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.

Here are the results:

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

Even with the problems my times were pretty good. The times represent 100 hits (five stages of four strings, with five hits per string). So the average time per hit with rimfire was 0.5922 S. With centerfire it was 0.9643 S. The last steel match I went to, March 13th, I had average hits times of 0.7675 S and 1.0882 S. On February 27th it was 0.6567 and 0.9233. And on February 14th it was 0.7125 S and 0.9271 S.

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

Lucky Charms

Renton Plate Rack

Saving Ammo

My guns worked well except for one failure to properly strip a round out of the magazine with my .22.

The complete results are here, but the divisions in which I participated are below.

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):

Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club February 2016 Speed Steel Scores

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.

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).

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.

Stage 1: Smoke and Hope

Stage 2: Four Corners

Stage 3: V for Victory

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.

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.

Last Saturday, January 23^rd, 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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

Go Fast

Go Hawks

Beast Mode

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.