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A Portal to my areas of interest. |
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Airgun shooting — messing around with iron sights |
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I really hate dry firing. Yes, I know, all serious competitors must dry fire as part of their training regimen. I remember reading an online interview with Roberto Di’Donna (then the reigning Olympic Gold Medalist in Air Pistol) - when asked about dry firing he replied: “It’s Boring!” My kind of answer — dry firing is a bore. It’s a drag. It really sucks. This isn’t my first go around with precision air pistols — I purchased a Pardini K2S from Don Nygord a few years back. I mostly shot it informally in my basement, and participated in an internet postal match or two. I thought that Air Pistol was a blast, but I really didn’t have the room in my home at the time for a 10 meter range and I couldn’t find any local opportunities to compete. Following my rule that “Any gun not shot in competition must be sold at a tremendous loss”, I passed it along to another shooter for a song. Fast forward to the present—I got the idea in mind that I would like to be able to get in some serious training at home. I also need to do more dry firing, or at least more “low recoil” firing. And I wanted to practice as inexpensively as possible—in my mind an Air Pistol was the ideal solution. I lurked around the Kitching Airgun Classified site and picked up an entry-level gun for an attractive price—a Daisy PowerLine 717. A quick overview of the Air Pistol: The grips are plastic, and don’t fit me very well. The sights are also plastic, but seem to do the trick. I like the SSP mechanism more than the compressed air system I had in the Pardini. Pick up the gun, and start shooting. No need to worry about filling anything; I like the steady shooting rhythm that the need to charge the gun between shots enforces. I look forward to upgrading to a more substantial air pistol in the future, but I am going to stick with the SSP charging system. I’ve constructed both 10m and 6m ranges in my basement—I’m using a “silent” pellet trap that I cooked-up myself on the 10m range, and a Gehmann trap at 6 meters. I’ve got a box full of targets and a couple of thousand pellets to get started with. I’m looking forward to getting in some daily practice on-the-cheap, and trying out a couple of Postal matches. Update—JULY 2006 Training is going fairly well; I’ve seen some improvements in my technique already, and this is reflected in my scores (more consistent) and group sizes. My 6 meter range suffers from bad lighting—I am retiring it until I can improve the environment. This may be completely unnecessary, as I’ve made improvements to my 10 meter range—most importantly, I’ve set up a spotting scope on a camera tripod I had laying around. No need to walk to the target until I am finished with the string! Several other significant improvements, such as setting up a small shooting table at my firing point, have more-or-less eliminated the reason for having the 6m range in the first place. I am working out a method to reuse my NRA B-4 single bull targets; I had been making 6m targets out of them by printing the reduced image on the reverse side of once-fired-at targets. As long as the groups are well centered, there is plenty of space to fit the reduced image (6m image can be found here). It should be possible to cut a 4.5” strip off of each side and make replacement centers out of each of the cut-offs. This will get me two reduced distance targets from each fired target. This is all probably a giant waste of time, given that it costs a couple of cents to print each image, but I had time on my hands over the summer, and more toner to burn than money! I may experiment with carving a set of custom grips. As I’ve mentioned above, the plastic grips are crappy. My current thinking is to laminate up a blank from 1” hardwood stock that I have laying around, and cut it to dimensions I will take from my .22. If successful, then I’ll pick up a walnut blank from this guy and duplicate the process.
Update — January 2007 I’ve been back to work on a very intense contract for the last few months, and this website, and all of the related subject matter, have been distant concerns. Things should be returning to normal very soon, and I will be picking up where I left off with the airgun regimen. Update to the Update — March 2007 As documented in my Blog, Free Pistol has monopolized my practice time the last few weeks that I’ve been back in action. I’m completely on-the-fence about my Air Pistol project. I’m itching to give competition a go, but I have second thoughts about continuing the “Nygord Daisy” project. Too much time and trouble, it seems, to save a few bucks. I am inclined to invest in an IZH-46M. More to come … Update to the Update to the Update — June 2007 The Daisy experiment has officially ended; in fact, I have sold it to finance other hobby purchases. As part of another deal, I have acquired a Walther CP2 CO2 powered air pistol. This is a step up in precision, and a change from a single-stroke pneumatic to a CO2 power plant. I have added some notes about this piece to my Blog, and a Training Log page is in the works. |
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An excellent target shooting message board run by one of the great vendors in the sport. Not a Bullseye site, but an excellent resource. |
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