Now that Summer (for all intents and purposes) and the Major Matches are over, we're back to shooting at Club matches. Some folks refer to this as "The Competitive Season, Part III".
Part I is February until sometime in June, when we have club matches.
Part II is June to Labor Day, when we have Major Matches.
Part III is September through much of November, when most of the big matches have been completed.
Part IV is from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and January after New Years.
All of this leads up to the concept that some people don't do much match shooting except for club matches, and this year I'm one of them. So it is with real pleasure that I note the re-commencement of regular club matches.
That's the good part. The not-quite-so-good part is the slow grind back to shooting up to expectations, rather than to innate ability.
Today was a good example of not shooting up to expectations.
You will recall that a few days ago I talked about the Albany Club Match, wherein I jinxed myself by focusing on shooting a Clean Match (no misses or other penalties) up to the last stage, where I scored three miss penalties.
This week was No-Shoot week. In a match with only one moving target and essentially simple, yet challenging stages, I managed to hit no-shoot penalty targets on 3 out of the six stages.
Worse, I jinxed myself again.
At the end of Stage 4, while waiting for the preceding squad to clear Stage 5 (of 6), I casually mentioned: "Have you noticed that my gun is running much better now? I installed a new recoil spring. I think that fixed the problem of the slide not going into battery."
You guessed it: on the final two stages, I experienced gun problems because my slide wasn't going into battery. Maybe I should switch from a 10# recoil spring to a 12# recoil spring?
I've checked the slide, the barrel and the frame. I am unable to discern any cracks. After Stage 5, I field-stripped the gun, wiped off the powder residue from slide, frame, barrel and recoils spring assembly, and applied another light coat of oil. I did note that I was missing not one but TWO of the five slide-mount screws, so I installed (with Blue loc-tite) replacement screws.
All to no avail. My problem wasn't sight alignment, it was reliability.
I wasn't the only one in my squad experiencing reliability.
Richard installed an Extended Magazine Release on his STI Limited gun. On the first stage, he dropped 3 magazines when he didn't intend to make a reload.
He removed the Extended Magazine Release. I've had the same experience, as have many other shooters of my acquaintance. We've all realized that it offers no advantage, but instead causes problems because we're just not use to that mag release button sticking out so far. As Richard said: "It worked just fine in practice!"
Yep. That's what I said.
After the 3rd stage, Richard decided to install a longer magazine release spring. It was a lost cause, because for some unknown reason he continued to have magazine problems. By the last stage (Stage 5: "Tennessee Two-Step") he was having problems with jams when his gun went to slide-lock and reload jammed the slide.
I note that within the CCS Section, the ARPC 12th annual Single Stack Match (NB: link is an MS Excel spreadsheet) is the last weekend of this month, followed by the Glock Match (NB: link is an MS WORD document) on Sunday.
Lots of local people were shooting Single-Stack, Limited 10 or Production in preparation for those two matches. If nothing else, the experience served to re-acquaint them with the gun they don't usually use in competition. More often, it showed them that they have often forgotten, or have not recently experienced, the idiosyncrasies of the pistols they don't use much anymore.
Getting back to the main subject.
By the last stage, Richard and I were both stuck with guns which were 'occasionally' malfunctioning, and we didn't know why.
We were having fun, regardless of our personal problems. The weather was absolutely perfect: it wasn't raining (much), the wind wasn't blowing targets down, the sun wasn't burning us up and there was no snow on the ground. The company was good, everybody worked (even unto the 'tear-down' at the end of the match -- TCGC doesn't offer 'paid' tear-down as do two of the other clubs in the section, but that's not a problem.
So I admit, the following video puts both Richard and me in A Bad Light, but it's all because of mechanical problems which we attempted, but were unable to correct during a match.
I can't speak for Richard, but if you find it funny it's because you haven't ezperienced the same problems ... yet.
We'll laugh at you then, and expect you to grin and bear it.
Of course, that doesn't excuse my 3 penalties for no-shoots.
Match results are available here, and more pictures and videos will soon be available at Jerry the Geek's Video Shooting Gallery.
No comments:
Post a Comment