Smoke ’em & Hope

Mr. Completely’s e-postal match this month was a bear.  Difficult to shoot with a rimfire pistol, and even harder to shoot with a 1911.  If you take the size of Mr. C’s stop plate, and project it out to the 42 feet it would be for the Steel Challenge course, it would only be two inches wide, as opposed to ten inches for the standard stop plate for the course.   But hey, it has to be a downloadable target, and if it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.

Scored 53 with rimfire scoped, and 83 with centerfire open sights.

Initially, when I started practicing rimfire, I was going in a sort of reverse Z motion. After scattering my shots all over the right side on the lower right target, I decided an upside down U was a better strategy, then going for the stop plate.  Tended to overshoot the stop plate though.

For center fire pistol, I had a bugger of a time with the third target. In addition, I had to raise my point of aim, because as my speed increased, my point of impact dropped. It goes back to Todd Jarrett’s advice of “Aim 3/4s high” But I hit almost nothing of the third plate in the U. A different pattern might be better with the .45, but it’s too expensive to experiment.

UPDATE: Another trick with the smallbore gun, is I was holding it taco.  Mr. Completely also uses this technique in Steel Challenge and pin shooting.  Normally, it’s a silhouette hold, but it seems to work pretty well for action shooting too.