This weekend's shooting

As I'd mentioned before, I took my wife shooting Friday night. That was actually the first time I'd shot pistol in a few months. Given my fairly tight schedule and current obsession with working on my rifle marksmanship skills, I've been completely ignoring the pistol. I'd like to participate in some of my club's pistol competitions. But then again, my commitment to see my kids as many evenings as possible makes that a bit difficult. I'm already committing to one night a week for the light rifle competition, and my monthly club meeting and monthly technical group meeting eat up some other nights during the week. As the kids get a little bit older (and my wife frees up from her 24/7-minus-whatever-relief-I-give-her daycare schedule), I'll probably feel more comfortable with doing more of these competitions.

But I meant to talk about shooting. Saturday morning's shooting wasn't too bad. Of five strings, I shot above 70 on two and would have shot above 70 on the other three if not for the one dropped shot per string. For the moment, I'm just concentrating on getting each shot in the black, which will, statistically speaking, essentially guarantee me a 70. I'm making progress, as I was shooting mid-50's a few weeks ago. I think 80's are certainly within my reach, but I'll likely need some help to do better than that. (Yeah, some people consider an 8 to be a dropped shot, but they've been doing this a lot longer than the few months I've been at it.)

This morning's shooting was abysmal. I replaced the hammer and sear in my primary 10/22 last night. I also installed an extended bolt handle. I want to think I dry-fired it at least once after installing it, but this morning, when I pulled the trigger, nothing. Not the it-went-click-instead-of-boom kind of nothing, just plain nothing. No release whatsoever. I made a quick trip home to grab a couple of brass punches and a screwdriver, disassembled and reassembled, and things started working. However, on my ninth shot, I got a failure-to-eject. The case was halfway out of the chamber, but instead of locking the bolt back and manually ejecting, I figured I'd let the rifle's ejector do the work. Close bolt, pull it back, and now the case is firmly seated in the chamber, with no possibility of manually ejecting it. Of course, I didn't have a cleaning rod on me, so that put an end to my morning's shooting. Guh.

Fortunately, my wife has offered to put the kids down, so I'm going to give it another try this evening. I'll be taking a cleaning rod, and for pure paranoia's sake, I'm taking the trigger group from my secondary 10/22, as well as the tools to install it. The first evening of my club's light rifle competition is Tuesday, so I want to make sure I have a working rifle.