Sins Become Apparent With Distance

It looks like shooting at 50 feet instead of 7 yards is a good idea. I learned from it. I learned that I have no idea how to pull a trigger.

I shot 150 rounds. Fifty from the .45, fifty from the .38 Super, and another fifty from the .45. Unfortunately I forgot my cell phone, so I couldn’t take photos. So I took the last target home and took a photo.

This is a second-quality Caldwell target I got from Midway for about half price. I could not find any defects. Sweet buy.

I’m very happy with that. There are flyers, but the core seems tighter than what I’ve been doing. I experimented with different trigger pulls today, and it seems like it helped.

I was trying to get away from a ridiculously gradual pull which caused the gun to go off completely unexpectedly. But the results were spotty. You can see some wild .38 shots off the orange in this photo, which probably demonstrate my point. Going back the gradual pull sucked things into a smaller area. I think. If I’m right, I should be able to repeat this performance next week without nearly as many flyers.

I believe it may be time to spend a little cash and get some instruction. I may check out that school in Frostproof.

Last week I had problems with .38 Super rounds failing to chamber, so this week I took the remaining ammunition out, cycled every round to see if it chambered, and got rid of the duds. Then I made new cartridges to replace them. I still had a few failures toward the end of the shoot. I suspect this is caused by one of two things. Either heat makes the chamber tighter, or debris does.

This taught me something new about reloading. The sizing die has to come down until it touches the shell plate, so as much of the case as possible is resized. I believe my problem was caused by cases that had bulgy lower ends because the sizing die didn’t go down all the way.

I had adjusted the sizing die to leave maybe 3/16 of an inch alone, because I had had a bad experience with the seating die mashing the case-eject wire. The seating die had been too low, so I somehow got the idea that the casing die AND the sizing die had to be kept up off the plate. And that was wrong.

The .38 Super scared me to death today. The first five rounds went through three holes. That thing may be super accurate. If I can learn how to pull a trigger, maybe I’ll find out.

My dad got me a Caldwell HAMMR machine rest for my birthday. If the range people will allow it, I want to test my 1911s with it. I suspect that the .38 is more accurate than the .45. Proof would give the Colt worshipers a big thrill.

I am so tempted to buy that used Special Combat carry model. If I get into combat shooting, that would be a super cheap gun to fix up. Although I guess .45 is not the optimal caliber.

That’s today’s big news.