10point9

Checking on progress with the RIKA

Aug 182011

So tonight became a session with the RIKA to check to see (objectively) how the hold has improved, with some nice results.

Started off a bit late as work ran on, got into the kit, hooked up the RIKA and started dry-firing to get settled, then some warm-up shots to cernter myself, then fired some calibration shots for the RIKA:

Then we covered the screen of the RIKA (so I wouldn’t be distracted) and shot a few ten-shot strings:

My head was *not* in the game for that one Took a few minutes, centered myself a little, and continued on:

And of course the RIKA didn’t capture that string properly (for some reason the software only recorded seven of the ten shots). So back to the line and put in another ten:

Not as good as the second string, but it did turn out to be instructive – you can clearly tell on the RIKA trace that that 7 is from the trigger, not the hold:

You can also see from comparing with earlier RIKA traces that the hold has gotten much, much better. For example, this was last night:

Okay, it’s a bit easier to see with just the trace from a single shot. So here’s a single average shot from last night:

And here’s one from three months ago:

The amplitude of the vertical wobble is about the same, but the left-right wobble is much less and so is the drift (the longer-term wobble caused by sway and other large position problems) – and that earlier graph was the best I could find from that session, but the one from last night was average – there were better ones than that last night:

I mean, that’s nearly textbook, right there. Now, to get that to happen every time….

UCD August Airgun Open 2011

Events, Training, WTSC No Responses »

Aug 142011

First match since the holiday and the rust is showing…

UCD August Airgun Open 2011

My balance was all over the place, and things just refused to settle down. Anxiety levels were high, but it’s that annoying kind of anxiety that you can’t see as anxiety when it’s happening; think of it as just a generally heightened level of mental tension rather than anything specific – like the way you sometimes realise your shoulders are so tense that they’re touching your earlobes, but you didn’t have any one specific muscle in pain?

The sight picture problem from the July Open was completely gone though, thanks to the efforts of the UCD folk who spent the morning installing new lighting, and to moving to a new firing point (the ones in the center have more ambient lighting than the ones at either end because of the difficulty in mounting lights safely downrange). So that was a welcome relief, but it did just highlight the poor hold in the position

End result was that despite good logistical prep, despite decent time management, despite taking a break to talk with Matt and Geoff half-way through, despite lots of dry-firing and settling at the start, things just refused to calm down and settle into place the way they’ve done in training.

UCD August Airgun Open (Relay 1) 2011

Matt says it’ll come, and so does everyone else, and I know they’re right – it’s just that knowing it’ll happen doesn’t make waiting for it any easier

On the upside, Ashling set a brand new PB of 375 (that’s the ladies MQS, which is a nice result after such a short stint of training with Matt), and Paul blew everyone away with a new PB of 589 (up from 577 in less than a month – proof that it does come when you train long enough…) And Emma is coming back to training as well, and will be coming out to WTSC to train with us on Friday nights, so the WTSC gang is getting better and getting bigger again, which is nice to see after a few years of a lull…

I may have made a mistake…

General, Training, WTSC No Responses »

May 272011

…or a major improvement. I don’t know yet, and probably won’t know for a week or so.

First of all, I tweaked my buttplate. That change has been a while coming, it was needed and expected and is reversible. Basicly, I just raised the buttplate a little – I was settling into position below the aiming mark too often, and this fixed that. So that’s okay.

Buttplate tweak - not a mistake. Probably.

The worry is the other change I made.

After yesterday’s session, and the last few training sessions both with and without Matt watching, I’ve been watching that rightward drift of my NPA and trying to find the cause or to fix it. Turning my feet so that they’re no longer parallel is not really an option, as it compromised my stability. Turning on the spot proved very difficult, and not repeatably consistently. Moving my right foot forward opened my hips to the target line and compromised stability. Moving the buttplate further out along my arm put it firmly on the bicep muscle, which was a recipe for pulse and twitches. The other problem with these solutions was that they didn’t seem to work anyway – that rightward drift kept creeping back in, no matter what I tried.

So last night I try the same exercise as on Tuesday. And I’m in a pretty good state compared to Tuesday, which is good, more data to check. After warm-up and dry-firing, the first ten shots of the exercise (the control group, shot eyes open) go down well:

Just two fliers, shot 6 and shot 10. The RIKA is tracking away, but again, the calibration isn’t matching Megalink to RIKA perfectly — this is the same group on the RIKA:

So again, watch the individual trace shapes, not their location on the target because the calibration seems to be drifting from shot to shot (other shooters have noticed this on this RIKA unit as well, not just me):

So it’s not bad, the shots all land in the hold area, more or less, and the hold area’s small enough:

Control group, shot eyes open, composite of all RIKA traces

Control group, shot eyes open, RIKA trace analysis

So that’s not a bad control group. Not the best I’ve ever shot, but more than good enough to work with. Tuesday saw a major drift of the NPA to the right when I fired with both eyes closed, but was that because I was having an off day or because of a real issue?

Test group, shot eyes shut

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and call that a real problem. The RIKA agrees (again, the calibration’s off…)

Test group, shot eyes shut, as captured by RIKA

Test group, shot eyes shut, composite of all RIKA traces

Test group, shot eyes shut, RIKA trace analysis

Okay. So that’s a conservative tweak, a good control group, a good test group, a problem clearly spotted, and good data all round. So far so good. Here’s where it gets a bit hinky.

When I drop my head into position, and look through the rearsight on target, I could tell there was something pushing the rifle out of my cheek and trying to rotate it around the axis of the barrel (or a parallel axis a bit lower down). It showed up on Tuesday, and I’ve seen in a match or two in the past, but I had it down as a product of a bad day. But I got to thinking when it showed up today as well (when I wasn’t having a bad day) and I started looking at it, and after some experimenting, I came to the conclusion that the cheekpiece came just a smidge too far out to the left of the rifle, so that when I dropped my head into position initially and compressed the flesh of my cheek, it was okay, but as the flesh decompressed, it pushed the cheekpiece away from my cheekbone.

Solution? Move the cheekpiece.

From this...

...to this.

The angle of the cheekpiece is now shallower, and it has been moved to the right by about four mm. Which doesn’t sound like much, but makes a large difference. It’s also been raised just a smidge to compensate for the angle change, but that’s more a consequence than a change in itself.

The results seemed very promising – the rifle is no longer shoved out of my face, my head’s just sitting there on the cheekpiece comfortably without any side pressure and with the foresight nicely centered in the rearsight. And the RIKA trace shows a good hold with this:

So why the worry? Well, first off, it’s like I said yesterday – changing the rifle setup is a Big Thing™. Having made the change, it’s going to be a week or so before I know I made it correctly (ie. did I move it far enough left or change the angle too much, etc), and longer before I know if it fixed the problem properly. And ideally, I should probably have waited another few sessions first. Dumb rookie mistake.

Hopefully, there’ll be some dumb luck to go with the dumb mistake, and this will lead to an improvement… we’ll find out over the next few sessions… and then there’ll be a few hundred dry-firing cycles to run through to properly bed the change in.

What, you thought a quick change to the rifle would be quick?

Friday night Rika training

General, Training, WTSC 2 Responses »

May 222011

So evaluation day didn’t go quite as well as hoped. Got to the range a bit late, got set up with some dry-firing and then set up for the Rika. Calibration took a while longer than I expected (and we never did get it perfectly synced to the electronic targets) and then I put 20 shots in on the Rika. The targets looked okay-ish:

(One wierd flier, but otherwise okay)

Again, a weird flier but otherwise okay. Looking at the Rika traces showed the fliers are coming from the triggering, so at least I know what to work on.

Unfortunately, we mucked up the setup of the Rika and lost the traces, and by this time my back was sore – that being the role of the jacket, not to help you shoot a ten but to help you shoot more than 20 of them in a row, which seems to be where my limit is at the moment. Something else to work on..

So I put another ten rounds in while still on the Rika:

Not a horrible group, if a bit loose (which was more to do with the back I think). Here’s the Rika trace:

Note that the traces didn’t match the points of impact exactly:

Minor differences between group sizes and shape – seems the Rika configuration drifts over time. Looking at the score-v-time graphs, they’re reasonable enough (reasonably level up to the release and no big spikes around release).

So, new plan. Work on back muscles to push the muscle limit past 20 shots, and work on the triggering to eliminate those weird fliers. Which probably means more Rika time in the next few weeks.

MEC Puck

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Mar 182011

While I was down training on Tuesday, I noticed that someone had a new piece of kit – the MEC puck. Been meaning to take a peek at one of these for a while now, and having now done so, I’m jealous It is a very nice bit of kit.

It’s a very simple idea – it’s a milled aluminium pellet tin. Which sounds odd since you get a free tin with every 500 pellets, but this has the nice feature that the bottom is rounded like a small wok, so grabbing just one pellet is made much easier. It also has a nice sealing ring to stop the lid flying off, and the body will sit into the upturned lid to keep things tidy.

It’s a very nice, very simple, very straightforward and very well-executed little idea. More like that would be a Good Thing!

Tweaking towards the middle…

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Mar 162011

My plan for Tuesday’s training wasn’t exactly detailed – it was to come down and shoot to practice the new shot routine. I also wanted to shoot without the shooting frames after the eye test on Saturday to see if I could do without them. Initial warmup was a bit all over the place though, it felt off and the results said it was off:

Matt was down to help myself and the Cunninghams train that evening though, and made some tweaks to the position once I’d warmed up. Taking away the frames lost me a reference point (and a mount for my blinders), but it did make it possible to get a more natural-feeling head position on the cheekpiece. We moved in the buttplate a bit to let the right elbow drop down slightly, but that didn’t get rid of the slight wobble in the position. So Matt did some major buttplate changes to get more contact between my arm and the upper half of the buttplate:

New Buttplate Setup

New Buttplate setup

We’ve also moved my feet around a bit to get my hips more in line with the target, and brought the rifle more in towards my left shoulder. All in all, it feels a lot more stable, and more like it was just a tweak of the position than major surgery (though the buttplate is a bit extreme – the rulebook had to come out to make sure it was still legal). The results weren’t bad either, but they did include the single most annoying flier I have ever shot in my entire life so far:

The most annoying flier of my life...

I have four range days left to the next match, the UCD Open, so the training plan is to just repeat what we fine-tuned today, get used to the new shot routine, and just shoot. Hopefully there’s enough range time to not embarress myself with the score at the Open!

New position from right side

New position from left side

New position from behind

Balance bags and progress

humour, Training, WTSC No Responses »

Nov 112010

Right, so first of all, a small note. I dislike winter training in WTSC without the heating

Mental note: must buy oil for the range’s central heating. Also, must reset range clock, it’s still on BST.

Today was the last training before the DURC Air Open so I thought I’d just put lead downrange and do some final tweaks, and afterwards do a few minutes live-firing off of these puppies:

You might remember these from an earlier mention from Kuortane. The idea’s simple: stand on them and shoot.

They’re also easy to find in Ireland. And they worked very well, though you have to remember to keep your toes overhanging the edge of the cushion so that when you’re in position your weight is centered on the cushion – otherwise, balance isn’t hard, it’s actually impossible.

As to the tweaking, it went fairly well:

And who said coaching is all hard labour and no laughs?

The results weren’t too bad either:

(though you can see a bit of confusion with the sights there at the end. I really do need to benchrest that rifle and get some hard data on how many clicks per ring those sights give me with my sight base length, but there’s no time before the DURC Open, so I’ll do it next week in WTSC. Oh, and that last 8.7 was shot standing on the balance bags, so the other shots give an idea of my current best horizontal hold – the vertical hold is okay too, but when you’re mucking with your elevation setting on your sights, it’s hard to measure vertical hold )

As to the DURC Open, what do I expect? Well, given how the rifle feels right now, I’m guessing I’ll start well, but given that I’m still coming off the tail end of a cold and that I have to shoot late on the 2030h detail, I’m guessing I’ll have some stamina problems. I’m hoping to break 540. The plan is to finish work around 1800h, get home for 1830h and eat something and change into the underarmour and tracksuit, head off around 1900h, get there by 1930h and spend at least 20 minutes warming up by wall-watching and be on the line in full kit and good to go by the start of prep time so I actually have my prep time for prep rather than the usual mad rushing about. I’ll post here after the match when I have the scores. Wish me luck…

Baikal IZH-61 Air Rifle

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Nov 102010

So before training yesterday, there was a bit of experimentation. For a while now we’ve been looking at cheaper ways to get started in ISSF shooting, and we’ve found that the lowest cost of entry is for air pistol with either an IZH-46M or a Tau7 pistol, for about €300 all in. Which isn’t bad, and since both are russian in origin, we’ve been looking at other russian rifles to find a cheap way into other ISSF disciplines. In smallbore, the IZH CM-2 is well-known already as a good basic beginner’s rifle:

and its price is competitive with other possible options like the Vickers Jubilee I looked at in an earlier post.

Today though, we had access to an IZH-61 air rifle to test, and it’s in air rifle that we’ve had the least success in finding a reliable, readily available, basic beginners entry-model firearm (for those outside of Ireland, yes, airguns are classed as firearms here. Yes, we know, that’s daft, but we have to work with it. Stop showing off ).

So here’s the IZH-61 for those not familiar with it:

The stock is mostly black plastic, but it’s sturdy enough. The buttplate is adjustable for length via the small screw you can see underneath the cheekpiece, and the trigger is adjustable for location and weight and travel, though the trigger itself… is not the crispest, smoothest thing on the block. But that’s okay; we’re looking for cheap and basic here, and so long as it’s not so bad as to actively hinder a beginner, we can tolerate imperfections, even gross ones.

As you can see, it’s a hand-cranked side-lever affair, and you can just see the release catch inside the handle:

It has a standard globe foresight, but doesn’t come with a diopter, having instead a leaf-type adjustable rearsight. This is easily removed and replaced with a standard diopter rearsight however; the rail is the Anschutz 11mm standard affair. Hence this very incongruous photo of a €100 air rifle wearing a €500 rearsight:

One oddity is that the IZH-61 is a five-shot repeating air rifle (there is a single shot version, the IZH-60, but we didn’t have it to hand; it’s identical except for the magazine arrangement). There is a simple plastic magazine to hold the pellets:

Once the pellets are loaded in, the magazine is inserted into the rifle:

And then pushed home:

Now, every time the side handle is cranked to compress the spring piston the magazine is advanced to the left a notch; and when the side handle is then returned to its rest position, the bolt probe pushes a new pellet forward and seats it in the barrel:

You can observe the bolt probe (the silver bit) cycling back and forward under the rearsight there:

IZH-61 Air Rifle bolt probe

Okay, so that’s a quick walk-around of the rifle. So far, seems promising. Good foresight, easy to fit a rearsight, it’s very light so good for juniors, it’s basicly adjustable, it’d pass the ISSF equipment rules at a pinch, and it’s quite inexpensive (this one is on the secondhand market for €100 at the moment). So all that’s left is the key requirement of accuracy, so I tried five rounds from the shoulder:

Not the best group (they’re all high because I didn’t adjust the rearsight); and it has the traditional spring piston habit of trying to give you a dose of scope eye, though not as badly as the FWB300 series used to. I did fire another five from a sandbag just to be sure it wasn’t me:

Sadly just not that great. As you can see, it’s not even guaranteed to hold the aiming mark for a rifle target. If someone was just starting out, it might suit, but it wouldn’t be a great idea after that point. For plinking at knock-down targets yes; but for paper targets in competition, not so much. However, I should point out that others with brand new IZH-61′s have reported groups that were as small as 10mm edge-to-edge after picking out suitable air pellets. 10mm is about the absolute maximum group size you could accept for a beginner; a proper match rifle will have an edge-edge group size of no more than 5mm. So perhaps with a new IZH-60, without any inaccuracies from the magazine system, and with some pellet selection, we could have a candidate here for a €100 entry point to ISSF air rifle. Investigations to continue…

Sink, sink, sink…

Training, WTSC No Responses »

Oct 202010

So back on the range training without kit again. The thinner poloneck I was wearing over the underarmour top is proving worse than useless – instead of stopping my supporting elbow from sliding, it’s just helping it slide even more. Settling into a position is nearly impossible, as the slipping causes you to hold on target rather than rest on target, with awful results:

At this point I almost quit and went home, but I thought I might as well try with the rather thick jumper I’d been wearing at work, and it was a good thing that I did – it proved far superior. For this training, I need some padding at the right shoulder to keep the rifle off my pulse, and some grip at the left elbow to stop sliding. There’s no support at all, so you can’t hold position for long or take too many shots lest injury surely follow; but it also means I’m not fighting the jacket when sorting out my natural point of aim, and that’s useful training as well. And the results aren’t bad, considering this is in hiking boots, jeans and a woolly jumper:

By the end, I was getting the routine right and I could feel it in the shots; it didn’t hold for long, but the target would stop moving, even if only for a heartbeat or three. The key is getting into position and just letting your back relax and moving your hips to balance. Sink, sink, sink and stabilise, ignoring the pain in your back afterwards and swearing you’re going to do more back exercises in the gym the next morning In full kit, this would be a lot more comfortable and the hold would be a lot tighter.

Some more regular balance work is needed though; so I’ve borrowed an old stock from Geoff to use as a prop. I’ll find some lead weights to get it to the right kind of weight and then it’s just a case of standing there for a few minutes each day, listening to my feet…

Oh, and I shot a card of air pistol too, just for fun (and because the stickers for the UCESSA postal arrived today and I’ve two rounds to shoot in November )

Training without kit

Training, WTSC No Responses »

Oct 152010

So my current training is centering around training without shooting jacket or trousers or boots, in order to focus on the natural point of aim and ensuring no muscle is holding the rifle on target. So this evening was ten shots sans kit:

and then ten more with just the jacket:

That’s a group with some fliers. Not horrible, but needs work. Time to start doing balance training daily…

Also, we’ve improved the mounting of the Megalinks:

Though we might have to modify them slightly for when we go to clean the lead out of the traps

Whoops

Older Entries

Checking on progress with the RIKA

UCD August Airgun Open 2011

I may have made a mistake…

Friday night Rika training

MEC Puck

Tweaking towards the middle…

Balance bags and progress

Baikal IZH-61 Air Rifle

Sink, sink, sink…

Training without kit

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