American Airguns Blog
The Random Ramblings Of An Airgun Addict

Like many other field target shooters across this great land, I have been preparing for the US Nationals. The match is going to be held in Tacoma Washington on August 20 and 21. I am really looking forward to going this year. Last year Roz Sumpter and I held the Nationals at Roz's place in Pulaski TN. Neither of us shot worth a hoot last year with all the work we were doing preparing and running the match. We had a lot of help but it still takes it's toll on this old body. I am really looking forward to going to the Nationals, shooting and enjoying myself. My wife's family lives in the Seattle/Tacoma area so we are also going to spend some time after the match vacationing.

Over the past week I have been fine tuning my gear to get ready for the match. Last year I was so busy getting things ready for the match and trying to keep living life that I didn't get much time to actually shoot. This year life is still busy but I have been able to shoot a bit more. The past few days I have made some final adjustments such that I finally feel like I am getting comfortable with my rifle in its new DaveG stock.

One thing I noticed on Sunday while I was shooting was that it appeared that my scope wasn't mounted completely vertical. So I went inside and leveled my rifle and sure enough, the scope wasn't vertical. After taking a bit of time to reset the scope back to vertical I went back out to shoot. Shooting at several different ranges confirmed that the scope was now vertically centered with the bore. A good side effect of resetting the scope was that now I wasn't canting the rifle away from me, something I didn't realize until after I fixed the scope problem.

Things were going pretty good last night but decided that the trigger was just a bit too heavy so I decided to readjust it a bit. I fiddled with the Paul Watts trigger blade and the pull weight screw. As I shot to test the new setting I realized the pull weight screw kept vibrating loose which then would make the trigger too light. So I had to remove the pull weight screw and apply some Loc-tite to it. After a bit more fiddling with all the adjustments, I finally reached a point where I was happy with the pull weight and the length of the first stage.

While I was adjusting the trigger, I was sitting on the floor of my family room shooting out the back door. I realized that I was sitting lower and was more comfortable this way so I decided to remove some of the filler from my bum bag. I had added a bunch of filler to it last spring but I think now that I put too much into it. I removed about 5-6 cups of filler and headed to the back yard again.

With everything re-adjusted and tweaked I shot for a short while and everything felt good. It has been a long time since it felt like that. I shot for a while and managed some pretty good groups. It was a good feeling and I hope that this year I will shoot a little bit better at the Nationals than I have in the last few years.