CTRP - January 18th, 2008 - USPSA Match

This was the first match with the new gun, and the first monthly match of the year in Waco. Arthur Brown runs a fine match! I won this match, even with some difficulties. Here's the video - comments follow...




Here we see one example of why its not a good idea to take new equipment to a big match. Obviously, this was just a local match - I use local level matches as match practice, so its an appropriate venue to try out new equipment. I have a tendency to push the gun into my left hand when indexing the gun, or when moving from right to left, and this causes me to bump the mag button and drop magazines. For most folks, the answer is to not use a mag release button. In my case, my short thumbs require me to shift the gun around a lot to reach the mag release, especially on a wide body STI frame. So, I've developed a method of building a guard around the mag button using JB Weld that works like a champ. In practice, I hadn't caused the problem with my new Open gun, yet - but it showed right up in a match situation. Needless to say, I've built the mag button guard on the new gun, now, and the problem is resolved satisfactorily.

The weather was pretty chilly - good training for the Florida Open coming up in a week and a half. I'm not sure anyone had a good match, in the end - there were lots of misses and no-shoots being hit, mental errors, etc. Even with the two dropped mags, and a rather stinky classifier, I still won the match by 25%. On the plus side, the new gun times well in the real world, and runs sharp, and I started getting dialed in on the gun well during the match.

The courses were a bit different, compared to what we've been used to at Waco. For starters, the "house" that usually dominated stage 2 is gone in preparation for the Texas Open. There were quite a number of partial and/or long shots in the match, which worked out to be good training for Florida, as well. Many times in the past, the Waco match has a lot of closer, wide open targets, but not this time. Between Arthur's stage designs and the weather, this became a very challenging match!