My 1/5th gun story, Part II

As info, the majority of my competitive 1/5th shooting has been done with two guns and three stocks.  A NS522 with a Weaver KT-15 was my gun for the first three years shooting mostly Wolf MT.  I put on a custom rear pad cut out of a flip flop.  Not to dampen the recoil but to make the butt of the stock more "sticky" in my shoulder.  Heck, some people put sandpaper on the end of their pad.  After a few years a far more experienced shooter who also used an NS offered to tune the factory trigger by adding a sear adjustment screw as well as cleaning up the sear.  WOW!  That was a huge help and something I should have done at the outset.  For glass, I started with a Weaver KT-15.  Mostly because it was under $100 and had Weaver's "Microtrac" system which I was told affords excellent repeatability.  And, way back when I bought two cases of Wolf MT.  They were just $167/case.  Seemed like a lot of money when Federal Lighting was just $69/case.

In truth I was always making changes, upgrades, tweaks.  Some shooters say you're just going to chase your tail.  While I will say, understand the truth in that statement yet when you start off, you have to learn what does and does not work.  Experimentation is what will help you develop the system that works for you.

I decided that 15x was simply not enough power.  Or, like so many males, more had to be better.  I picked up a Sightron 6-24x44 SII with a dot reticle.  If I recall, the extra power caused my scores to go down.  But, my shooting buddy had loaned me his Anschutz std gun for the season and I needed a second scope.  So there I was, looking like everyone else, two gun cases, two supplies of different ammo, one for each gun.  I looked like a pro!  Truth is, I was running in place never really getting anywhere.  I reviewed my scores and with the NS522 I was getting on average 3 fewer animals.  We're talking 22 to a 19 on average.  Too much equipment, no focus!

I was at sea.  Progress had ground to a halt.  But I kept trying.  I decided to try air since that is what the good shooters were doing.

I started to shoot other shooters airguns.  They of course all had Leupold scopes.  WOW!  The clicks were tight and better yet, you could see the paint chips on the animal.  I convinced myself that seeing the details of the animal would help me and I purchased my first 6.5-20 Leupold with target knobs.  Silly money.  3x as much as my gun.  I liked it and it gave me more confidence.  Better yet, Leupold scopes don't seem to lose value.

I started to practice air at home over the winter as I had to give back the Anschutz std gun and re focused on my NS522 with it's new Leupold Scope.  Talk about bi-plys on a Ferrari!  In short, back to one gun, air practice, a good scope with clean optics, target dot, 20x power.  I Have 28 SB/SB Hunter matches recorded and 11 airgun matches.  39 competitive matches, shoulder to shoulder in 2002.  In 2003 I had 54.  My point, I went to every shoot I could find and shot a lot of airgun.

Nomad invited me to go to a big match in Pe Ell Washington.  Yes, FLY to a match. I did and managed 33+27+28+23=111.  For AA class that was enough to win a Nesika Bay Fiberglass stock which Nomad coached me to take off the table after HOA, First M, First AAA took the Kowas and Leupolds.  He then introduced me to John C. who wanted my stock and would trade a Anschutz 1710 toward the stock.  So, in 2004, four years into my journey, I retired the NS and moved to a 1710 in a black MacMillan stock with a two stage trigger.

I moved up to an Anschutz 1710 in a MacMillan Monte Carlo stock with a Leupold 6.5-20x40mm scope still shooting Wolf MT.  The score books do not tell much of a story as I moved from Dallas to Memphis shortly after acquiring the Anschutz.  In 2007 I moved my 1710 action to a Mark Pharr designed Silhouette RT stock.  At this point, all problems are caused by the shooter.  This is a mental game, a shooter skill game, not an equipment game.

To substantiate that statement here is a story.  I was shooting well one day at Pemi.  It happens sometime.  As I was encouraging a fellow shooter who was not having as good a day as I was, I offered to shoot his gun to see if I could find the cause of this problems.  After I emptied the 5 round magazine on 5 rams which all now rested in the sand, the gun, a CZ, was exonerated from any wrong doing.  It's mental, not equipment!  Don't get sucked up into the equipment vortex.