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Rob’s home page |
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A Portal to my areas of interest. |
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The definitive online Bullseye resource. If there is information you need that you cannot find here, you are trying too hard. |
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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 run-in with precision air pistol — I had purchased a Pardini K2S from Don Nygord a few years back. I shot 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 discount, 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 need to shoot as inexpensively as possible—in my mind an Air Pistol is 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 in the same manner I had been making 6m targets out of them. I should be able to cut a 4.5” strip off of each side and make replacement centers out of the cut-offs. I will post a .pdf of the file when I have it set up. 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. |
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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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