American Airguns Blog
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Weekend Shooting
It was a busy weekend, but I did get a chance to shoot at our club match Saturday. We had a 30 shot Hunter course that we shot before the 60 shot traditional match. I took my "new" FWB124 with the Williams peep sight to the range to shoot on the Hunter course. I didn't have a lot time to really sight in the rifle before the match so I had to do a bit of fine tuning at the range. The windage was pretty much on target but the elevation wasn't adjusting very well. I found out that I wasn't looseing all the proper screws on the Williams sight to adjust to elevation properly. Once I started making the adjustments correctly, I got the 124 shooting on target.
I decided adjust the elevation so that the point of impact would be about 1/4" high or less at 35 yards. The majority of the targets are between 10 and 35 yards so this would allow me to hold the top of the front sight at the bottom of the kill zone. At ten yards, the POI was about 1/4" high and at 20-25 yards it would be less than an inch high.
My strategy worked pretty well. I managed to hit 20 out of 30 target this way. The long targets gave me the most trouble since the front post covered the kill zone and finding a definite aim point was tough. We also had some targets in a pretty dark area that made the front sight all but dissappear. A 1 1/4" black skunk in the deep shade at 25 yards was especially hard. However, all things aside, I really enjoyed the challenge of shooting the course with the iron sights. The 124 performed very well and I hit every target I aimed at, only not all of them fell over.
On the traditional course I didn't shoot as well. I finally had a chance to shoot my HW97 in it's new DaveG maroon target stock but I know I didn't shoot as well as the gun is capable of. The match started out pretty bad since I didn't get a chance to sight in at all before the match. I went out on the range without firing a single shot through my rifle. Luckily I started on a fairly easy target, a 1" kill at 25 yards. However it got hard very quickly after that. It took me about three lanes to really warm up, but even after that I was missing shots I should have made. I am still getting aclimated to my new stock, it feels and shoots a bit differently than my Macarri stock. By the end of the match I was starting to get into a groove and hitting more shots. I still had a great time shooting both matches even though I didn't shoot that well overall, but having fun is what it is all about for me.
I decided adjust the elevation so that the point of impact would be about 1/4" high or less at 35 yards. The majority of the targets are between 10 and 35 yards so this would allow me to hold the top of the front sight at the bottom of the kill zone. At ten yards, the POI was about 1/4" high and at 20-25 yards it would be less than an inch high.
My strategy worked pretty well. I managed to hit 20 out of 30 target this way. The long targets gave me the most trouble since the front post covered the kill zone and finding a definite aim point was tough. We also had some targets in a pretty dark area that made the front sight all but dissappear. A 1 1/4" black skunk in the deep shade at 25 yards was especially hard. However, all things aside, I really enjoyed the challenge of shooting the course with the iron sights. The 124 performed very well and I hit every target I aimed at, only not all of them fell over.
On the traditional course I didn't shoot as well. I finally had a chance to shoot my HW97 in it's new DaveG maroon target stock but I know I didn't shoot as well as the gun is capable of. The match started out pretty bad since I didn't get a chance to sight in at all before the match. I went out on the range without firing a single shot through my rifle. Luckily I started on a fairly easy target, a 1" kill at 25 yards. However it got hard very quickly after that. It took me about three lanes to really warm up, but even after that I was missing shots I should have made. I am still getting aclimated to my new stock, it feels and shoots a bit differently than my Macarri stock. By the end of the match I was starting to get into a groove and hitting more shots. I still had a great time shooting both matches even though I didn't shoot that well overall, but having fun is what it is all about for me.
