Springtime in the Spring

First, it has been a very busy month!

I mentioned last time that the trigger safety on my primary IDPA pistol had gone on walkabout. This was discovered before a regular Wednesday night match and later research reveals that I had not noticed it was missing for at least a week and probably two. Well, I made little of the missing part, completed the match, split the collected brass with another loader and went on with life, including ordering a replacement trigger, which Zev thankfully covered under warranty exchange.

A couple of days later, I was cleaning that brass and I was kinda vaguely on the lookout for the safety and extremely to my surprise, it was in that brass! That means it was lost there at or before the lunchtime range trip in which I snapped a pic of the pistol, survived who know how many times sweeping the floor, including a couple of IDPA matches, only to end up the the *half* of the brass swept up on *the night* I discovered it was missing. Sadly, the lottery tickets I bought when I realized the pretty low probabilities of all that happening did not pan out as well.

Even before the trigger fiasco, I had decided that I would attempt to shoot CDP division for while, which basically means either 1911 and barney mag or the Glock 21. I went for the Glock angle.

My Glock 21 had Warren Tactical Sevigny sights on it, which are very nice but that I personally don’t care for. I am kinda spoiled to dots on the rear sight and I had some delay in finding a sight picture quickly. I picked up a set of TruGlo TFX Pro sights and swapped them out. Now that they are in place, I kind of wish I’d put the TFX Pro sights on the G20 and put the older TFO sights on the G21. I may still.

In any case, it turns out that between the “wrong” trigger and the increase in power factor for CDP, I was kinda crappy at CDP. After giving it a try for several matches and growing to hate it, I decided the retraining curve was sharper than I wanted to tolerate for the leadup to three major matches in 3 months, so I switched back to the G20 shooting soft 40S&W and started having scores that didn’t piss me off. 🙂

I went to what is officially the most distant IDPA match that I have gone to *for the match*. I did manage to take in a local match in Phoenix last summer while I was there for work and that was farther away, but this was a level 3 IDPA Regional Match to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The event raised $7000 for the AFSP. When the dust first settled, I was 7th in my class and division. While we waited for the scores to be finalized, it turned out that one squad’s scores for Stage 8 had dissolved into digital dust somewhere. At first, they had requested that squad return to that stage for a reshoot, but it turned out that some of those guys had left for the day. They decided to throw that stage out, which did result in a little bit of cheering. Apparently it was not a great stage for many shooters. My own time jumped up quite a bit. It was my worst stage as well, though other people must had done especially poorly on it. When the dust settled for real this time, I had a better score but had gone down to 9th. Obviously, at least a couple of ESP Sharpshooters had shot generally better than I did, but must have really stunk up Stage 8.

For the matches leading up to the Arkansas trip and for that match, I had worked up a nice load running 130PF at home, just to be sure I had a little margin for the chrono in Arkasas. I loaded 300 rounds into boxes that were marked specifically for that match and eight more for the several matches before going to Arkansas. All of this ammo is ideally the same.

For the first match after I got back from Arkansas, I had some intermittent failures to feed. In a couple of those stages, it was just about like I had a bolt action Glock, having to bump the slide or rack out what felt like after every round fired. It was painful!

Between stages, I cleaned the barrel. The pistol had not been cleaned since the MVSA match and while I had never had that much trouble with it being just a little dirty, it seemed to help some. Then I noticed that it might be one particular magazine. It’s just hard to troubleshoot during a match.

It occurs to me that some of these magazines are approaching more than 10 years old and still others came to me from elsewhere, so no telling how old they are. I decided to do a full clean and recondition of all of them, complete with replacement springs. A 10 pack of Wolff +10% magazine springs is less than $50 and less than the individual cost of ordering 7 springs. They should be in soon.

 

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