30% chance of rain be damned. I’m going to the gun range!

Well, I’m actually back from the gun range.

Chronographing

A couple weeks ago I loaded up variants of my 9mm plinking load. In short, coming to the end of my Remington small pistol primers, and the rule is if you change something in the recipe you need to re-test to ensure all is good. So, I finally was able to get to the range to chronograph it all.

I will have detailed results later (lots of numbers to crunch). But at least a cursory glance over the numbers leads me to believe I’ll be just fine switching to the Federal or Wolf primers… small difference, remains to be seen just how statistically relevant the difference is. More eventually.

Updated: data now posted.

My Work

On the last range trip I left knowing a few things to work on. Karl was kind enough to provide some suggestions. So I did a combination of that.

Started by running the 1 target strings of those same drills. How funny… while at the range I thought that I hadn’t improved any (I was still not pleased with the numbers I saw). Getting home here and writing up this posting, I’m comparing my numbers from last time against now. I did improve! Yea! Across the board I was about a half second faster. For instance, 1 target, 3  yards, 6 shots. Last time I did it in 3.02 seconds with the first shot at 1.54. This time I did it in 2.59 seconds with the first shot at 1.46.

On the whole, my first shot times improved maybe a quarter second… not sure if I’m getting out of the holster faster or onto the trigger sooner. I know I felt like I was really slow on my draw, but generally doing a 1.5 second draw from concealment (IWB holster @ 3 o’clock) isn’t horrible. And certainly, my splits are improved.

So that’s the other thing Karl suggested I do. Just buckle down and shoot fast and put 5 rounds in the target. Just watch the sights and see what they do. The point is to get my brain to learn what that sight picture should look like. Splits in all my shooting (not just this drill) were coming in the 0.18 to 0.22 range, so that’s certainly improved, and I started to burn it into my brain what that sight picture should look like. Will still need a lot of range time to really ingrain it, but I’m starting to rewire my brain.

All in all, I’m pleased to see some improvement. I do still need to work on all of these things, including those fundamentals of reacting quicker to the timer beep, getting the gun out and first shot off (getting my eyes switched from target to front sight sooner, finger working the trigger sooner). A 1 second concealment draw (beep, rip shirt, draw, first shot) would be a great goal to achieve (and not a “gaming” IDPA concealment draw… I’m talking real-world, how I carry every day).

All good. Still much work to do. But, I didn’t want to spend hours there working on me because…..

Daughter’s Fun

Daughter came with me today. She’s been helping me almost every time I’m at the reloading bench, so she wanted to go with to see how all this chronographing stuff worked. And of course, get some trigger time herself.

Main thing we did was work with the Buck Mark .22. I set my cardboard at 10 yards and stapled 3 6″ paper plates in a “stop light” column on the cardboard. We started out just working on sight picture, then trigger control, tweaking her grip and stance along the way. She understands the notion of a “high grip” but a couple of times she got a little too high with her thumbs and the slide bit her. 🙂

After she reestablished her fundamentals, I had her try moving from plate to plate. Then a round of going a little faster (about 1 shot a second). Then a round of trying to put everything through the same hole. I tell you… when she did that? Her first 2/3rds of the magazine went great, but then I could tell her arms were peeding out so the last few shots dropped. Still, little girl is a pretty decent shot.

Take a look:

Ignore the middle target, the 9mm holes, and the .22 caliber holes not in the paper plate (the 9 holes are from me, the other .22 ones are from another gun which we learned has messed up sights… more on this later). The middle plate was full of a lot of me blazing away. So really, the 2 plates to focus on are the top and the bottom. That’s a 6″ paper plate, but that “inner circle” is 4″, and she was shooting at 10 yards.  The combination of all the shooting she did, from the slow at each plate, to moving from plate to plate, to the tight groups. I know you can’t see how each string fared, but little girl did good. She’s not yet Julie Golob, but so long as she’s improving and having fun, all that matters.

Anyway, twas a good morning at the range. I’ll have more numbers later.