Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Shooting Season Has Begun
Time has flown by this winter, even though it is still pretty cold outside. It is already mid March and this past weekend the Tennessee Valley Airgunners had their first match. Our club is comprised of about 15 guys from around the region, 10 of whom came to shoot with us on Saturday in Huntsville. The day was cool but sunny and we all had a lot of fun.
We started with the Hunter FT course in the morning. The Hunter course is comprised of 5 lanes with 3 targets on a lane for a total of 30 shots. I really like Hunter FT. It has a different set of challenges from traditional FT and really moves along much more quickly. For me it is better since I feel like I am shooting more. I shot my ProSport .177 rifle with a Hawke 4-12x scope with mil-dot reticle. I did pretty well but had a problem with dropping shots low and right. I had to tighten the stock screws before the match and thought that was probably causing me problems. Another problem was that one of the ring screws on my BKL mounts broke and I had to remove one ring strap on the front mount.
After the match I went home and removed the action from the stock, cleaned the mounting holes and loc-tited the stock screws before putting the action back in the stock. I also cleaned the bore and polished it a bit to make sure I didn’t have any gunk build up in the barrel. I decided to replace the Hawke with my old trusted Bushnell Elite 3200 4-12x scope. After I got it all back together it seemed to be shooting much better. I shot it across the chrony and it was shooting around 950 fps with 8-9 fps variation. I was happy with that!
The traditional FT match follows the Hunter match by about ½ hour. The traditional course is comprised of 10 lanes with 3 targets on a lane for a total of 60 shots. I shot my old HW97 MkI with my customized red Maccari match stock. I have always had some trouble with reaching the trigger and decided to try a trigger shoe to make the trigger wider. That really worked well. I felt like I could really get a nice feel of the trigger and a smooth, consistent pull from shot to shot. Because of my shooting position, over the arm, I have the stock cut down to a 12 ½” length of pull. This is a bit short feeling on my standing shots but sitting it is just right. I like to put the rear of the stock against my right knee to stabilize it, the shorter stock makes it easier to get my hand on the stock pistol grip and reach the trigger comfortably.
I ended up shooting pretty well, knocking down 51 of 60 targets on a 34 difficulty course. Our course has three lanes in an open field. Up to the field lanes, three of my last four lanes, I had only dropped 4. On the first field lane, my zero dropped ½”. I dropped two shots before I was able to correct for the shift. Then on the last lane, not in the field, the shift went away and I dropped the remainder of my shots. The wooded lanes were colder than the field lanes and I wonder if the warmer air on the field lanes caused the dramatic shift. I have seen this before on this course but didn’t correlate it that directly before. You can be sure that I will watch out for this in the future!
I was very pleased with my shooting this weekend. I was able to clean the 6 standing shots and with the limited practice I was able to get in before the match, I felt pretty stable and was able to bring back the old form pretty quickly. I have a lot of room for improvement but it wasn’t a bad day. Of course, even a bad day of shooting is better than a good day of working and this last Saturday was a good day!
We started with the Hunter FT course in the morning. The Hunter course is comprised of 5 lanes with 3 targets on a lane for a total of 30 shots. I really like Hunter FT. It has a different set of challenges from traditional FT and really moves along much more quickly. For me it is better since I feel like I am shooting more. I shot my ProSport .177 rifle with a Hawke 4-12x scope with mil-dot reticle. I did pretty well but had a problem with dropping shots low and right. I had to tighten the stock screws before the match and thought that was probably causing me problems. Another problem was that one of the ring screws on my BKL mounts broke and I had to remove one ring strap on the front mount.
After the match I went home and removed the action from the stock, cleaned the mounting holes and loc-tited the stock screws before putting the action back in the stock. I also cleaned the bore and polished it a bit to make sure I didn’t have any gunk build up in the barrel. I decided to replace the Hawke with my old trusted Bushnell Elite 3200 4-12x scope. After I got it all back together it seemed to be shooting much better. I shot it across the chrony and it was shooting around 950 fps with 8-9 fps variation. I was happy with that!
The traditional FT match follows the Hunter match by about ½ hour. The traditional course is comprised of 10 lanes with 3 targets on a lane for a total of 60 shots. I shot my old HW97 MkI with my customized red Maccari match stock. I have always had some trouble with reaching the trigger and decided to try a trigger shoe to make the trigger wider. That really worked well. I felt like I could really get a nice feel of the trigger and a smooth, consistent pull from shot to shot. Because of my shooting position, over the arm, I have the stock cut down to a 12 ½” length of pull. This is a bit short feeling on my standing shots but sitting it is just right. I like to put the rear of the stock against my right knee to stabilize it, the shorter stock makes it easier to get my hand on the stock pistol grip and reach the trigger comfortably.
I ended up shooting pretty well, knocking down 51 of 60 targets on a 34 difficulty course. Our course has three lanes in an open field. Up to the field lanes, three of my last four lanes, I had only dropped 4. On the first field lane, my zero dropped ½”. I dropped two shots before I was able to correct for the shift. Then on the last lane, not in the field, the shift went away and I dropped the remainder of my shots. The wooded lanes were colder than the field lanes and I wonder if the warmer air on the field lanes caused the dramatic shift. I have seen this before on this course but didn’t correlate it that directly before. You can be sure that I will watch out for this in the future!
I was very pleased with my shooting this weekend. I was able to clean the 6 standing shots and with the limited practice I was able to get in before the match, I felt pretty stable and was able to bring back the old form pretty quickly. I have a lot of room for improvement but it wasn’t a bad day. Of course, even a bad day of shooting is better than a good day of working and this last Saturday was a good day!
