"Victory is mine"

[ckkalyan]

LOL good one Shooter...once you get to MN he will give one lessons until one's arms are ready to fall off! Beware! That's some shooting XL! Bravo!

[Vikram]

A rifle shooter would be proud of that kind of shooting.
For a handgun, its great great great.

+1 to that. Great groups, XL.

[xl_target]

LOL good one Shooter...once you get to MN he will give one lessons until one's arms are ready to fall off! Beware! That's some shooting XL! Bravo!

Unfortunately when CK was here, we just happened to pick the hottest day of the year to do our shooting.
He held up his end though.

A rifle shooter would be proud of that kind of shooting.
For a handgun, its great great great.

+1 to that. Great groups, XL.

Vikram and Shooter,
It wasn't me.
None of my other .22 LR handguns shoot like that.

[AgentDoubleS]

Wow, that is some shooting XL! What a start to my day reading about a 400 round day at the range and those groups..

Cheers,
SS

[xl_target]

So, I'm finding that this is a very accurate pistol with a wide variety of .22 LR ammo. The fiber optics with their brightness make them easier to see with my aging eyes.

Every Monday evening, from April to Sept/Oct, I shoot competitively at my gun club. This is an informal group and we get together to shoot different formats. For years we hammered defenseless bowling pins but when they started shooting back, it was time to move on. The problem is that it is harder to get wooden pins now and the replacement plastic pins make the sport dangerous. Yes, those darn plastic pins shoot back! I mean that in many cases, the bullet hits the pins and bounces right back at you.

So now we have switched to shooting steel plates. They are angled down so you don't get hit by ricochets. The plates are large and widely spaced but they are painted gray. The pistol that I used last week to shoot the match has an off-white or ivory colored sight, which to my consternation, disappears when superimposed on the steel plate. Part of the problem is that as I get older and my ability to focus on close objects gets worse, that front sight gets harder to see clearly. Consequently, I had to really concentrate to hit the plates which results in slower times.

So I've been trying to come up with a solution; handgun scope, a tube type red dot (like an Ultradot Matchdot) or a mini reflex sight. I’m leaning towards the mini reflex sights as most of the other solutions are too bulky or too slow to apply in this fast moving game. There is a new generation of mini reflex sights that allow fast target acquisition, permit a very generous field of view and glow enough to be seen in bright sunlight. They are also relatively light weight and tend to be somewhat unobtrusive compared to traditional firearm mounted optical sights.


Ultradot Matchdot
Image from here

Reflex sights are not new. They have been around for a long time. In fact, by WW2, most fighter aircraft had reflex type gun sights. It is in that last decade or so, with advances in battery technology and the ubiquity of surface mount components on circuit boards, that the relevant power sources and circuitry has shrunk to the point where it is practical to produce cheap mini reflex sights (that don’t require battery changes every other day). One sight that I looked at is the Vortex Venom. It has a battery life of 30,000 hours! That’s like three and a half years!


Vortex Venom
Image from here

Anyway, I think it would be easier and faster for me to use some kind of red dot sights to be competitive at my club. I just have to test this theory and decide if I want a small dot or a large dot. A large dot is easier to see when shooting the steel plates however, it doesn’t work well for precise aiming. So I pulled the little Bushnell TRS 25 off my AR pistol and stuck it on there. This has a 3 MOA red dot and is reasonably precise on a .22 LR pistol out to 25 yards.


TRS 25 on the Victory.

I will post the results of this experiment later.

[herb]

Nice! a lovely pistol. Very accurate and in a caliber you can shoot all day long. Congrats!

-Herb

[Peacefulguns]

Lovely weapon. Great shooting.

[ARAE]

Gorgeous...

[xl_target]

Thanks, Herb, Peacefulguns and ARAE.

The groups that I posted in the previous posts were hand held at 7 yards (21 ft).

Last Sunday when I was out at the range, I had it all to myself so I was able to sit down and take my time. I don't have any kind of dedicated pistol rest so I set up at 25 yards and rested the butt of the grip on a sandbag. With a two handed hold and using the red-dot to sight in on the target, I was able to carefully fire each shot. At 25 yards, the red dot completely covers the little stick-on targets that I was using. So I had to try and hold the dot so it would be centered on the target every time. The idea is to see what the pistol was capable of.

I'm actually quite surprised at the groups. Smith & Wesson weren't kidding about this pistol having a match barrel. I'm not sure how they can do all this for the price that they are selling this pistol for.



5 rounds with Wolf MatchTarget. Note that one round is off on each target.
Apparently I can't concentrate long enough to put five shots on target, sigh!

Last night, I was at our steel shoot and was able to cut my time by approximately half when using the red dot on this pistol. The accuracy on targets being shot at speed at the fifteen or twenty yard range is greatly increased. As long as you put the dot on the target, you will hit it. The big issue was losing the dot occasionally as I was moving from target to target and having to find it again. This will take practice and I think the open sides of the Vortex reflex sight that I have been looking at will be a better option that the tube of the Bushnell TRS 25 sight I am using now.

[Vikram]

Though I haven't used either, I think the Vortex would offer faster target acquisition than the tube. Still very good shooting!

[ronj]

I have been trying to find one of those for about 2mounths. I really like the looks. Your very lucky to have found one. I gave up looking and got a Ruger sr 1911 45 cal and put a Kimber 22lr kit on it.

[xl_target]

Ronj,
You have a couple of high quality components there.
You ended up with a very fine .22 LR handgun.

Added in 16 minutes 19 seconds:
The Black Knight strikes back!

So yesterday, I went out to the range and all of a sudden, every other shell would stovepipe of fail to eject.
On looking the pistol, I find that the ejector has tried to become a member of the Martin-Baker tie club.
In other words, it has explosively parted company with the bolt.


I wedged it open with an empty shell so you can see the end of the bolt.


close up of the bolt showing the missing extractor.

I called S&W and they said to send it in so I went to my local gun shop and had them mail it in for me.
Now we get to see what kind of customer service S&W has.

[TwoRivers]

I hope it's better than SIG's, not that that would take much.

[Sakobav]

XL
Nice shooting one of these days will go to basement range here too with Browning she needs an outing..Alas
Cheers

[ckkalyan]

You sure are an experimenting man xl_target!

ngrewal let's head out, with your arsenal, to Alas-KA?!