Latest Excuses for not blogging.......

Wow, almost a week since the last post! Where does the time go?

I've been trying to get out to the range at least every day if I can, and try to shoot four or five hundred rounds of practice each time. Today I managed to get in two sessions, although the first session was only about three hundred rounds since the extractor broke off in the practice gun. Yes, I have two race guns set up as close as possible to each other, so the practice gun gets all the hard usage, while the main gun is used primarily in the matches. Interestingly enough, when the extractor broke off, the gun continued to run and extract without any problems. I ran about sixty rounds through it with no extractor! I didn't even notice that the extractor was gone until I partially pulled the slide back to check for a round in the chamber and the round stayed fully in the chamber rather than being partially pulled out by the extractor.

Why all of the practice? On June 1st. I fly out to Holland for the European Steel Challenge Championships. So far this year I have shot two major matches, and a bunch of club matches, and to tell the truth, I haven't been too happy with my shooting. I know I can do much better than I've been doing, but it takes tons of practice to get it to work every time. In a sport where one or two tenths of a second per five shots fired can move you ten spots or more in the final standings, you need to practice a huge amount to get the consistency.

There's a story about Jerry Miculek, the revolver master, where someone asked him how many rounds of practice did he have to shoot before he could shoot as fast and accurately as he does. His answer was that it took one hundred thousand rounds of practice to get to where he could shoot like he does, and another one hundred thousand rounds until he could do it every time. Probably a true story! Most of the top shooting competitors shoot at least fifty or sixty thousand rounds of practice a year!

Another activity that's been taking up a lot of time is working on the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. If you've never put on an event, you have no idea how many loose ends there are to take care of. Talking with sponsors, arranging shipping, coordinating with the hotel, handling registrations, making range arrangements, and more. If I was getting paid to do this, I think I'd ask the boss for a raise! There will be some big announcements coming up soon regarding the Rendezvous. 

I've been doing some development work on some new sight mounts for the OKO Red Dot Sights , and not too far down the road we should have a wide range of mount choices to cover just about any of the handguns out there without needing to use a Weaver style rail.

The new on line shooting supply store Magnum Shooters Supply is growing, and the sales of the James Austin Moon Clip Server around the world has been a pleasant surprise.

I'm also looking into setting up a small plastic injection molding press for making some small parts, and if I can find the right one at a good price, or possibly even build my own, that should be a handy capability to have. I've just about got my own anodizing setup dialed in, and I've run a couple of small runs with good results.

Now, if I could just find a small NC milling machine I could afford to automate building some of those sight mounts........