On November 3rd I had surgery on my left shoulder. Over three and half weeks later I still have large bruises and somewhat limited range of motion.

But I had made it to the range a couple of times for practice and my shooting was okay and only occasionally experienced some pain. So Saturday I went to Whidbey Island for the Holmes Harbor Rod and Gun Club steel match.

I tried to take just a little more time before squeezing off the shot but still make the target transitions as quickly as I could. This seemed to work a lot better than if I tried to make everything go fast.

My rimfire results in particular were very good. I cut my total match time by over 10 seconds (this is about a 15% improvement!). This was a total of 56.64 seconds for five stages. Since there are four strings of five shots in each stage this means my average time for each string was 2.83 seconds. And since every stage requires five shots the average time per shot was 0.5664 seconds. I’m constantly amazed this is even possible let alone that I am capable of shooting this fast on targets likes these:

But it’s possible. Here is the video to prove it:

The scores were:

From Tactical Warrior Wear.

I like this one best:

For many years I’ve been fighting a losing battle (daughter Jaime claims I lost the battle years ago) about people calling a “magazine” a “clip”. I’m not fighting the battle alone though. Guy Sagi posted Top Media-Abused Gun Terms and points out the problem is larger than I usually view it:

Clip—Any ammunition-retention system, including magazines, speed loaders, belts, bandoleers and TSA screeners.

I was expecting the worst when I went to Whidbey Island for the monthly steel match. I have been very busy recently and hadn’t shot a pistol in nearly a month. After I arrived I realized I had left my race holster at home. My centerfire shooting was all from an inside the waistband holster and my draw time showed this.

I was surprised to do as well as I did. I did quite well (I won) with iron sighted rimfire pistol and decent (second place) with iron sighted centerfire pistol:

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

This was a “USPSA like” match I shot in last Sunday. The shooting part was by USPSA rules but the stage designs were NOT! Stages had from 40 to 60 rounds. This was the 60 round stage:

Here is a 59 round stage:

I didn’t do all that well at this match. I made a fair number of mistakes. I overlooked one target. I failed to shoot another target twice, and I had far too many misses on the all steel stage. I also started one stage, stage 5 which I don’t have video of, with a magazine that was only about half full.

It was fun though. There weren’t any no-shoots. There wasn’t any hard cover. There weren’t any disappearing targets. There was just a lot of trigger pulling, reloading and of course fun.

Overall I placed 44th out of 83. In Limited Division I was 25th out 41. Other results things such as individual stage results can be found here.

My shooter point of view video:

Loke was in my squad and has his own video and commentary on the match. His video, and of course his shooting (he came in second overall) is far better than mine:

Ry and I were at the Boomershoot site in Idaho this weekend when Sebastian sent me an email asking about steel penetration by bullets. I was pretty sure I gave him off the cuff correct answers but I was in a good position to do some of the tests. The next morning Ry and I found a piece of 0.5” mild rod and I shot it a few times.

The question was, “Could a pistol bullet severely damage the mild steel rod? Or is severe damage proof that AP rifle rounds were used?” I said, “I don’t think 1000 FPS pistol bullets will do that.” But I also said that a rifle, even relatively low powered lead core rounds, would go right through. Ry said, “The pistol bullets will only polish the metal.”

Here is the photographic evidence:

Entrance of a .223 52 grain JHP from 30 feet.

Side view of the .223 shot.

Left to right are Winchester Ranger 180 grain .40 S&W, hand loaded 180 grain polymer coated lead, .223 exit.

The Winchester Rangers were probably going about 1015 fps and polished the metal a little better than the handloads going about 950 fps. I don’t have any chronograph data of my own for the .223 rounds out of my gun but Black Hills says to expect about 3250 fps.

This shows why those who wish to ban ammo that penetrates police soft body armor are actually proposing to ban all hunting ammo.

Saturday I went to Whidbey Island for the steel match at Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club. I had specially practiced for this match last Thursday and had high hopes of doing well.

Here are the results:

I won in both rimfire iron sighted (RF-I) and centerfire iron sighted (CF-I). In a similar match last month I had times of 69.39 seconds and 82.6 seconds compared to this months 67.22 and 82.13 seconds. Those differences are essentially in the noise unless the stages were more difficult this month but comparison of other shooters between the months doesn’t show a clear pattern so I’m going with I didn’t shoot measurably better this month. I had a lot of misses so I think I probably was doing the transitions quickly enough to make up for the misses. If I can combine the speed up in transitions with accuracy then I might see some improvement.

Here are pictures of the stages. You can play a game of “Where’s the tennis ball?” in each of the pictures to discover the starting aiming point for people shooting rimfire guns.

I used my video glasses to record most of the stages. Again I forgot to turn on the glasses for one of the stages.

I was very pleased with one string (starting at 0.00:24). I shot five targets in 1.94 seconds. The first shot took about 0.77 seconds so the remaining four had an average split time of less than 0.30 seconds.

It was hazy from all the smoke but I had a nice ferry ride on my way home:

I reserved the training bay at the local indoor range last night and put about 600 rounds of .22 down range:

I had noticed something when I watched Master and Grandmaster class shooters. When they transition between targets they move the gun much faster than I do. Why don’t I do that?

I set up the simulated steel challenge stage with paper targets with the largest possible angle I could get in the range and still keep the bullets in the berm from 30 feet away:

The stop “plate” is the center target so I could test shooting left to right and right to left. And a secondary test was an order of shooting question I had wondered about for years (1, 2, 4, 5, 3 versus 1, 2, 5, 4, 3).

First I shot as I normally do and found the order of shooting didn’t make any difference. And although it was more comfortable for me to shoot left to right it didn’t make a measurable difference in my time. It was always between about 4.6 and 4.9 seconds.

I tried swinging the gun faster between targets. Maximum acceleration then stopping on target long enough to fire an aimed shot then maximum acceleration to the next target. I found it took me quite a bit longer to get the gun settled on the target compared to the way I usually do it. The end result was that I ended up with essentially the same times.

But I kept trying. At about 300 rounds my time just dropped by a full second. It wasn’t gradual. It was just the same as usual on one string of fire and the next was a full second faster. It continued to be in the 3.6 second range and when I sometimes messed up with a target acquisition and it took something like 4.5 seconds it seemed like forever. 4.5 seconds a few minutes earlier would have been a good run.

I pushed a little harder and even had a few runs that were in the 2.8 to 2.9 range. That’s almost two seconds off my previous times. That a reduction of about 40 percent! I backed off some so that I was consistent and was steady at about 3.6 seconds per string. I continued shooting until I ran out of time trying to condition my brain and muscles to make this a comfortable habit.

My gun got so hot I couldn’t hold onto the barrel and I found out when I cleaned it tonight the front sight had come loose. The heat had probably degraded Loctite on the threads.

The gun also got quite dirty on the outside as well as the inside:

I’ll find out at the steel match tomorrow if the training stuck. If it did and I can shoot as fast and accurately tomorrow as I could last night I will be very pleased.