After a rather bad training session at lunch, and a two-hour delay picking up the last gift for herself (thank you all the bad drivers who were converging on Blanchardstown Shopping Centre for making life so much fun for everyone else…), an excellent training session in WTSC.
Good shooting, perhaps the best I’ve ever done with an air rifle technically. Started shooting to warm up and the warm-up group was dead centre and all good nines or higher. Two shots to check sight adjustment (both in the same hole, both tens) and then Matt had me shoot a 20-shot match.
That’s the equivalent of a 570, which is grand, but what’s not recorded there is that we paused at shot 15 for a few minutes and I daftly continued straight on into the next five shots without doing any dry-firing to get my head back into the game. Cue the immediate appearance of a 9 and a bad 8. Daft, daft, daft. Lesson learnt though. And this is where the Anchutz owners can get jealous of some of the newer air rifles, which have a single button to switch from live-fire to dry-fire in the middle of a match for just this reason. But then, on the other hand, it’s a lot easier to be safe when you have to physically screw out or in the air cylinder to change over. And it’s not that much more effort…
got to a scanner eventually, here are the cards:
Warm-up
Sighter
Match
Anyway, later looking at the ten-shot strings (I’ll put up the scanned targets as soon as I get to a working scanner later on) we noticed that all of the bad shots were high and right. So there’s still something left to be tweaked. There are some possibilities.
It might be an inconsistent head position. We noticed last time that my head comes down on the cheekpiece in the wrong place sometimes, and while it’s not happening so often anymore, sometimes I forget and we get the same problem:
See the difference? It’s easier to compare directly:
So we modified the shot plan to try to tweak that error out. We’ll see how it goes…
The other major possibility is that it might be the trigger, and I had a bad trigger hand position anyway (when my hand opens, my forefinger is at an angle to the other fingers for some wierd reason, no idea why). So we took the pistol grip off, added a spacer to drop it down some, then turned and moved the trigger blade to meet my finger properly. Small change, but it felt much better afterwards. And it’s still a full five or six millimetres within the ISSF rules. Excellent!
Of course, Matt being Matt, we had to try something else first… 😀
And then to add insult to adjustment, Matt had to make the point that my beloved new buttplate, which does give me a much more consistent start in the shot plan, doesn’t quite do what I thought it did when I’m actually pulling through the second pressure on the trigger and releasing the shot:
Apparently this happens with all kinds of buttplates and is just what happens. It doesn’t seem to be hindering my shooting, and I’m quite happy with the buttplate so I don’t feel daft, but it’s funny to see nonetheless 😀