Another Appleseed

23. August 2012 · Comments Off on Another Appleseed · Categories: Rifles · Tags:

We attended another Appleseed event. The husband ended up walking out of there with an orange hat, as an instructor-in-training. We brought along a bunch of our friends and had a great time overall.

This was an unusual variation on the theme of Appleseed. I ended up renting a gun because of how this place was set up. They didn’t have one with a scope available for me unfortunately, but there was the red dot. The instructor was kind enough to adjust for me and gave me larger targets. My goal was to work on tightening up my groups so that next time I had something better to work with when I had more appropriate equipment.

Working with the rifle is reassuring. There are a lot of limitations for me but, with the right optic, it levels the playing field. I just need to get the right zoom to get even with other peoples’ eyes. Red dots are amazing! And I am loving my scope. I am confident that with enough practice, I can learn to read the wind as good as anyone, and factor it in.

We went on another scouting trip to Cabela’s. I focused on looking through their scopes to find what adjustment features, ladders, etc. I could use. I found a ladder that would work but it’s an order of magnitude more expensive than I can afford right now. Well one of these days when I get a high-powered rifle of my own, I know what to put on it!

New Toys

02. August 2012 · Comments Off on New Toys · Categories: Pistols, Rifles · Tags: ,

I brought home a couple new toys recently.

First, I bought a lever-action Henry. These are supposed to be great for training. It is supposed to be a great training gun because the ejection of the bullet is separate; you can do it at your leisure, you have less recoil because the firing is not used to eject the casing. That also means less of a trigger pull because less work has to be done with each click.

I found this to be a very easy weapon to use, but my arms grew tired even on this little one and I will have to work on my stamina (seriously, can’t even finish the tube?).

I also bought the PPQ. I needed a full-sized, full-capacity centerfire. I didn’t really like the options that most people had. I didn’t want to get into the 1911 platform, I don’t like glocks, I was ambivalent to the M&P (but anything glock-like, I’m not a fan of), and the CZ I saw looked promising but they don’t come out of the box like that.

In the PPQ I expected good ergonomics, good balance, and from the videos, a ridiculously short trigger reset. I got all of those, but it turned out to be not exactly what I expected either.

I have a PPS which I enjoy a lot, but being a compact gun, it’s not really conducive to any of the games. It’s in .40cal because I actually like having a bit of recoil and the 9mm just didn’t do it for me. I got the PPQ in .40cal too. I expected that, since it’s a bigger gun, there will be less felt recoil. With people going on and on about how little guns have lots of kick, that seemed well, obvious, right?

But I was totally wrong about that. There’s more barrel so less gas is wasted. The PPQ has substantially more recoil than the PPS. So much so that I was genuinely surprised. I haven’t figured out a good grip yet, especially on this larger gun where there’s more room for my hands to move around, so the minute tilts that I would get in the past because of a limp left hand was wildly exaggerated. At first, I didn’t know what hit me when it’d cant wildly and the casings would fall on my head. I eventually fixed that, but then I started having feed problems and I just don’t know how to reliably make that not happen yet. I really need to take a good look at how I hold the gun and work it out.