I participated in the South River 2700 yesterday, as planned. Some good, and some (very) bad:

The good news: I am very happy with my performance in the .22 match. I finished with an 829-15x - an improvement of 71 points over last month. This validates my training methodology, I think, but I can't overlook the value of simply being prepared to shoot this time around. I spent a solid hour on Friday morning getting sighted in properly at 50 yards with a fresh battery in the sight and a clean pistol. I still had to tweak the zero at the match, with cost me probably 3 points or so (two 7's high center), but I made one quick adjustment and things were fine for the rest of the match.

The bad news: My .45 is not ready for prime time. After all the time and money I've spent trying to work around the short rail, I am back at square one. The Truglo sight failed miserably. As a general observation, the HUD design works fine on the .22 probably because there is less adjustment necessary for different ammo and between the long and short lines. On the .45, the imprecise adjustments are very frustrating.

I left the range on Friday with, at best, 50% confidence in the rig. The sun got very bright while I was testing, and the dot became difficult to see against the background. I was hoping that it wouldn't be so bad under match conditions, as the firing line is covered at South River. 

This was a major mistake on my part. I started out in Slow Fire chasing the dot under overcast conditions - I was consistenly left of center, but shooting decent groups. If I attempted to adjust the sight, it was an overcorrection to the right. If I attempted to "hold off" in the white, I couldn't see the dot.  Once we started Timed Fire, performance went right off of a cliff. I couldn't see the dot at all after the first shot broke; conditions steadily brightened as the clouds thinned out to the point where I couldn't see the dot at all. I swapped in a new battery, which helped for the first shot,  but bottom line was a miserable performance.

My mental game deteriorated in lock step with the equipment problems. I went from perturbed, to annoyed, to pissed-off, to completely out of my mind as the match progressed. To make things worse, my stapler crapped-out on me (2nd stapler in as many matches at South River - must be something in the air as I 've been using them for YEARS without a problem).  The net result was that I called it quits after the Center Fire match; there wasn't any point in lobbing another 90 rounds into random spots on the backstop.

In summary, I shot a solid Expert score with my .22 and that makes me very happy. If I can't get the Pardini sorted out by next month, I'm not sure what I will do. It is a poor investment of time and money to travel over 100 miles to shoot only one gun in a match.