I participated in a USPSA match at Marysville (Washington) today. For some reason I was extremely nervous for the first stage. My stomach was tied in knots and my shooting suffered. The second stage I shot (Killer B’s) I felt better but I still shot extremely poor. I had three misses and hit a no shoot target. It was a tough stage and two people zeroed it. But I shouldn’t have had problem with it. After that I settled down and did okay. But only in one stage (Dirty Mike) was I rather pleased with my results. But that wasn’t the stage that I did the best in compared to everyone else. I did the best in the classifier where I came in 3rd out of 17 in Limited and 7th out of 43 overall. Seven people zeroed that stage.

In Limited I came in 7^th out of 17:

I tested out video glasses I got from Amazon and have shooter point of view for all but one of the stages:

The configuration program for the glasses didn’t work so I couldn’t set the date and time on the glasses and I couldn’t turn off the time stamp. So all the video has the wrong time.

I forgot to turn the camera on for the stage that I messed up on the most. That is the stage I would have most liked to have the video for!

Update: The match winner has his own blog post and video.

I attended a steel match in Renton today. I was feeling kind of weird. I hadn’t gotten much sleep then I was really rushed trying to clean two guns and then get to the match on time. I left nearly 30 minutes later than I planned and I think there was far more adrenalin in my system that I can tolerate without side effects. I was shaking most of the morning, my stomach was upset, and I was feeling strange in the head.

My shooting felt pretty good anyway and I was pretty sure I was doing well compared to everyone in my squad. I was shooting in both rimfire iron sighted pistol and centerfire iron sighted pistol.

The stages looked like this:

Smoke and Hope

Closed Quarters

Roundabout

Double Tap

With Double Tap there was another USPSA target to the far left my camera couldn’t capture from the shooting box. The two USPSA targets were to be shot twice then the center target was the stop plate.

For those unfamiliar with scoring steel matches of this type you shoot the stage five times. Your score is the sum of your four best times. Hence you can determine the average time for a shooter to fire the five shoots on a given stage by dividing their stage time by four. If, for example, someone (like me when I shot rimfire) has a score of 10.14 for Closed Quarters it means I got five hits, on the average, in 2.535 seconds. Considering that it probably took about a second to get the first hit going from the orange marker on the ground to the first plate the other four hits took about 0.384 seconds each. I’m constantly amazed this is even possible let along that I can do this.

My standing in the match was somewhat surprising to me:

I’ve been wanting to get my classification stages completed so I could get a better sense of where I stand compared to shooters nationwide. But I keep getting repeats of stages I have already shot. This match was no exception. We had Smoke and Hope and Roundabout as the only two classification stages. At least I improved my centerfire times from my previous 18.76 seconds to 15.44 seconds on Smoke and Hope. But my time on Roundabout went from 18.67 seconds to 19.43 seconds.

With my rimfire pistol I came in 7^th overall which is ahead of all the other pistol shooters, including open class pistol shooters. With my centerfire pistol I came in 23^rd overall and 3rd among centerfire shooters.

I’m okay with that.

As I said on Sunday I shot in three-gun match as well as the pistol match. I then said:

I haven’t seen the results from that yet but I expect I came in the top three or so. Maybe 2^nd.

I was partially wrong:

I had based my estimate on my time. I knew my hits (points) were good but I didn’t know they were that much better than everyone else.

I was a little annoyed that even though I had iron sights on everything I was put in open division simply because my shotgun had detachable magazines. Other people with scopes on their rifles were not in “Open”. I got the last laugh on that though. Adam had his rifle scope fail. It literally broke with internal components displaced and visible through the ocular lens. He was left with attempting to look under the scope along the barrel as best he could, seeing where his hits were, adjusting, and shooting again. He shot fast but had poor hits.

I shot a match at the Lewiston Pistol Club today for the first time in years. In my squad I shot far better than anyone else but that didn’t hold true when extended to the other two squads. I did place first in the Senior category and I came in 4th out of 22 overall:

I probably didn’t get high enough Hit Factor on the Classifier stage to push me back up into the solid B class but since I started shooting with this club back in the mid ‘90s I considered it a win for me if I came in ahead of Don Wood. I accomplished that goal today so I’m pleased.

There was also a three-gun match after the USPSA pistol match. I shot it in as well. I haven’t seen the results from that yet but I expect I came in the top three or so. Maybe 2^nd. Some of the other really good shooters had equipment problems. I had one failure to feed with my shotgun but other than that everything ran really well.

It was really nice to visit with people I hadn’t seen in years and catch up on things with everyone.

I should have taken pictures. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe because it was hot. I know that part of the time I was not feeling well. Drinking another half liter of water seemed to fix that problem so after that I drank a liter or so at each stage of the match. Did I say it was really hot?

I received an email today with a discount code (5% off) for certain gun safes. The code is “FatMarble4u” and is valid for the “Fatboy Jr.” safes in burgundy and grey marble at gunsafes.com.

The prices on their website include shipping, or as they put it, “free shipping”.

USPSA matches frequently have stages which can be shot many different ways. It’s a thinking game almost as much as a shooting game. What is the best way to shoot this stage? And the best way depends on the shooter. Can they easily make long distance shots? Can they run and stop quickly? Can they shoot better over or under obstacles?

One of my biases has always been to run to a set of targets and shoot them from close up rather than shoot from a distance. I consume time running but I can shoot a lot faster and get better hits when I am close to the targets. But there is a tradeoff. If there is only one target then almost always it is going to be better to take your time and make one or two carefully aimed shots rather than run 50 (or more!) feet to hit a full sized USPSA target. So how do you know when you should run and when you should just shoot?

I’ve always just sort of guessed and sometimes had dramatically great results. So much so that I have had better scores than Master class shooters and the shooters who followed me would shoot it “my way” rather than the way others had been shooting it before me.

But how can one know which is the better way, without shooting the stage both ways, rather than relying on intuition? I decided to do some tests. I reserved a bay at the local indoor gun range and placed a bunch of USPSA targets at the end of the range. I then moved back various distances and tried shooting the targets various ways.

In each test I shot carefully enough to get all A-zone hits.

At 15 yards I found I could run to about one yard away from the targets and then get a single shot on the first target in about 3.5 seconds. The second shot on a target required about 0.20 seconds. As I moved parallel to the target line the transition to each new target required 0.40 seconds. From 20 yards the run time was about 4.4 seconds with, of course, the same splits on the targets as I moved parallel to the target line.

From a low ready position at 15 yards it took me about 1.3 seconds for the first shot with splits of about 0.55 seconds regardless of whether it was the same or a different target. From 20 yards it was about the same acquisition time for the first target but with splits of about 0.95 seconds.

I also tried shooting at the same time I moved toward the targets. This took much longer than either of the other methods.

From this information I made a spreadsheet that allowed me to explore the decision as to run and shoot or just shoot. The results surprised me. I expected that at greater distances it would be require more targets to make it more worthwhile to just stand and shoot rather than just shoot. But that wasn’t the case.

At 15 yards I should run and shoot if there are five or more targets. Otherwise I should just stand and shoot. At 20 yards I should run and shoot if there are only three or more targets.

It turns out the time to run goes up linearly with the distance but the additional split time (compared to shooting from one yard away) goes up at a faster rate. I was going to extrapolate from these two data points to different ranges but with the split time varying in a non-linear fashion I need more data to be able to do a proper extrapolation.

On Monday evening I received an email saying the normal match was canceled. No reason given. On Tuesday morning I got another email saying “Change of plans…The Steel Match is back on for this Saturday the 25^th.”

It was a cool and cloudy day and sort of dreary but I have never been on a ferry ride that I didn’t like:

Chatting with people before the match I found out the reason for the cancellation was because the weather forecast was for rain. The reason for having the match anyway was because a couple people sent email saying they wanted to have the match anyway. It was sprinkling a little bit before the match. During the match only a few drops came down but we didn’t get wet.

We suspected the questionable weather was the reason for there being only eight people who showed up. With only eight people we just ran one squad and had more time to socialize during the match than usual.

The stages weren’t quite as interesting as they have been sometimes but there was a good variety. As is usual for this match they use a yellow stop plate:

In most of the pictures if you look closely enough (click on the picture for a higher resolution photo), you can see the tennis ball used for the aiming point for starting if you aren’t using a holster. No one uses a holster for rimfire guns and combined with the lower recoil the rimfire people turn in some really great times.

That last stage is very similar to the stage we called “Drag Race” at the March 28th match:

The stage yesterday was a little slower than back in March because of the position of the stop plate but I still did well on it. Some people were impressed with one string in particular which, IIRC, using my STI in .40 S&W, I completed in 2.93 seconds with 1.59 seconds used for the draw and first shot. I know it was below three seconds because Jeff said that was the time he wanted to beat. He came very close. He had one string of, IIRC, 3.08 seconds. And one of 3.15 which included a miss, and a makeup shot, on the stop plate. If he had not missed it would have been 2.75 seconds. Also of note is that all the other centerfire shooters were using 9mm which has a lower recoil but I do fine with the .40.

To me, even though I can repeatedly do it, it’s almost unbelievable to be able to draw and shoot five targets of that size, at that distance, in about three seconds. After consuming 1.5 seconds on the draw and first shot the split times between the other shots average a third of second.

Both my guns ran perfectly and although I had a few misses things went well.

The match results were as follows:

I participated in a USPSA match on Sunday. It was the largest local match I have ever participated in. Originally they told us 97 people were attending but the results only show 92 so maybe some people left without shooting. That would be entirely understandable. It was a hot day for the Seattle area. It was 97 F when I left. The sweat was dripping off of me most of the time and I consumed two liters of water without once using the bathroom. Including my travel and registration time I spent 10 hours participating. It’s a good thing it was fun.

Marysville Rifle Club has stages that are more complex and challenging than those I have found at any other club. Don’t fool yourself into even thinking for even a millisecond these are anything like real life scenarios. They are problems to be solved using gun skills and your ability to move. It’s a game and this match demonstrated it better than any other match I have attended.

Here is an example:

Where, in real life, might you find something that looks like this?

Other stages were difficult because there were targets which were hard to find even when you weren’t on the clock. I, as well as many others, overlooked one target because of this and got a lot of penalties for it.

One stage required us to run about 60 feet then shoot a bunch of targets. I ran, shot targets, started to move to the next set of targets and reached for one of my four spare magazines on my belt. Three of them were gone. My stopping at the first set of targets caused the magazines to fall out of their holsters. This was a 30 round stage and I had just dropped one of my two remaining magazines that still had ammo in it. I had planned to do another reload when I moved between target arrays again. The magazine that remained was my one special magazine. It has a special follower that allows it to hold 19 rounds of .40 S&W. Along with the “super powers” the follower has a flaw. It doesn’t lock back the slide when the gun is empty. For this reason I don’t normally use it but it gave me 20 rounds in the gun and I decided to continue on without going back to look for the missing magazines or pick up the one I just dropped from the gun. I finished the stage with one round to spare.

An unusual thing did happened on a couple stages which can be blamed on the polymer coated lead bullets. They produce a lot of smoke. When shooting targets in deep shadows while the gun is in the bright sunlight the targets would sometimes nearly disappear in the smoke after a couple shots. The smoke reflected the sunlight creating a bright cloud between me and the targets.

As interesting as the previous stages were they weren’t the “best” one. Check this one out:

See the Texas Star on the right? Here is someone shooting one the conventional way:

In our case we had two Texas Stars. One on each side of the barricade. We also started the stage over 100 feet away and had to shoot 11 other targets on the way to the barricade.

It turns out that barricade has a special name. It’s called a Rhodesian Wall. The 1996 January/February issue of Front Sight, the USPSA magazine, had this to say about Rhodesian Walls:

With a Rhodesian Wall, which is not commonly used any more, the shooting position is a raised box behind a wall with a stout rope hanging down the middle. The problem is that the wall is so wide that you can’t shoot around it except by holding onto the rope with one hand, leaning around the edge and shooting one-handed while keeping the feet on the box.

Here is one of the participants in Sunday’s match practicing on the wall:

Yes. You had to shoot small moving targets one handed, around both sides of a barricade, while dangling from a rope, after running over 100 feet.

I have never seen such a difficult stage before. Many people in our squad ran out of ammo before hitting all the plates on the Texas Stars. One guy left three plates on one star and hadn’t even shot at the other one. With misses like that you end up getting a zero on the stage. There were stage times approaching 200 seconds. And I saw one guy get disqualified for breaking the 180 on this stage.

Fortunately last Thursday I went to the range and practiced my one handed shooting. I did well on this stage completing it in 42.12 seconds (an average of 1.316 seconds per shot) with no misses. I had good hits on the paper and got 154 points. The Grandmaster shooters in Limited came in with times of 32.80, 36.83, and 39.48 seconds with points in the range of 150 to 152.  This put me at 7^th out of 33 in Limited Division and 13^th out of 92 overall.

That was my high point of the match. I also did decent on the classifier for a change. I might actually get my classification back up into the B range with that stage.

The worst stage was where I overlooked the target and had a miss on another target racking up 40 points in penalties.

I had misses on other stages as well. It was very common with even Master and Grandmaster shooters having misses.

Overall I was pleased with the results. My gun ran perfectly. But the fiber optic front sight insert did disappear sometime along the way, I think it might have been on the Rhodesian Wall stage. It is very fragile and I had to shoot through a port there (as well as several other stages) and it is easy to bump it on the edges of the port. But the irons were still fine and I didn’t really miss it.

Overall, across all divisions, I came in at 40^th out of 92. In Limited I came in at 13^th out of 33. In B class, I came in 2^nd.

Here the blog post of Loke Tan who was at the match and came in 3rd overall. He also made a video of him shooting each of the stages:

I tested out some different .40 S&W ammo the other day. Although I usually use my reloads I like to know which factory ammo can also be used. I seldom have reliability problems with centerfire ammo but accuracy is frequently a problem.

I was very pleased to discover that Federal RTP40180 (RTP => Range Target Practice) did well in my STI DVC Limited. The two groups below are offhand at 10 yards and 25 yards:

The groups are small enough I believe about half of the group size is due to user error. Compare this ammo to other ammo I have tested in the same gun here.

What I find odd is that I can’t find the ammo on Federal’s website although several websites have the ammo for sale at a good price.

Ry and I went to a steel challenge match yesterday. I shot both a .22 and my STI. The .22 ran perfectly. But with my STI I had one round with an oversized spot (0.434”, versus the specified 0.4241”) just above the extractor groove which locked up the gun hard. I had to grip the slide tightly and bang away on the grip with the palm of my hand to get the round extracted.

I had about 100 rounds of the polymer coated lead bullet cartridges left. About half of them would not fit in the case gauge. Last week I purchased the Lee Precision 40SW10-mm Carbide Factory Crimp Die and ran all the rounds through that die and tested about 20 or 30 cartridges. They all fit or were just a little tight. I tested the tight ones in my barrel and found they dropped in just fine. I didn’t bother to run all of them through the case gauge and paid the price for it. I think it may have come from an old batch of reloads from before I started putting all my brass through the Redding G-RX Carbide Push Thru Base Sizing Die. I had assembled thousands of rounds with that brand of bullet before I got the die. Some of the older rounds could have gotten mixed up with some of the newer ones. It didn’t matter as long as I was using my old gun, but it matters a lot with the new one.

Anyway… I finished off all of the existing rounds that might have the problem and should be fine for the future as long as I used both the specialized dies for the new gun with the tight chamber.

Here are the results:

Rimfire Pistol

Main Match

I’m pretty pleased with the results. I was top Senior in Rimfire and came in second Senior in the Main Match. If I had practiced a few times in the two weeks prior I might have done a little better but for the most part things were going pretty well for me. Ry took a few videos of me on stage 1 (see also here, here, here, and here).

Here is a video of four of Ry’s runs on a different, far more difficult, stage:

The most disappointing part of the match was that, as she vowed last time, Taylor didn’t hang out with me this time.

As I mentioned yesterday I shot in another steel match on Saturday.

It was a beautiful day for a ferry ride:

Here are the match results:

The codes are:

• RF-RI-O: Rimfire, rifle, open
• RF-O: Rimfire, open
• RF-I: Rimfire, iron sights
• CF-I: Centerfire, iron sights
• CF-O: Centerfire, open
• CF-RV-I: Centerfire revolver, iron sights

Even with the malfunctions I had I won in my classes. I felt like I was shooting very well. I wasn’t thinking, I just moved the gun past the targets and it went off when the sights were on the targets. Misses were rare. It feels really good to have things working like that again.

There were five stages. The times are the sum of all the best four of five strings fired on each stage. So with five stages and four strings per stage you can figure out that I averaged 3.86 seconds per string with my centerfire pistol. That is 3.86 seconds for a draw and five shots on five different targets.

With the rimfire pistol it was an average 3.57 seconds per string. With the rimfire pistol I did not have to draw. The start position for the pistol was pointing at the tennis ball you see in each of the pictures below:

This was a very fast stage. I think I had a couple runs that were under two seconds.

Via Pat Kelley:

You can see how slow I am starting at the 1:01 mark.

This is from the match I shot in last Saturday.

Here are stills of all the stages except stage 4:

Stage 1: Dot the Box.

Stage 2: Total Recall.

Stage 3: Texas Tree.

Stage 5: Hidden Option.

Stage 6: Basic Instinct.

Stage 7: Treed.

Stage 8: Tin Men.

Yesterday I participated in the Washington State Steel Championship. I knew this was going to be a whole new level of competitors for me and I didn’t expect to have results that would appear to be anything beyond, maybe, average. After shooting a couple stages I was concerned I would come in dead last even though, from my perspective, I was shooting pretty good. I was clearly the slowest shooter in my squad.

I started out shooting polymer coated lead bullets in my STI. These have almost zero hazard of bullet fragments returning to hit shooters and observers. I had put every single round through the case gauge and hoped that would fix my feeding problems I had last week. The first and second stages were fine. On the third stage I had one failure. On the fourth stage I had something like five or six with one set of three failures in a row.

I brought out my handloads made with Montana Gold JHPs which I also had run through the case gauge. I switched to that ammo and never had another failure. There were lots of fragments coming back but that was no different than anyone else.

I was shooting fairly consistently. I had few misses but many of the other shooters on my squad would have multiple misses and still have times a second less than me. And this when my time for a string might be in the four to five second range. So they were shooting, including multiple misses, in 25 to 30 percent less time than me.

Pat Kelley was in my squad and there were other shooters in our squad doing as well or better than he was. I consider Kelley god-like with a shotgun and wonder of nature with any other gun.

The overall results are here. I came in 44^th with my iron sighted .22 and 58^th with my STI in .40. This is out of 105 entries. I was actually concerned that I would come in dead last so I feel pretty good about being in the middle of the pack.

But look at where Kelley came in! He shot his Limited gun in the open division as well as limited and came in 30^th and 40^th overall. Mike Gallion (he went to the European Steel Challenge Championship and came in 12^th) came in 39^th! The competition was really tough.

That was overall. In Limited division Kelley did win and I came in 11^th out of 35. Okay. I don’t feel bad at all about that. Especially with a gun that was malfunctioning on some of the stages.

In Limited Seniors I came in second, behind Kelley, out of nine.

In rimfire iron sighted pistol I came in 9^th out of 21.

In rimfire iron sighted pistol Seniors I came in 1^st! I also came in last as the only senior in this division.

I had fun and wasn’t completely embarrassed by my results so it was a good day.

Despite having a cold I participated in a Steel Challenge match yesterday. I shot two different guns (not at the same time). Here are the results:

Main Match

Rimfire Pistol

I’m not sure shooting two different guns was a good idea. The trigger pull on the two was quite different and several times my new STI went off before I expected it to and I missed the targets. I also had problems with jams on the new STI. The cartridges would just start into the chamber and then stop. There were also some rounds that were very tight in the chamber. I suspected my handloads were the problem.

When I got home I looked at the ammo. I think I don’t have enough crimp on my handloads. The factory ammo has a noticeable crimp. My handloads are crimped just enough to have a straight case wall. I also know that not all my handloads would pass the case gauge. If they didn’t I would test them in the chamber of my old STI and throw them into the ammo can anyway. Since that barrel is history I need to run all my rounds through the case gauge again. I probably should crimp them a little more too. I’m going to the International Steel Shooting Association Washington State Championship (ISSA is different from the Steel Challenge Shooting Association) on Saturday so I need to get my gun working this week.

Despite not feeling well, the trigger pull issue, and the jamming problems I did manage to decrease my times on Pendulum and Roundabout. Previously I had times of 30.87 and 23.43. This time I achieved times of 28.66 and 18.67. Smoke and Hope was slightly worse with 19.16 when I had a time of 18.76 in March. I also won my division with the STI.

I wish the club would use some different classifier stages. I need 5 to Go, Showdown, Outer Limits, and Speed Option before I can really know my level compared to other people.