The clubs nearest me are VAPA. I've done shoots where only myself and one other have turned up for a scheduled match, those are actually the most fun. I think the most I've seen at a Cowboy match here is perhaps eighteen shooters, at 3-gun there are usually only five or six plus the Cowboys as they've been joining in recently. I don't think 3-Gun actually allows a pair of revolvers, but you're never going to reload a Single-Action Army on the clock. This was part of today's effort practicing -
https://youtu.be/YQD2Ic4kuowThe fact that 3-Gun only uses one handgun makes it easier to get into than Cowboy, but the Cowboy club has club guns for newbies to play with. You have to shoot two matches "off the table" before you can do your holster qualification.
At my local club, air-pistol is the easiest to do as it's shot individually rather than as a group, and being in the evening there are usually enough people to instruct unlicenced shooters. And being a fairly quick match (about 30 minutes) people don't usually mind waiting to use the club guns if they're in use. On the outdoor range where we shoot rimfire and centrefire it's shot as a group, with up to fifteen shooters shooting the course of fire together. For Rapid Fire we can only have three shooters at a time as we're shooting at five turning targets each. There's not much interest in Rapid though so it usually works out okay.
There are some major issues though. Only one outdoor range, so if I want to sit in a bay and put a brick of .22 through a pistol, or test centrefire loads, I can only do it while other people are shooting a match, which is dumb. And we can only shoot on three days, Monday (starting this year), Wednesday, and Saturday. Although it's very difficult to hear anything from the road, they did a deal with the locals to restrict shooting to those days, so not much we can do about it. We get keys and can attend between business hours, but the matches happen in the morning and afternoon so the times you can actually have the range to yourself are very restricted. There is a second outdoor range there but it needs the hardwood overhead baffling installed (so the shooter can't see the sky at all). Some of us are pushing to volunteer to do this as it's not a big job so hopefully that might actually happen one day. They also have a 50m range but that needs a lot more work to be usable under the template they have.
The other range I've been attending gives you keys and you can shoot 24/7 every day except three days in the year - Easter, Christmas and ANZAC day. And they have lots of range space out to 50m. My IPSC time I spent more time up at the range on my own doing my own thing than I did shooting matches. My first pistol instructor was ex-army and enjoyed the same sort of thing so we would go up together often. I'm not into social stuff either, I don't eat at restaurants or cafes, don't drink tea or coffee, don't drink alcohol, and avoid eating around other people generally, but I do try to be helpful and will always be happy to attend the range at some odd time to supervise somebody else that can't make the scheduled times. Any time spent at the pistol club is time well spent I think
Yep, they're strict about attendances here. If you attend when it's a scheduled Centrefire shoot and shoot a .22, then no attendance for you. I don't believe we can claim an attendance if we're just practicing on our own, but if it is a scheduled match, and you're the only one who turns up I would think it's possible. We've had situations where people have turned up to shoot scheduled matches but nobody else has turned up with keys so they couldn't get in. If you make every attempt to attend a scheduled match, but it doesn't happen for reasons beyond your control, I think the Act does allow you to register it as an attendance. This year they've added to the paperwork too. They now want us to sign two attendance books. One every time even if we're not shooting for an attendance, including our licence number - this apparently means we're covered by insurance (I would've thought being a club member would mean we're all covered by the insurance any time we're at the club anyway). They stopped including our licence number some years ago for security in case the attendance book got into the wrong hands. And if we want to record an actual attendance to be submitted to Police then we also need to fill out the Participation book, including the serial number of the firearm we're using, so Police can see we're using the correct class for the scheduled match. If we're using a club gun we also have to sign that in and out. The paperwork sucks
In my day we just had a sign-on sheet at the start of the match, and we needed to attend every eight weeks minimum, basically seven shoots for the year, but all through the year. We couldn't shoot for two or three weeks and then do nothing else for eleven months. If we exceeded eight weeks without recording an attendance the club informed Police who chased you up (never happened to me so I don't know what the result of this was). If you were crook or working away you could request an extension so it wasn't too horrendous. When I was working in the bush I just flew to Perth or Darwin to do my shoots. Once I went to Kununurra but that was a boring ISSF-style shoot so I never went there again despite only being an hour or two from there most of the time. I preferred to drive to Kununurra airport and fly somewhere else to shoot
I've been doing a ton of lever-action practice the last few months to build muscle memory for Cowboy. I worked up a nice light .38 load that makes 540fps in the 20" Uberti 1866, and 450fps in the 24" Rossi 1892. I've fired a few hundred with no issues at all. But I've discovered I can run the 1892 much faster than I can the 1866 so I've been putting more through that lately. Today, what I've been concerned about happened, I had two drop low enough that they didn't exit the barrel. The first one stopped six-inches short of the muzzle (I dropped .22 rounds in there to measure as they're an inch long). I pushed the bullet back by dropping fired .22 cases in there but as it went down it got tighter than I could push. I got it down to two inches from the chamber, then pulled the bullet from a round, chambered the charged case, and fired it out. A few rounds later I had another one, only one inch from the muzzle. With the 1892 it's a job and a half to disassemble the rifle to push it out from the chamber, and I couldn't be bothered pushing another one all the way back, so I brought it home and pushed it out with a rod. So that load is not suitable for the longer barrel any more
I also made some wadcutters by seating the bullets backwards in the case, flush with the case mouth, for my mate to use in his Schofield, they made 150fps more than having the bullet seated the right way up due to the reduced case volume.
fnq22 wrote:yeah i expect it to take a while before I'm happy with the IPSC stuff..with trying to do everything fast and safe I need to practise so it becomes second nature...
I'm not looking to win trophies either but club matches with guys that are quite good will no doubt accelerate my learning and give me some benchmarks to acheive and plenty of advice about becoming better....plinking at cans and steel ducks is fun but I really want to be able to use the gun in a practical sense as well...plus as you mention its a lot of fun too....but as a new handgun user I'll take very opportunity, no matter how boring, to increase my skill level..and, man ,shooting unsighted is so much harder then i thought it would be.....certainly nothing like the cowboys facing off in the Westerns on the Telly...
The main club I'm at is ssaa and does all firearms and service pistol and IPSC handgun matches, but only on weekends, while the other club I joined is PSQ and does more the boring precision issf stuff and indoor 10m air pistol but is much smaller and may only be half a dozen people there on Sunday.......the real reason i joined that club though is because you can let yourself in there, by yourself, 7 days a week whenever you want to practise......Being somewhat of a loner that's more my speed and of course gives me more opportunities to play around and practise without having to fit in with other shooters and having to be sociable when I may just want to focus on my own thing that day........
Are they pretty rigid about signing your attendance records in Victoria that it has to be an actual club match rather then just you competing against yourself...?..it sounds a bit more relaxed up here in country QLD..
Crept into a ambush position over 2 warrens, but missed taking a chance on one rabbit I'd snuck in close to without noticing it by faffing around with the shooting sticks, backpack and sticks. I have a tripod arriving tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be able to take advantage of the opportunity next time. Sat over the warren for a while before a young coney hopped out through the blackberries and wattles. Had to wait a few minutes til it moved into a clear area ~35m away and a shot to the back of the head put it down in one. The old man had mentioned he was interested in a rabbit if the opportunity arose, so I rang him and told him I'd leave it on the pump cover for him so I could keep moving.
