Sunday Round-Up

Well, a round-up of only a few cows…

There are a couple of great blog articles this morning. The first is that we welcome back RifleSlinger from the Art of the Rifle blog after his spring hiatus. His writings have been instrumental in my improvement as a rifle shooter. For the near future he's going to be addressing standards, an important issue, but not as easy as one might think:

Part of the difficulty lies in the diverse applications of the rifle. Excellence can really only be defined in terms of how effectively it accomplishes a given task. No single standard can be reasonably expected to provide an adequate measure of every application. So the logical first step is figuring out what types of skills we need to have yardsticks for. Here are those that come to mind, just off the top of my head: 

• Close range, high speed. 

• Medium range, time sensitive, general marksmanship. I’ll arbitrarily define medium range as 100-500, though other variables could alter that. This would be Appleseed’s realm of specialty, using non-scaled targets at full distance. 

• Medium range field shooting, e.g. the Cooper standards. 

• Surgical shooting- small targets in conditions and/or distances that don’t require complex accounting for trajectory or environmentals. 

• Precision shooting in the environment- up to long range, which I’ll arbitrarily define as 1000 yards, possibly extreme long range, >1000 yards. 

I believe that any standards devised with the intention to measure the above, or any other modes of rifle shooting, should include the requisite rifle handling skills (loading, reloading, clearance) that would be reasonably expected in that venue.

BTW, I think that's a perfect breakdown of the uses of the rifle. I look forward to his continued observations.

A second blogpost that's worth your read this Sunday is from Matt at Jerking the Trigger on how to get the most from a red dot sight (RDS) and a 3X magnifier. He basically breaks it down into 3 steps:

• Choose a good mount
• Choose the right RDS
• Shed weight from the front of your carbine

This is particularly applicable for me since I spent time a couple of days ago setting up an RDS with a 3X magnifier. I ended up using an old Aimpoint T1 4 MOA and an Aimpoint magnifier. Like Matt, I found 3X magnifiers to be a little better in theory than in practice. The T1's dot under magnification looks more like a red Rorscharch Test than a clearly defined round dot.

Still, it does the job well…as I mentioned in the previous post, the DoubleStar 3C delivered the accuracy I wanted with the 3X multiplier. I used the same set-up on a DD rifle at the Crimson Trace Midnight 3-Gun 2 years ago and was very happy with it.

I've hit an unfortunate stretch with illuminated sights. In the last week or so I have had 3 illuminated sights go down on me — the Burris AR-1X reflex, my oldest MTAC and a Leupold VX-6. scopes Both the VX-6 and the MTAC are older scopes and have been workhorses, so it puzzles me. I did a battery swap-out, but that didn't solve the problem. I thought I had extra 2032 batteries around to see if my existing stock of 2032s had gone south, but if I do they're in deep hiding. I ordered a bunch today. I'm going to try a couple of different AA batteries on the AR-1X today and see if I can isolate the problem. I'll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE: Using my keenly honed deductive methodology, I cleaned out the battery compartment of the Burris AR-1X by blowing in it, slotted in a new AA battery, and, as if by hand of the occult, it's 100%! Since I have the C3 perfectly sighted in for the next Appleseed, I pulled the Lucid HD7 off the TAVOR, bolted the AR-1X onto the rail and shot the crap out of it…no problems at all. Michael's key learning points…make sure the battery box is clean and that the battery box cover is tightly screwed down! I do like the "dot-in-a-donut" CQ-1X reticle, especially in green. I may shoot this set-up in a local 3-Gun match next weekend!