It’s not my fault, really. The seller made it too easy….

I finally swapped out the Burris red dot sight on my G20 non-compensated slide for a set of TruGlo fiber optic sights. I got a compact sight pusher tool from RST. It’s a simple & clever “I could have made that” design but I didn’t have to.

The pusher consists of two steel plates, both with holes and one with nuts welded in front of them. There are two long thumbscrews for clamping the slide between the plates and a shorter one with an interchangeable tip that does the actually pushing work.

Clamping the pusher to the slide is pretty trivial, beyond aligning the pusher screw to hit the sight but not the slide.

The base plate of the Burris sight is only slightly narrower than the slide, so all this pusher could do was pop it loose and start it moving. I put the slide in a vise and tapped the sight the rest of the way out with a handy deadblow hammer, which was bigger than needed. I have no doubt that I could have completed the removal without the vise if required.

Installing the new sight was pretty much exactly the reverse of removing the old. I had to tap the new sight far enough into the dovetail for the RST pusher plate to be able to clamp to the slide, then the pusher very easily and precisely moved it into place.

That pic was deceptively hard to get. The focus depth of field on my smartphone is narrow enough that I had to hold it almost at the limit of my reach for front and rear sight to both be in focus. Since I needed to crop most of the pic, I had to turn the resolution up to max. Pretty happy with it, actually.

The one complaint about the RST was something I might have been able to avoid, but the soft brass pusher tip left brassy colored scuff dots on the black finish on both sights. This is mostly removable, but particularly on the Burris plate, cleaning the brass dot off left a slightly polished finish. I think that is because the Burris plate has a paint/powdercoat finish and the TruGlo is some sort of chemical finish like anodizing.

The tool comes with a spare brass point and a steel point. The steel point may have actually been better for not leaving these marks. If I need to adjust the TruGlo sight, I will test the steel point for that.

Though it is a fairly common “mod”, I had not taken the time to paint fill the imprinted lettering on my magazines and the slide of the pistol.

Pretty happy with the added contrast. It doesn’t help it shoot any better, but it was a nice project that I could do in a couple of hours with a bonus of spending time with my Love in the craftroom.

As an aside, I noticed while doing this work that the screw holding the front sight is loose. It will be an easy enough fix, removing the screw and sight, cleaning with acetone and reassembling with Locktite.

There are many descriptions on the web as to the lettering procedure. In my case, I first cleaned the slide and magazines with acetone. Next, I used plain ol’ Testors model white enamel and a size 0 detail round brush. Technically, I was globbing it on to fill all the lines, but I tried to keep the glob in the lines and the part outside the lines as thin as reasonably possible. I filled all the lettering except for #10, which I went back and did in red. I wish I’d had a brighter red, maybe a fluorescent red or orange, even green. The point is that #10 is also filled but in another color. In IDPA shooting, magazines in my divisions are typically loaded to 10 rounds and since I am corrected to slightly farsighted with my contact lenses, it is hard to make out even the higher contrast lettering to read the actual number. Making the 10 another color makes it easier to check the magazine capacity.

Once all the paint was well dried came the somewhat tedious bit. I used the Testors thinner on bits of paper towel. It took a couple of magazines to refine the technique, but what seemed to work well was to put a drop of thinner on a small piece of paper towel and quickly rub it over a small area of lettering, checking between each stroke. When only the desired coloring is left, buff the area with a dry paper towel. This was the fastest way and required the least retouching cleanup. The thinner needs to be really light on the towel. Too much on the towel and it wets the paint too much and too much is removed from the lettering. I did all the white then came back to the red with fresh towels to keep the white from becoming kind of pink.

I pretty pleased with how they turned out.

In a previous post, I noted that I had a magazine that did not easily drop clear at reload time. Since I had numbered the magazines, I knew which one it was. While I was preparing the magazines, I had them all in one place and wanted to compare this troublemaker with it’s stablemates. I found a couple of differences that I am sure are documented online somewhere else, but here goes….

Since the empty magazine wasn’t dropping well when released, I first wanted to compare the latching notch. It turns out that there was a pretty big difference immediately visible. The magazine on the right is the one that doesn’t drop well.

In further digging, I noticed a difference in the followers as well. The one marked with a 2 is the one that doesn’t drop well. Due to the shadow, it’s hare to see, but the top magazine follower has a simple ’10’ on it while the bottom one has ’10 mm’ completely obscured by the shadow.

Referring back to the pic above of all the magazines, note that the two on the left are slightly different in the placement of the Glock logo. Yes, I have two magazines of this different model. In the original numbering order, these were magazines 0 and 2. The first was easy to remove from the magazine order. I did all other shooting with magazines 1, 2 and 3. However, I have so rarely had to drop mag #2 on the clock that I haven’t noticed if it also had trouble dropping clear.

Partly to address this issue and partly because I just have them, I decided to install the six magazine extension floor plates that I got in the box of goodies that included, among other things, most of these magazines. The previous owner found that, with all other equipment on his pistol, these extension floor plates in stock condition made the overall weight of the pistol perilously close to overweight for IDPA. He drilled out some material from the inside of the plates to reduce the weight. I hope my combination of parts fits under the wire because the added weight to the magazine makes all six thus equipped drop out of the pistol nicely. I have put them on both of the ‘odd’ magazines for the acid test.

The pistol is a close but passing fit in the IDPA box with the extensions.

Well, I didn’t get to attend the SO class. I will try harder to make the next one!

A few of my coworkers and I have begun a lunchtime range trip. Three Thursdays in a row have had us going to three different local ranges. For the last two, I have also attended IDPA matches that evening and I think it has helped. Last night’s match was particularly gratifying. I like all those 0’s and 1’s. In fact, there was a single 3 and all other targets were 0’s and 1’s. Oh, and one procedural for taking a step when I was supposed to be flat footed for those targets. I didn’t even know I did it. 🙂

At yesterday’s shooty lunch, I was was shooting hot ammo. Power Pistol handloaded 40’s and some bulk 10mm I bought some time ago that are pretty peppery. I need to chrono those someday. Then for the match, I was back to my usual semi-mild 155/165 grain TiteGroup loads. While I didn’t specifically train with big ammo and shoot with lighter, that’s how it worked out. It was quite a confidence booster.

At the match, I had one magazine that didn’t drop free very well. Because I only yesterday numbered my magazines with some skate tape stickers from Dawson Precision and I kept track of which ones I was using last night, I know which one it was. I will see what I can figure out, but I suspect it will be a slight burr on the notch where the magazine engages the release.

Having loaded up a good inventory of IDPA ammo, I took time to inventory my reloading components and find that I am in pretty decent shape there. Since I am consuming more 40S&W than anything else, it makes sense to have some extra for components needed for 40. I was gifted with a big heavy bag of 40S&W brass. I haven’t weighed it, but I imagine its in the 10 pound range, which puts it at about 1000 rounds. Add that to the stock I already had and I should be able to practice enough to help. 🙂

Speaking of practice and chronographing… Begining at about 2:40 into this Jerry Miculek video about a cool shotgun speedloader (interesting in its own right), I noticed a piece of equipment in the background. It seems obvious to me *now* but it had simply not occurred to me that a bullet trap could be sized to be mounted on a trailer. In my mind, a bullet trap small enough to be portable was just a safe area tool and all others were part of a permanent structure, typically an indoor shooting range. Now I want one.

I see a small unit with a 24″ square opening as adequate to my most common need, a safe place to chrono handloads and otherwise test firearms. Other than a lotto win purchase, I think I’ll have to just keep my eyes open for something for sale or make one.

I haven’t updated the ol’ blog in a while, but I have still been shooting!

The intervening time included one major match, a bunch of local matches and a couple of months fighting off a return of my childhood nemesis, asthma.

Asthmatically speaking, it’s now well controlled. I’m essentially symptom free once we found the right combination of treatments, which turned out to be Singulair, Breo Ellipta, albuterol and occasional Allegra for good measure. Once I was able to get it under control with medication, I have been able to wean completely off the medication once more.

I haven’t stopped tracking all my matches, but I have stopped deeply analyzing bad stages. A tip from With Winning In Mind is to make note of bad stages and their general causes, but to not exhaustively analyze them as I have been. That actually reinforces bad behaviors by dedicating a lot of mind-space to them.

As I have begun looking at stages that way, I have also realized that, while the actual details may vary, the root cause of…. I’m going to go out on a limb and say probably all…. of my bad stages is….  prepare yourself for this nugget of wisdom…. not doing everything right.

What looks like a quote from Captain Obvious is more subtle than it seems. Obviously, I didn’t do everything right or I would not have scored badly on the stage in question. But the subtle bit is that rather than agonize over what I did *wrong*, I need to add to what I did right.

I have cranked out a lot of ammo lately, about 2000 rounds of 40 S&W, split between 155 and 165 grain bullets. 155/165 grain bullets on 4.5 grains of TiteGroup has become my routine ammo. It makes about 140 power factor from the Glock, so it should make better than 125 even in the Kahr.

My press issues have all been addressed, as have the quality assurance issues. I have not had a single ammo issue since before June of 2014. I like having a sizable inventory because I can just go shoot without being overly concerned with whether I have suitable ammo.

I *have* had troubles with misfeeds that seem clearly to be caused by a limp wrist when shooting weak hand. At least two matches in the last couple of months featured a course of fire requiring shots fired weak hand only and on both occasions, I had ammo feed problems with the weak hand only element and full reliability with all other shooting. Reliability, not necessarily decent scoring 🙂

This weekend, I am taking the IDPA SO course. I’ve been with IDPA for over a year, shooting almost every week, so no excuses not to take on a little more responsibility.