Monday, June 25, 2012

An Afternoon At The Range

Since I haven't been to the indoor range in I-forget-how-long, and I took today off work to unpack the Jeep and recover from Field Day, my son and I went out this afternoon for a couple of hours.
It's nice getting there at 2pm, as we had the whole place to ourselves, and used the lane next to ours to stack our gear, reload our guns, prep the targets, etc.
He brought his step-dads Remington Viper 522, and his Sig P226. I brought my Kimber TLE-II 45ACP.
As usual, it took a a magazine full of 45ACP before I got "good" again, and the the whole first mag I was chanting "Front Sight, PRESS, Reset, Front Sight, PRESS, Reset" as I dusted the rust off my marksmanship. At ten yards. they were all in the black, but not nearly as tight as I know I'm capable of. Still, they were all within a "Dinner Plate Sized Circle" as propounded by the NRA for Basic Home Defense.
By the second mag I had them all within a space I could cover with my hand, so the skills came back pretty quick.
The Remington Viper 522 my son brought is an interesting little rifle. It was the replacement for the Nylon 66, which I owned a LONG time ago, and regret giving to my best buddy before I moved out here to Kaliforniastan. My buddy still has it, and shoots it regularly, and tells me it's none the worse, but I still miss it.
The 522 lived up to it's reputation for the plastic magazines it came with being pretty crummy, and we had numerous failure-to-feed malfunctions. Once we switched to the aftermarket steel magazines he brought with him, it settled right down, and we burned through all the "old" ammo he brought with him. We had a bunch of failure-to-fire malfunctions, and although the round showed a solid hammer strike, it just didn't fire. We started to use some Federal "Value Pack" ammo I brought with me, and spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between shooting at the 1" stick-on circles he brought, and using our handguns.
By the time we were finishing up for the day, people were starting to come in, including some local LEO's who use the range for qualifying.
All-in-all, we had a great time, and we're going to try and get up to Angeles Shooting Range in the next week or so for some rifle time.
And I'm definitely going to try and get to an Appleseed event after the August launch that I'm scheduled to go on.

3 comments:

  1. There's a Nylon 66 in a shop near here... But they're getting pricy now!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Rev, it's always enjoyable to spend time with my son, and being at the range makes it doubly so!
    DirtCrasher....yeah, they go for big bucks on GunBroker.com, too.
    Hard to believe a little rifle I paid something like $60 for way back when now goes for $250~$500!
    Guess I'll just have to be happy with my little Marlin 60.

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