needed to load up a bunch of ammo for the InSights Intensive Handgun Skills class February 20-22. I now have all the ammo I need for that and now I need to start getting a little ahead of the game on practice and match ammo. Plus I need to reload a few hundred rounds of low recoil self-defense and practice ammo in .40 S&W for my student.

In the last month I reloaded just under 2200 rounds of .40 S&W. This gives me the following lifetime totals:

223.log: 2027 rounds.
3006.log: 467 rounds.
300WIN.log: 1351 rounds.
40SW.log: 43550 rounds.
9MM.log: 21695 rounds.
Total: 69090 rounds.

I expect by the first of March I will have reloaded over 70K rounds.

Student shooter update

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Remember the student shooter who was having trouble handling the .40 S&W her husband bought her for self defense at home? Remember the light loads I was working on so she could handle the recoil better?

Yesterday she and her husband went to the range with Barb and I. She shot a Ruger SR22* with a suppressor and did great. She shot it without the suppressor and did great. She really liked the Ruger Mark II. And she shot my gun I have had all the problems (also here) with. With about 100 rounds through it yesterday there was only one failure to feed.

Her husband tried the .40 S&W with the two different light loads. The 148 PF (in my gun, probably less in theirs) worked fine. The first round of the 131 PF loads failed to cycle but worked okay after that.

She wanted to shoot the .40 S&W. I had her shoot my gun with the lightest loads. She did fine. No nausea. And her hits stayed on target although they weren’t quit as accurate as when she shot .22s. She tried her gun with the 131 PF loads. She had nothing but failures to extract even when I had her hold the gun more rigid. Moving up to the 148 PF loads fixed the problem although the ejected shell casing just barely popped out of the ejection port. She handled it fine. And I had her shooting at silhouette targets and around corners all without difficulty before our range time was up:

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I sent them home with 100 rounds of the 148 PF practice ammo. And now I’m going to load up some of the self-defense Gold Dot Short Barrel bullets in a similar load for them.

Barb handled the 131 PF loads in my gun just fine too. I might load up a few for her self-defense needs as well.

* The SR22 wouldn’t cycle when using CCI Quiet-22 ammo. But it worked great with Standard Velocity. But wow, was it ever quiet.

CCI_Quiet_Standard

Speed Steel match results

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Last Saturday, January 23rd, I went to Whidbey Island for the steel match. It was a rainy, dreary, day as I road the ferry to the island but I had rain gear and was dressed warm enough to be comfortable.

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The weather wasn’t any better at the range and we put up a canopy to keep things a little drier for our little group of die-hard shooters:

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I shot my Ruger 22/45 for the iron sighted rimfire division and did okay with it.

With my STI DVC Limited gun I had changed out the sear spring and adjusted it for about 4.75 pounds of trigger pull rather than the 3.5 pounds it came from the factory with which I have never really gotten used to. It worked fine in practice and I was looking forward to using it. It worked fine some times then on other shots it had a much harder trigger pull. The pull was probably something on the order of 10 or 15 pounds. It was sometimes hard enough that my hands shook from pulling the trigger so hard to get it to fire. My times for centerfire pistol sucked.

Name Division Time
Steve Mooney RF-RI-O 47.66
Steve Mooney RF-O 57.63
Joe Huffman RF-I 67.12
Bruce Barchenger CF-I 91.92
Rev Barchenger RF-O 92.36
Joe Huffman CF-I 111.91
Jim Dunlap RF-O 112.08
Scott Bertino CF-I 123.44

67.12 seconds for five stages works out to an average of 3.356 seconds per five shot string. I’m okay with that.

Here are four of the five stages we shot. They started tearing down the fifth stage before I got around to taking a picture:

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Steel challenge match results

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On January 10th I shot a steel challenge match. I took video and have been meaning to edit it and post it on YouTube but I just haven’t got to it. Virtually no one watches (40 to ~100 views each) them anyway. So I’m just going to link to the results and tell you want happened.

The overall, all divisions, results are here. There were 34 participants and I came in 11th in iron sighted rimfire pistol and 13th in iron sighted centerfire pistol. My times for the four stages were 67.80 in rimfire and 76.58 in centerfire.

In the rimfire, iron sighted, pistol category I was 5th out of 11. I was the only shooter in the Limited division but if I had been in the iron sighted pistol division I would have been first. They didn’t get my Senior category into the record, but I would have come in with either gun only behind Jeffery with his open division rifle.

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Go Fast

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Go Hawks

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Beast Mode

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Focus

I shot my new rimfire gun that I have had all the problems with. It worked fine in practice and on the first stage our squad shot (Go Hawks). Then on the second stage we shot (Focus) it started jamming again. I went back to the Ruger 22/45 for the remainder of the match.

Gun madness again

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As implied by my last post about the overloading of the NICS system I have been noticing how crowded the indoor ranges are around here. A couple weeks ago, about 2:00 PM, on a Saturday, I was stopped at the local range to practice before a match. The parking lot was full. And it’s not a small parking lot:

WCA

Every place you see parking lines, or cars, and on the street in front of the building had parked cars. I drove by the front door and looking into the lobby to see it was packed. I just drove on home.

Recently I’ve been visiting the range at lunch time and while I don’t have a problem finding a parking spot the range has been crowded. The only time it hasn’t been crowded recently was when I went to a different range (because I was in the area anyway) and it was during a Seahawks game. I was far from the only shooter in the place but it wasn’t packed.

Another item of interest is that I ordered a holster and magazine pouches from Kramer Leather yesterday. They quoted me a delivery time of seven to nine weeks.

My speculation is that it’s the threat of more gun control that has people hitting the range and the gun stores in mass again.

Certificates of Achievement

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I’ve moved so many times in the last 10 years that many of my boxes still are unpacked. But in the last few days I’ve been making some progress. Here are some of my Insights Training certificates of achievement which I put up on the wall:

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I have several others but some are in boxes and the frame glass is broken in still others. Today Barb got prices on replacement glass so those will be going up soon.

The certificate in the upper left is for Intensive Handgun Skills. The certificate is dated nearly 20 years ago, October 25-27, 1996. I signed up to repeat it on February 20-22, 2016. I figured I need a tune up after so many years.

Old primers

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The other day I was cleaning out a box of old stuff and I found this:

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It’s some very old primers. I’m pretty sure I bought these in Moscow Idaho about 1975. This was long before I was into guns or had ever reloaded ammunition. I think I was going to use them to make an Estes rocket into some sort of missile with a “warhead” for the 4th of July. I never got around to it and all the primers are still in the package.

Herman’s World of Sporting Goods closed their last store in 1996, but I’m pretty sure the one in Moscow was closed many years prior to that.

Today a box of 1000 Small Rifle Magnum Primers cost about $35.00, if they were packaged and sold in 100 piece quantity, as in the picture above, the price would be just about double what they were when I bought mine.

Found in a box of bullets

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Today I finished loading a case (supposedly 2500 but there were 2513 in this one) of 180 grain, .40 caliber, JHP, Montana Gold bullets. In the box I found this:

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It’s a partially formed bullet jacket.

Bad primer

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I found a bad primer when reloading some more ammo over the weekend:

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This is the second time (out of nearly 70K rounds reloaded) I have found a bad primer. The first time was less than a year ago. Again it was a Winchester Small Pistol (WSP) but it was a different lot this time:

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This primer was very obviously bad and would not have inserted into the shell casing without difficultly had I tried.

Rounds in the last year

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This last year I reloaded more ammunition than I have in a long, long time. I posted some my updates on the topic January 6th, February 6th, March 1st, April 5th.

For the entire year it was:

9mm.log: 2993 rounds.
40S&W.log: 6538 rounds
Total: 9531 rounds

That’s a decent number but I suspect I will do more this year. I’m taking InSights Intensive Handgun Skills class February 20-22 and I need to make up about 2500 rounds for that class alone.

The total number of rounds since I began reloading my own ammunition:

223.log: 2027 rounds.
3006.log: 467 rounds.
300WIN.log: 1351 rounds.
40SW.log: 41654 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.log: 21636 rounds.
Total: 67135 rounds.

This really makes a mockery of the stupid proposed law in New York which “would cap the amount of ammunition to no more than twice the amount of the capacity of the weapon every 90 days”. I would have to claim all my guns are belt fed with essentially infinite capacity to keep up my current consumption rate if I were to attempt remaining lawful under such a tyrannical restriction.

Steel match results

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Yesterday I went to a steel match at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club on Whidbey Island.

It was cold for the Seattle area, in the upper 20s, but it was a beautiful day for a ferry ride:

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I had been sick earlier in the week as well as busy with Christmas stuff on the previous weekend. I hadn’t practiced in several weeks. Things didn’t go well. My new gun crashed and burned with multiple failures to feed on the second stage and I switched back to the Ruger 22/45 for the rest of the match. Even the video glasses messed up on stage two—the audio and video got seriously out of sync. But mostly it was my fault for not practicing and I had lots and lots of misses.

Even had I been shooting as well as I usually do at this match I wouldn’t have come in higher than second place in centerfire. There was new guy, Tony, shooting in the iron sighted centerfire gun category. He is much better than me even on one of my good days:

Tony Ceci CF-I 63.12
Bruce Barchenger CF-I 81.45
Joe Huffman CF-I 87.14
Rick Huggins CF-I 91.17
Scott Bertin CF-RV-I 106.80
Chris Ceci CF-RV-O 91.45
Brian Lawson RF-I 60.86
Joe Huffman RF-I 61.98
Mitch Hardin RF-I 83.24
Steve Mooney RF-O 48.43
Rev Barchenger RF-O 75.71
Steve Mooney
 RF-RI-O 41.08
Brian Lawson RF-RI-O 42.28
Tony Ceci RF-RI-O 46.59
MAC RF-RV-I 84.94

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

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Powder puff load report

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As I reported last week I was trying to make some very light loads in .40 S&W for new shooters. I made up 200 rounds with the 180 grain Rainier FP over 3.9 grains of Bullseye with an OAL of 1.131”. On Christmas day, while at Brother Doug’s place I shot some over the chronograph. This load yielded a mean velocity of 825 fps (standard deviation of 9.6 fps) for a Power Factor of 148.5. The expected result was 800 fps for a PF of 144. Not too far off from the actual. I would have preferred it be on the low side instead of the high side but still, not bad.

My typical handloads run about 940 fps for a PF of 169 or so. 180 grain factory loads run about 1000 to 1025 fps for PFs of 180 to 185. Hence these new loads are have about 80% of the momentum of a factory load and a little under 90% that of my usual handloads. This is better but I would like to do better still.

While in Idaho this weekend I bought a pound of Clays from Alan B. I loaded up 100 rounds of the 180 grain Rainier FP over 3.0 grains of Clays. I ran them over the chronograph today. Remember that the reloading manual said to expect:

180 grain bullet over 3.0 grains Hodgdon Clays => 727 fps with 131 PF

The result was 728.11 fps (standard deviation of 8.8 fps) for a PF of 131.06. Wow! That was freaky close compared to the expected result.

That gives me a load with about 78% of the momentum of my typical handloads and a little over 70% that of a factory load. And get this, it’s right at the same momentum as a typical 147 grain 9mm round but with a muzzle velocity that is about 100 fps less. That is even less velocity than a typical 230 grain .45 ACP. With such a low muzzle velocity it is much more of a push than a “snap” on the recoil. It’s a very comfortable load to shoot.

Thank you Mike B. and Alan B. for the Clays powder. That made a big difference.

I was thinking ahead to how to make a self-defense load with similar recoil properties and found that Speer makes a bullet they call Gold Dot Short Barrel for good self-defense characteristics with lower velocities. This sounds like just the ticket for Cherie. We have another range trip planned for the end of next month to do some more training and test out the new loads.

Bill was correct

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Regarding the issues I was having with a new gun and feeding Bill suggested the gun was simply breaking in rather than the different lubricants I was trying actually making a difference.

While at Boomershoot Mecca on Christmas day I shot it again after lubricating it with Interflon Fin Super. This was the lubricant I thought was causing me problems. It was cold, about 25F, and with two different types of ammo it functioned flawlessly.

I have to conclude that Bill’s suspicion was correct.

Powder puff

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I decided I should make some low power loads in .40 S&W for new shooters that are recoil sensitive. “Powder puff” loads. After exploring lots of options I came up with these as the best possibilities. From Hodgdon:

135 grain bullet over 4.0 grains Hodgdon Clays => 940 fps with 127 PF
180 grain bullet over 3.0 grains Hodgdon Clays => 727 fps with 131 PF

Typical factor loads are in the 180 to 190 PF range. So this should be about 70% of the recoil of factory loads.

The difference between power factors of 127 and 131 with equal weight bullets is probably undetectable in your hands. But because the 127 PF load is with 135 grain bullets versus the 180 grain for the 131 PF you get a much different recoil impulse. The lighter bullet is going over 200 fps faster and that means the recoil impulse is much shorter and hence will feel sharper. So, the 180 grain load looks like the winner. That nice because I have lots of 180 grain bullets around.

But I don’t have any Hodgdon Clays powder. I started looking online. Nothing.

[Heavy sigh.]

So what other options do I have and do I have any powders that could come close to this? I have an older version of the Hornady Handbook of Cartridge Reloading and they list Bullseye powder for a mild load.

180 grain bullet over 3.9 grains Bullseye => 800 fps with 144 PF.

I have some Bullseye powder left over from my explosives experiments with it about 1996 or ‘97. This would be a good opportunity to get rid of it. This isn’t as good at the loads with Clays but it is still less than 80% of a factory load.

I loaded up 20 rounds Saturday and went to the range to see if it would cycle my gun and if it was accurate. I used some 180 grain Rainier truncated cone FP bullets I had won at a match this summer. I have had problems with the accuracy of Rainier HPs once I went beyond about 7 yards so I was a bit skeptical of these too.

The ammo cycled and fed well in two different guns. The accuracy wasn’t great at 7 yards but it was far better than new shooters can manage. And I don’t have them shoot beyond that distance anyway.

Today I loaded up 180 rounds using some nickel plated brass I had laying around. I used the nickel plated so I could easily keep track of it being “special”. I’ll load up the remaining 300 Rainier bullets in that configuration in the next couple of days.

It turns out the loaded ammo looks particularly pretty. Barb said it looks like Christmas:

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I suppose it does. We have Powder Puff Christmas ammo.