I went to a USPSA match today and my gun barrel fractured and locked up my gun. This is a cropped version of the picture I tweeted about shortly after the incident:

Robb Allen almost immediately asked the obvious question, “Your own loads or factory?” And of course the answer was they were rounds I had loaded myself. In many situations this would be the end of the story. The shooter had a squib (a round with no or insufficient powder) which resulted in a bullet stuck in the barrel and the next round set off the automatic self-destruct sequence of events. Another way it could have happened was a round got double charged or the wrong powder was used. In any case it is relatively easy and frequent that handloaders blow up their guns through their own carelessness.

But as Ry pointed out the head of the shell casing is still there which probably means there wasn’t an over pressure event involved. I was able to hammer the gun open far enough for the shell casing to drop out and confirmed Ry’s suspicion:

This is a perfectly normal looking piece of brass. Even the primer looks normal so there was no overpressure event involved. I tried putting it in the case gauge and it would only go in about halfway. The chamber of barrel is now, of course, large than spec and the brass expanded just a bit more than normal even though it can’t be seen with the naked eye.

I tried for quite a bit to get the gun open in the hopes that I could remove the barrel but I wasn’t able to get it open any beyond this:

You can’t see it in the photograph but the feed ramp also split.

I finally just closed it up:

I don’t know what the root cause was. I wonder if it wasn’t a timing issue which caused some abnormal stress because I had a broken link with this barrel once before.

Something that is interesting to me is that I had the lugs break on the original STI barrel after about 20,000 rounds and this barrel failed after almost exactly the same number of rounds. I have known the gun was living on borrowed time for nearly six years now so I can’t really complain a lot.

I’m not going to try to get the gun repaired. As Barb, essentially, and Gay_Cynic said, I used the gun up.

Update: I should have said that the shot sounded and felt almost normal to me. The recoil cycle wasn’t quite right but there wasn’t a greater than normal impulse or BOOM!

Yesterday I went to Whidbey Island for a steel match at Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club. It was a beautiful day to be on the island:

The match was run the same as Steel Challenge but none of the stages were the classifier stages.

The stages were the most interesting steel stages I have shot. In each of the pictures below you shoot the white plates in any order then shoot the yellow stop plate last.

You had to be careful on this one. It was undefined what happened if one of your shots hit both the yellow and white plate. Our squad gave the shooter credit for whichever plate gave him the best result.

One guy in our squad called this stage “Saw tooth”.

They called this stage “Train crossing”.

I don’t recall there being a name for this stage.

They called this stage “Drag race”. Obviously it was a very fast stage.

“Drag race” was the last stage our squad shot and I was “getting into the zone”. As per Steel Challenge rules we shot each stage five times and threw out the slowest time and summed the remaining four times. My cumulative time for the four best strings was 11.87 seconds (an average of 2.9675 seconds for the draw and five hits). One string was 2.83 seconds. When I finished a guy on our squad told me, “Fancy shooting!” I’m not sure “Fancy” was the appropriate term but I was very pleased with the results. Although I’m nearly certain there are a lot of shooters could do it in under two seconds.

The overall results are as follows. Most people shot more than one gun in different classes. The class definitions (IIRC) are:

RF-RI-O: Rim Fire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rim Fire Pistol Optics
CF-I: Center Fire Iron
CF-RV-O: Center Fire Revolver Optics
CF-RV: Center Fire Revolver
CF-LR: ??

It wasn’t a big field of competitors in my class but I did win by a pretty wide margin.

I’m thinking this is on Ry’s wish list for Boomershoot clean up:

H/T to Say Uncle.

I participated in an USPSA match today. The results are:

Match Results – Limited

I came in at the 76^th percentile this time. This is a slight improvement from last Sunday. But what is most interesting to me is that at the last match Andrew Hong came in ahead of me getting 99.6% of the possible match points (I got about 78.6%). This time he came in number 16 with 52.1%. He must have had some equipment problems or something. He zeroed stage 1 and stage 2. And he came in 9^th on stage 3.

Here are pictures of stage 5, “More Disaster Factor (13-08)”, and stage 7, “Window Pain”:

This was before it started raining. It got pretty muddy and for most of the match we had clear plastic bags over the targets. It wasn’t nearly as wet as last Sunday but it was enough to cause a few issues with the targets and the tape failing to stick.

I have been doing some organization of my ammo and shooting up the older and small quantity stuff. I noticed the packaging for CCI Mini-Mag .22 LR ammo has changed over the years:

The leftmost is the oldest and the one on the right is the most recent.

On Tuesday I finished off the box on the left. I suspect it was getting close to 20 years old. Every round fed, fired, and ejected without a problem in my Ruger Mark III.

I shot in another USPSA match on Sunday. It was raining. At times it was really pouring. At other times it was a mild drizzle. It never stopped.

One of the guys at the match has been to a couple of Boomershoots and I know both he and his wife from outside of the gun community. He came up to me, said hi, and I told him it seemed a little damp. He said, “I’m not staying. I just came to check on my stage.” He had a shovel over his shoulder and had dug a ditch to carry some of the water away.

It wasn’t the wettest match I have ever heard of but it was the wettest match I have ever attended.

This is a much better outcome that previous matches. Only two master class shooters were ahead of me. Another B, an A, and a Master class shooter were below me. Although clearly they were having a “bad day”. I came in at about the 73^rd percentile of the shooters. This is much better than the 52^nd percentile, and 59^th percentile of the previous two matches.

I have been practicing and then testing myself with El Presidente. Here are the results from January 30^th of this year. To make it easy for the spreadsheet and to reduce the need to tape the targets I only track the strings where I got all A-zone hits:

This sucks. I had no idea how slow I had become until I did this test.

And from February 12^th:

Better but not by much. Things still weren’t clicking. I had to really go slow to get the A-zone hits. This was especially true with the first shot after the draw and the split times for shots on the same target. It shouldn’t take almost as long for a second hit on the same target as it did for a transition to another target over three feet from the previous one. Why was it taking so long to get on target with the sights and pull the trigger? I just didn’t know.

From March 11^th, a few days before this match:

The splits on the same target got a lot better. I had been practicing with a .22 on multiple shots on the same target when it suddenly just clicked. The splits just happened without me having to think about them. The sights lined up and the gun went “bang!” without me having to think about it. When I substituted the .40 caliber it still happened.

When I shot the match on Sunday things felt a lot better. The gun went bang without me thinking about it. There were some very short range shots where either I didn’t let up on the trigger enough to get a reset or I was cycling the trigger faster than the gun was cycling the slide. I’ll have to do some tests to find out what is going on with that. And for all except the stage with the 50 yard targets I got good hits. My speed improved without problems with my accuracy.

8.45 second El Presidente’s are still slower than they used to be. I’m pretty sure I was doing them in the mid to high sevens years ago. More practice is needed. The transitions need work. I know this because of this. I should be able to remove at least a tenth of a second. I would then get down into the low 8’s for El Presidentes.

I’m going to the range tomorrow and doing a bunch of transition work with the .22. I’ll do another El Presidente test on Thursday.

I finally found the USPSA match results from last month when I shot a match the day after Valentines day. One stage was particularly well themed:

Shoot them in the heart. The black is considered “hard cover”.

This (quasi) heart shaped outline on the ground is the shooting box.

The results for my division are as follows:

MRCPS The Love Zone

2015-02-15

Match Results – Limited

As you can see I didn’t do all that great. There were ‘C’ and ‘D’ class shooters who came in above me. Among other things, on the last stage I had a major brain fart and fired six shots on the wrong side of a shooting line. That was worth 60 points of penalties. It didn’t even give me any advantage to do so. I just forgot I needed to be on the other side of the line to shoot those targets.

This match was shot before (February 15 versus February 22) that last USPSA match I reported on. In that match I came in at the 59th percentile. In this match I came in at the 52nd percentile. That is a little better but it is essentially unchanged even though there was some practice between the matches.

I attended a Steel Challenge match last Sunday. Here are the results:

I did a little better this time than last. I still made a serious mistake that cost me about two seconds which cost me a couple of positions. On stage two there were six, instead of the usual five, small plates that were a bit harder to hit than most. On string three is had several misses and should have reloaded before shooting the fourth string. But instead I figured I had eight rounds left and it should be fine. I again had a lot of misses and had to reload for the last two plates.

I know better. There was no point in taking that risk. I had a fully loaded magazine on my belt. It would have cost me another couple of seconds off the clock to reload before the fourth string rather than two seconds on the clock during the string.

This is a demonstration of the principle represented here:

This isn’t me. I can quit any time I want.