This evening was the 3rd Friday IDPA match at LASC. I arrived a bit early and shot a Dot Torture at 7 yards using the pistol-training.com target. The lack of live fire practice was apparent. I went from consistently scoring 49 at 7 yards to a 40 tonight. I do find the gray circles on the PTC target a little harder to see on my poorly lit indoor range than the thick black outlines on the dedicated DT target, but they are not that much harder to see.

My POI does seem to be different with this gun. While it’s not enough to be a problem for defensive shooting, it is an issue when shooting 2″ circles at 7 yards. Having said that, there is still a very good possibility that it is me. I won’t know for sure until I get my practice gun fixed and I can shoot them side-by-side.

Only 6 people showed up and we decided to shoot drills instead of running a match. We mostly focused on accuracy related drills. It seemed that was where most of the guys present could use the work since only a couple of us could keep all our shots (2H, SHO and WHO) on a 3×5 card at 3 yards.

I was at the range for 3 hours and shot a total of 250 rounds.

I’m really focusing on fixing my grip. It feels better, but I won’t know anything for sure until I get to spend some quality time at the range.

At my bullseye league tonight we continued to use the reduced targets at 50′. As I mentioned before, I find these much harder to shoot than the standard sized targets at the usual distances (25 and 50 yards). Tonight I scored a 796-13x:

• Slow Fire Match: 159
• National Match Course: 273-5x
• Timed Fire Match: 176-4x
• Rapid Fire Match: 188-4x

After bullseye, I went to the adjacent range and shot 400 rounds of 9mm through my P30. I worked mostly on slow-fire accuracy drills (3×5 cards and 2″ circles) from 3 to 25 yards and a few 10-shot bursts at an 8″ circle at 10 yards. The pistol-training.com target continues to be an excellent target for practice sessions, allowing me to work on a lot of drills with having to constantly repair or replace it.

The biggest thing I learned tonight is that I’m not getting a proper grip during my dry fire practice. The gun kept “squirting” out of my weak hand and allowed my strong-hand thumb to interfere with the slide release and prevented the slide from locking back on an empty magazine. I think I’m not getting my weak-hand far enough around and towards the backside of the grip. I’ll experiement with using different sized grip inserts and see if this is somehting that can be addressed via hardware. However, I suspect that more than anything it’s more a matter of me needing to slow down during practice and ensure that I’m properly establishing my support hand grip.

I also noticed that my WHO shooting had suffered. I had gotten to the point that I was about able to keep 90% of my WHO shots inside a 2″ circle at 7 yards. Tonight while I was able to maintain a mostly 2″ group, I was impacting the target an inch of so low and right of where I wanted to. While this is likely just do to a lack of practice, there is a possibility that my carry gun has a slightly different POA/POI relationship than my practice gun. I did notice that during 2H and SHO shooting that I was consistently a little low and to the right, but not as much as during my WHO shooting (which make me think this is more of a software problem).

I was at the range for 2 hours and 15 minutes and fired a total of 490 rounds.

I suck at multitasking.

After the Shot Show, a very exciting and important project that I’ve been working on with a partner — but had been on the back burner for a while — became my number one priority. I shouldn’t mention it at all since we can’t publicly discuss it quite yet; however, working on it has consumed almost every waking moment of my life (except for time spent at my day job) for the past few weeks. Today we’ve reached an important milestone and that has freed up some time for me to catch up on the website.

Given how busy I’ve been, I haven’t been able to get to the range for any live fire practice. For the past 3 weeks I’ve done nothing but dry fire. I put in a total of 3 hours and 36 minutes and did a total of 1,869  repetitions. I won’t bore you with the actual break down of those reps, but was a combination of the same stuff I usually do — concealed draws, reloads, press-outs, and Wall Drills.

A few days ago, after approximately 19,000 trigger pulls, the trigger return spring in my training gun broke again. This time it was a clean break and very obvious, unlike last time. I really need to get a set of spare parts on hand and stick the the 12,500 round (or in this case trigger pull) replacement interval that ToddG suggests. In the mean time, I’ll be using my carry gun for training.

I’m going to try to keep things up to date here on the website. Despite having reached an important milestone, there is still a plenty of high priority work to do on the other project that will likely consume the majority — if not all — of my free time for the foreseeable future. As a result, there will likely be more multi-day catchup posts (like this one) if I have long stretches of nothing but dry fire. I am disappointed since my original plan was post each and every day, but sometimes life (and more important things) conspire against us and plans need to change.

I continue to be impressed with the comfort of the Shaggy AIWB holster. In the past few weeks I’ve spent over 100 hours — 5,400 miles over the course of 8 days — wearing the Shaggy for 12+ hours at a time while driving. After getting used to it, it is easily the most comfortable holster I’ve ever worn.

My luck at the HK booth didn’t extend to the dinner and I didn’t win the MR556A1. Oh well, maybe next year…

During the HK Booth Get Together I continued my good luck by winning the knife they were giving away. At the HK dinner tomorrow night they will be giving away a new MR556A1 rifle. I hope my luck continues, but given the larger turn out at the dinner chances of winning that are slim.