Sunday, January 21, 2007

Fist Fire attempt 1 - Impressions

I took my faithful and trusted CZ 75 with the Kadet Kit to my range this morning. We had our 5 th straight weekend of snow falling but I slip and slid and skidded my way to the range anyway.

For much of the past month and a half I've been working on my one-handed bullseye form. I haven't given up on bullseye but I've signed up for a CCW class on the same day as the next 2700 match so I will not be competing for another month.

I've also returned to going to the gym lately and just started a new phase to my program. Friday's workout was upper body and I was working it. It's not unusual for me to have day-after muscle soreness but I really blasted my upper body and have a second day's worth of chest, shoulder, arm and back soreness. I really felt it when trying the support hand wrist lock.

I now know why the "reverse Weaver" is the term for this. You can not get your wrist lock in position with the gun-hand elbow locked. You can have both bent, for "guard" or both partially extended for "partial" but full extension is support arm locked out and gun-arm bent.

I'm sure I still have a lot more to learn about this position before I can even think I'm close to doing it right but, yes, it DOES help reduce muzzle flip and gets your gun indexed for another well placed shot faster than what I had been doing. You don't need to try and squeeze the gun between the hands, either. The wrist lock acts to reduce muzzle flip by working at the other end of the 'lever'. The soft webbing of your hand absorbs more energy, too, than trying to line up the hand/wrist/arm bones when you properly index the gun in the firing hand.

Prior to this I would consider what I did a "shallow" grip. The backstrap was normally on or close to the bones of my thumb. Only recently in bullseye shooting with my S&W 41 had I worked into a deeper grip. Middlebrooks' use of indexing with the second finger is a key component to achieving a proper grip.

A side benefit of using this "deeper" grip is that my long fingers don't try to wrap through and around the trigger. The finger is better positioned to use the tip to activate the trigger which will help with trigger torque.

One aspect occured to me. It seemed to me that the steeper grip angle of a Glock would work better for someone learning Fist Fire. It's not required as Middlebrooks is shooting a Witness in DVD 1. There was another club member with a G17 and I held that with Fist Fire indexing and it felt better to me than the CZ 75 or the other two guns I fired, an XD Service 40 and a 1911 clone in .45 ACP.

I plan to get my G 17L and 23 out for the next test fire.

3 comments:

Fits said...

Good Lord where does one begin.What precisely do you want to get out of your shooting? There's of course different styles for different needs. If you're going for your CCW the recommendation would be to settle on one self-defense gun and work with it, and it only, until you're convinced yourself that this is the best weapon for general purpose protection.

I'm not saying that you should do what many advocate, namely shooting one gun for the rest of your life because too many grips, safeties, trigger resets, bore axis adjustments and a host of others things ruins your accuracy and response time.

It takes about 15 years to get good.It helps to stay with one platform as much as possible. But it all gets back to what do you want to do.

Fits said...

Oh and PS: I was a powerlifter for many years and progressive resistance works for guns as well as preacher curls.

Hyunchback said...

Yes, progressive resistance does work for guns. As I detailed in my "Forty Caliber Flinch" posting. I'm to the point where the .40s don't worry me and I'm at least as accurate with them as I am with 9mm or .45s.

Sticking to one gun is a harder concept for me. I may be doing that for a time, though. Most of my pistols operate the same way with a DA/SA trigger system. Some are deckockers, some are safeties. I have 3 that are DAO.

What I haven't put as much time in with has been my Glocks. The 17L was more a curiosity piece after I had used a G19 in a class. The G23 was picked up because it was available. The G22 that I just now picked up was deliberate.

What do I want to do? Number one is have fun. Rifle, shotgun, handgun, all should have some element of fun. Fun to me is hitting accurately. Seeing large (paper plate diameter) groups at 25 feet is not accurate to me. I have worked to ensure that those groups are gone from my performance.

As I said, I chose to get a G22 today. I have chosen to work more on the Glocks. May have to change the name of this blog for a bit.

The Glock is a proven system. Yes, you can mess with them. That's usually when you start getting into errors. The stock sights may not glow in the dark but they are good. Aside from cutting skateboard tape to place on the sides of the grips and maybe a trigger job they really don't need much. (Well, maybe grinding off those damned finger grooves.)

I still love my CZs. I'm choosing to go Glock for now. I'll be taking them to my CCW class. (The range component for this one is not going to include drawing from a holster.)

 

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