I needed some repair work done on my STI Eagle 5.1 and from my phone call to them I expected to have it back in about 10 days. It arrived at their factory on August 12^th. I received it back yesterday. That was exactly 35 days.

I started getting a hint that things weren’t going so well about a week after they got it when I got a call and instead of them telling me it was on it’s way back David told me he had just briefly looked at it and, “that’s a really old gun”. Hmm… And your point is? It turns out there was far more wrong with the gun than I knew and that a lot of things are built different now compared to when the gun was new. That meant some replacement parts weren’t just drop in. They were going to have to do some machining on the frame. Stuff that wasn’t going to be covered under warranty. Fine, give me an estimate and then I’ll decide.

Nearly a week after that on August 31^st I had an exact amount and sent David (yes, to him personally rather than STI) a check for $231 for the non-warranty work. He also told me there were things wrong that he couldn’t really fix and but it would still be good enough for “What we down here in Texas call a ‘truck gun'”. Great. My STI is now a “truck gun”. But for $231 I would have functional gun that would be far better than any other gun I could buy for $231.

To be fair the stuff he didn’t want to work on were things that I had long suspected were messed up by the original gunsmith (who shall remain nameless because he is no longer working as a gunsmith anyway) who built it from a kit. Nearly the first thing I did when I got my hands on the gun back in 1998 was check the slide to frame fit when the gun was in battery. I was shocked and disappointed that there was quite a bit of movement. I looked up in surprise and the gunsmith said that he had asked me if I was going to carry the gun or just shoot it in competition. I told him both. So he made the tolerances much greater than a competition only gun. He said that he was taught that a carry gun needed to have looser tolerances so it would be more reliable. I asked if it could be tightened up and he told me that for all practical purposes the answer was no. Rather than rejecting the gun due to a misunderstanding I took it. I really couldn’t complain about the accuracy. It wasn’t what I expected but there were very few stages which I competed in for which the accuracy was a limiting factor.

But that wasn’t the only problem with the gun.

The lugs for the barrel link broke on the original STI barrel after only about 20K rounds. The gunsmith figured it had to be a defective barrel. STI didn’t see it that way and I paid for new, non-STI barrel to be installed. A few years later I told someone else about this and he told me the only way that break occurs is if the barrel was installed wrong. David, at STI, told me the “new” barrel was installed incorrectly as well but it isn’t likely to break–it just doesn’t lock up quite right and the accuracy is degraded.

So, I took the gun to the range tonight and it functioned well. The new safety fits better than the old ones (I had the first gunsmith replace a one that broken once before) ever did but it required some machining on the frame to get the new safety to fit. I’m glad I didn’t try to do it myself because I don’t have access to a milling machine to do the type of cuts that were required–besides not knowing that the frames were built different now and that the frame cuts were required instead of removing material from the safety.

I’m a little annoyed at STI for taking five weeks when I expected something closer to one week. And the non-warranty work being done via a direct payment to David is a little unprofessional. But except for the slide to frame fit everything on the gun looks very good to me. I’ll probably continue to use the gun in competition for quite a while longer. Maybe next summer I’ll be able to justify (money, it’s a lot of money) a new STI (Eagle 5.0 or maybe an Eagle 6.0–any suggestions?) and put this one “behind the seat of the truck”.

Regardless of my irritation with STI I still say–I shoot a STI gun in competition, I carry a STI gun and you should too.

I have an expired Utah license and because it has been expired too long I have to reapply as a new applicant. I’m seriously thinking of taking this Utah Concealed Firearm Permit Class on September 26^th.

Anyone else want to show up at the class and hang out with me? It’s just four hours on a Saturday.

Update: I was reminded by Barb that her schedule is changing and I will be in Idaho on this weekend. And with her new schedule none of the Utah classes listed match my schedule.

A a good joke is based on at least a little bit of truth. Examples are here and the variation here.

Life imitated art just down the road from me (even closer to home is that Ry, son James, and I used to work in the building next door):

Kirkland police, contacted today for more details, said a passerby on their way to the local farmer’s market called 911 saying that they thought they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47 about 4:20 p.m.

Here is the AK-47:

Via email from Say Uncle:

I thought IDPA was supposed to be about real world defensive shooting. If so then why didn’t the shooter get off the line of attack? In my training at Insights we did a LOT of that. I kept wanting to push off to one side just watching this video.

Robb Allen also has some comments on the video.

As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday I had a request for permission to use some of my pictures in an Italian magazine and blog. He told me:

Both on my site and on my articles, I write about reloading, especially for pistols.

One of my elaboration led me to examine the correlation between recoil intensity and bullets weight. I will public this article both on my site and on “Armi Magazine” journal. Now I am searching some pictures about recoil.

This email to ask you if I could use some of beautiful photos from your blog, in particular that in attached (have you the HD format ?), for sure I will mention your name on the pictures.

Here are the pictures (cropped down to the interesting parts) I sent him:

Some of you will recognize the guns and others will recognize their own hands.

Update: I have a .pdf file of the completed article now. Only the first picture above was used (Robb, your hands may soon be famous in Italy). Once the article is actually published I should be getting a link to it and I will post it. Here is the title of the article:

“Tiro dinamico: palla leggera o pesante ?” – “Dynamic shooting (IPSC): light or heavy bullet?”

Sub title: “Rilevamento e tempo di riarmo di una pistola in funzione del peso palla” – “Recoil and slide time as a function of bullet weight”

As I have been shooting IPSC (now USPSA) for nearly 15 years this is a topic of great interest to me. From what I can tell looking at the graphs and picking up a few words and numbers in the article this is a very interesting article. I’ll probably spend the time to run it through an automated translator to get a better idea of what it says.

Suppose you are interested in improving your pistol scores in a game where time matters–a lot. USPSA, Steel Challenge, or IDPA for example.

How do you go about that? Well, practice, sure. But what do you practice? And how do you know what your weak areas are? It was several years ago (since this post is about precise units of time it was 12 years, 10 months and 1 day ago) but I took a class called Intensive Handgun Skills and learned some interesting things about this topic.

I’m not sure why but a lot of people spend a lot of time practicing their draw (I used to too). They will spend hours trying to shave another 0.1 or 0.2 seconds off their draw. 0.5 seconds faster? That would be awesome, right?

Maybe not. Let’s do some simple arithmetic.

Suppose you are shooting a fairly simple stage such as El Presidente. You draw (and turn), shoot six rounds, reload, and shoot six more rounds.

That involves one draw, one reload, and ten splits. If you were to cut 0.05 seconds off each of your splits you are just as well off as if you had cut that awesome 0.5 seconds off of your draw or reload.

What about something even simpler? A Steel Challenge stage has five plates and involves drawing and shooting five rounds (assuming you hit them all with one shot). So that is one draw and four splits. In order to match that awesome 0.5 seconds you worked so hard to gain on your draw you need to improve your splits by only 0.125 seconds each.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore your draw or reloads but it does mean, in absolute terms, your split times are generally more important than the draw and reloads.

But how much is there to be gained in your shooting? If you are already getting 0.25 second A-zone double taps on the USPSA target at 10 yards getting another 0.05 seconds represents a 20% improvement. If your draw is 2.5 seconds then 0.5 seconds also represents a 20% improvement to it. One might think that the effort involved should be about the same, 20% either way. Right?

It turns out that isn’t true. Or at least that isn’t the way to bet.

A better way to look at the problem is to compare yourself to other shooters and keep yourself “balanced”. If you improve your weakest areas you will get a better return on your investment in practice time and ammo.

Here is a table they gave us (I added the “Calculated El Presidente” row) at that class nearly 13 years ago:

In the table above it is assumed you are getting all A-zone hits. If you aren’t getting A-zone hits in practice you are going too fast. You should push yourself until you occasionally get a non-A hit but then you back off such that you are just on the edge.

So if you are already getting 0.25 second A-Zone double taps you are shooting at about 95% of the skill level of the best shooters in the world. But if your draw is 2.5 seconds you are at about the 55% level. If you spend your time on your draw you should be able to cut 0.5 seconds off of it much faster and easier than you could cut another 0.05 off of your splits. And probably you will get over a full second off of it without too much trouble.

This assumes you are using the proper technique. You may be hitting a “wall” because you are practicing the wrong thing. If you are way off “balance” and things aren’t getting better as fast as you think they should then get some expert instruction to make sure you are practicing the right thing. Remember what Say Uncle said one year and five days ago.

Similar trade-offs can be made for determining what other skills you should practice.

Keep it balanced and practice the right things.