Semi-dry fire practice

Turns out my new timer will not pick up the sound of my Glock dryfiring. No real surprise there but it makes getting real times on things like draws pretty difficult. I know I could set up a par time to beat but wanted to see where I am first. Well, I had a handful of primed 9mm cases which were just sitting around so I pressed them into use. The timer picked up the primer pop without any trouble. I practiced draws from concealment as I knew I was hitting around 1.11-1.20 drawing without concealment. A hands relaxed draw on a target about 15 feet away and about 12 inches square was around 1.5-1.6 consistantly with some draws going as low as 1.31 seconds. Turn and draws from surrender (El Prez start) were in the 1.65 range. Speed rocking I was able to post a 1.02 run with 1.05 being about standard. Unfortunately I could not confirm an index. I tried one "head shot" scenario with about a 3" circle at 15 or so feet, 1.85 seconds.

These were pretty handy drills but I can't truly trust the results without live fire to confirm the hits or lack thereof.

More shooting stuff from the weekend

Saturday, my buddy and I went out to set up the shotgun side match stage(s) for the USPSA match today. We spent a couple of hours clearing out an unused bay at South East Firearms Training Center AKA Jeff's backyard. We ended up with a nice little speed course with two clay targets and ten steel plates. We then ran it though a few times with 9mm Winchester white box ammo to calibrate the plates. (No we didn't shoot the clays with the 9mm.) Then we tinkered around doing horrendous turn and draws (essentially the first shot of an El Presidente stage) on the one "A" zone sized plate.

After wandering back up to Jeff's house and helping dispose of the (several days old) deer doe that turned up out by the pond, we let him convince us to run through a pistol course he had set up a couple weeks back as a training tool. Since Jeff is a GM class shooter, it would have been rude for us to turn him down, so we reluctantly agreed. (Yeah, right...) Tony's first run at the course took 20+ seconds. By the time we had run it through with Jeff pointing out errors and improvement areas, Tony hit 13 seconds and change and I had run a 10+ second run with a open gun and 29+1 in the gun. (Ok, the multiple misses and hits on the no-shoot targets caused that 10 second run to dim a bit, umm, lot.) Jeff, however, posted a 9.89 first run and hit 9.29 with mostly A's and a couple of C's. Him = GM, us = nowhere close.

We convinced him to wander down and critique the shotgun stage, which involved a Benelli and bag of shotshells. We all ran it to offer up objective opinions, us around 16-18 seconds, Jeff ~13.

Back to the house to prep for Sunday's match. I loaded ~60 rounds of 40 S&W for Tony, 140 rounds of 9 minor and 100 rounds of 9 major for myself. Mounted the skyscreens for the timer/chronograph. Charged the batteries for the camcorders, packed the shotguns, shells, etc, etc.

This morning. Have to be out early as the club president was striken with some flu bug and did not get out to set up courses yesterday. Get back out to Jeff's around 8:30 and help set up for the match. It's a special classifier match and I do not have classifications in Limited 10 and Open yet so I am running them both back to back. I have my Glock 17 set up the a compensated barrel and slide mounted red dot sight and my plain vanilla Glock 19. I'm using the same holster and mag carriers for each but have to swap ammo. It was a bit hectic but I manage to shoot all stages twice. The more I shoot the open gun, the better I seem to shoot the limited/production gun by comparison. I will probably beat myself on match points with the L10 runs over the Open runs.

After lunch and everyone else was gone, I came back by and tested the chronograph function which seemed to work exceptionally well. It confirmed my minor loads are indeed making minor at least.

Home from the ER

As I suspected my daughter's tests did not show anything abnormal. The one thing the doctor did note was sinusitis, which she inherited from me. This got her an anti-biotic prescription to clear it up. She is scheduled to get an EEG done on the 19th to further check for signs of seizure related illnesses. Otherwise, things are pretty much back to normal.

ER

Well, it's never fun being in the ER but things could be worse.

My oldest daughter fainted at school today and her doctor thought it best to go to the ER for tests. She seems to be fine now, no nausea or headache, etc. The staff has been very friendly and helpful. She's had an EKG and CT scan as well as having blood drawn. We're waiting for the blood work now. Should be another 45 minutes or so. As I suspected nothing abnormal has shown up. Usually when these things happen, there is no smoking gun per se. So we'll hang out watching cartoons until the tests are back.

Such fun...

Shooting stuff

I got my timer in Tuesday but have not had time to take it out to the range yet. The manual did not make it to me and I had an IDPA match Tuesday evening, so I did not get to play it it much then.

I've run some par times and have begun assessing where I am for a few tasks. I have concentrated on mag changes and I'm pretty consistant at 1.5 seconds. It takes about twice that for a reload with retention. I need to get a bar set up for the chronograph skyscreens. I tried temporarily taping them to a table and shooting across with an airsoft gun but my interior lights don't work well with the skyscreens. I only got one reading which was about the velocity I expected. It should work much better in sunlight.

The IDPA match was a good thing for me. I have been shooting USPSA for a while and this has really improved my speed. I put the fastest time on the speed stage. Unfortunately I dropped a point so another shooter bested the stage with .17 slower time but no points down. Since he won the match I felt pretty good about that stage result. I bobbled one stage due to a problem with my ammo. One case needed to have been retired as the primer pocket had gotten loose. This is one of the problems of using range brass for reloading. Needless to say I tossed it ASAP.

It was good shooting with the TTG group again. I like shooting both sports, IDPA and USPSA, as both emphasize fast accurate shooting but both also encourage different methods of shooting a stage. IDPA tends to force the shooter to do it the "right" way, at least according to IDPA conventions. USPSA allows the shooter to solve the stage as he or she chooses. As a result, I find I do things in IDPA that I normally would not practice, while I tend to run closer to full out in USPSA. I figure the combination of skills will give me more choices if I have to use my guns in a non-sporting situation.