Canadian Airgun Forum

A full month to work with this time!

Post your scores, along with a description of what sort of shooting you were doing: rifle/pistol, target type & distance, offhand/rested, scoped/open sights.

The only rules that matter: Shoot safely and have fun!

10m pistol, offhand, red dot sight. 506/600

1st entry with the new pistol, not great shooting but at least I have something to beat Probably a case of too much modding, not enough practice. Groups were 48, 49, 52, 51, 53, 49, 52, 52, 47, 53

10m pistol, offhand, red dot. Shot in two sessions. 537/600

I was a bit disappointed with yesterdays results, so I settled in for another go. Picked a bad start time and had to stop for lunch, so I got burned twice by the "can't shoot the first target to save my life" problem, but still managed to edge out my PB - starting to feel the love for the 2240 In line with the "concentrate on execution not scores" advice, my main goal at the moment is to hold the 8 ring. I managed to do that for 6 of ten groups, held 9 for one group and sevens for the rest. Still much room for improvement!

The individual groups were 54, 53, 56, 55, 54, 51, 55, 55, 51, 53

Following up from comments made in the February postal thread... I shot the match last weekend and didn't get anywhere near the scores hoped for, but considering how many 7's there were among the 180 shots my result of 1626 points for 180 shots (average 90.33 points per 10 shots) was at least not completely embarrassing, and earned me a silver medal for my small collection. Had a fair number of pairs of 10's (we shoot 2 pellets per target for ease of scoring) but all too many 7's and 8's tossed in between.

Since then I decided to adopt some different approaches, as it seems I was on the wrong track, both in training and in shooting style, causing me to plateau. While my groups have definitely tightened up within the 9 ring for the most part, the wild jerks to one area or another due to poor trigger consistency is holding me back. So as per an essay in Polish (thanks Google translator) by A. Kudelin I'm now engaged in putting most of my focus on the trigger, taking it away from the sight alignment. Not an easy shift with so many telling one to focus on the front sight, but hey, I focus on the target anyway and use centre aim as front sight focus really doesn't work for me, nor the sub-6 thing.

I'm still a bit of a wreck from the build-up to this match so not training a lot for the next couple of weeks, just shooting a few strings per day. Here's 18 shots at 10 metres with my Pardini K10. It shows rather vividly the difference between concentrating on the trigger pull being smooth with only a small focus on sight alignment (every shot within the 9 ring) and slipping back into too much focus on the alignment when holding too long (all those dropped and stray hits on the lower values).



I'll try to engage properly with this series of postal threads later this month when I've had a chance to settle into whatever it is I'm doing. Shorter holds, trigger focus, and just letting my 60,000+ shots of the past 2 years do the rest of the work for me, trying not to think myself out of too many 10's.

I know you had high expectations, but 1626 and a silver medal sounds worthy of congratulations and a celebration to me! I can't imagine trying to shoot 180 rounds under match conditions - it has to be exhausting. 10m AP is an amazing sport, the further you progress the more it becomes the pursuit of perfection. Everything matters, and absolutely anything can cause you to under-perform.

I will shoot next weekend! This weekend is booked! Gotta get out with the new sail for my Hobie Outback kayak.
I doubt I will repeat my 593! I think I had a lot of luck with me!

Unrelated but,
I did a head shot on a coon last night at 53yds, measured with my golf laser range finder, with my Beeman. Dead on the first shot!

_________________
-Rick

Brocock Concept .22
3 Crosman MK 1 pistol .22

1626 of a possible 1800 still seems a long way to go, especially when the match winner - http://blog.allanharding.com/ - shot a 1686 and the second place was a 1680. And neither of those guys were on their absolute best form. As you say, a pursuit of perfect. Thankfully no one's shot a perfect score (officially - seems someone or other has in practice) so that mark is still sitting there, waiting for anyone to take it. But I suppose if that day comes they'll just make the targets a bit smaller. It's like what I've seen in BMX riding and mountainbikes since I did that stuff in the early 1980's. We thought we were being gonzo back then. Looking at what's possible on bikes now I'm just amazed, never would have dreamed such stunts were going to happen. The bar is always getting set a bit higher.

Well, I shot a couple more sessions since I last posted, but haven't been consistent enough to better my previous score. Strangely enough, the inconsistent shooting produced consistent scores - 527 and 528. This is a weird hobby at times.

Dry fire practice at a target pinned to the wall when you are watching the Boob-tube.

_________________
-Rick

Brocock Concept .22
3 Crosman MK 1 pistol .22

Nice to see this going on!

10m pistol, strong hand?, iron sights, ~1.5 hours. 371/600. (If you spit your coffee on the screen... I'm glad.)


Question for the veterans, my setup is in the picture, how do you scale the 10m targets properly? I printed out 6yd targets and that's all I'm using for now. I'd have to stand outside my balcony for 10m to work...

MrYellow; your targets are too low. At 10metres the regulation height is 1.4metres, plus or minus 5cm, measured at the middle of the 10. As for scaled targets - there are quite a few online if you search, mostly in forums but some not. I have a small collection scaled for 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10 metres and could email them to you if you like. They're in PDF for the most part. Here's a formula for accurate, scoreable scaling if you want to do the legwork yourself.

New Ring size = ((old ring size + pellet size {mm}) * (new distance / Standard distance)) - pellet size {mm}

example, going from full 10m scale to 8m:

((11.5 mm + 4.5 mm)) x (8 m / 10 m)) - 4.5 mm

Oh, and no coffee was snorted onto computers at my end. My first scaled to 6metre matches at home were something like 271/600 or thereabouts if memory serves. I felt outrageously lucky to hit the black at all sometimes. Now I get all mad if I fling one out into the white, like this morning when I shot a string of 5 x 10's then got a twitch as I squeezed the trigger and hit a 4 on the far right. Almost swore. Decided to laugh instead.

Very similar here, except I started out at 15ft and was worried about missing the 3ft wide backstop! Then I felt good when I was only worried about missing the 12x16" target box. Migrating to 10m and keeping the pellets in the scoring region took some time, but the satisfaction had me hooked.

As for throwing shots wide - does anyone else get that feeling that you're falling over backwards? I had that happen last week and tried to fight my way through it. Put one in the 4 for my efforts.

Just visually, that set of 3 by 4 targets looks very small. It would be worth getting a set of Gerard's and printing them out to compare against. (Just very roughly, I'd have thought you might get 6 scaled targets to a page, 12 seems like a lot)

Here's a set of printable targets. I'd recommend setting scaling to 100%, and using draft mode if you're using inkjet or the cost of the black rings is going to drain your ink dry in no time. Draft mode, at least on my Lexmark, is plenty black.

http://www.luthier.ca/other/forum/scale ... argets.zip

It's about 1.2MB as a ZIP.

Wow thank you very, very much for the targets and for the info.

I'll definitely have to rework everything and shoot again. So far my shooting is very inconsistent, I'll be in the black for a shot or two and then in the white and and then outer edges. Lots to learn...

There's a lot you can train into yourself around visualization and consistency in stance and grip and overall timing/method. Do a lot of reading. Especially Piddubnyi. Here. I'm feeling generous with what's been handed on to me, especially thanks to 'V76' who was a member here for a while and organised the most long-standing of postal matches on CAF - and who quit the forum in disgust thanks to some obnoxious members insulting Quebec and him personally. He shared most of this stuff here, some of it privately with me in our year-long email conversation about shooting AP. I'll leave it on my server for a time, so grab the ZIP full of readings and feel free to distribute it if you like. Maybe I should put it on the pirate bay if I can figure out how to do that... Anyway, this file is about MB and contains enough study material to keep one busy for quite a long time. The ZIP file is about 7MB. There may be some duplication between formats, but I don't feel up to weeding that out at the moment. The three folders are files linked to web pages saved and ought to be kept in the same folder as their host HTM files to function correctly.
http://www.luthier.ca/other/forum/AP_training_readings.zip

There's also this video called 'Pistol shooting basics by Efim Khaidurov' which is on Youtube, a bit big to put into the ZIP:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSW1sFMCMCs