Alright. I know it’s not typical for me to post about anything else but health and fitness related topics, but the topic of self-defense is something that I’m interested about and, naturally, want to learn more about. And, as I already mentioned in my previous post, I am not going to restrict myself to mainly posting about health and fitness (health and fitness is one of the many things I’m interested in).
So here we go..
My first 1911 pistol and my first day at the range with it.
So, if you care any about firearms and particularly about 1911’s you know that in this day and age just about any firearms company out there has their own version of this 100+ year-old pistol design. In fact, if you don’t know anything about handguns this is exactly what the name of the pistol means – it was released as a final design in 1911.
Any way, so much has been written about this handgun during these 100+ years that, being the relative amateur that I am in this field, I feel that if I don’t shut up with my general talk about the 1911 I may even do it disservice.
My 1911 is a Taurus PT 1911SF.
Let me stress right away that this is by no means a review of the Taurus PT 1911FS. It’s just a word or two (or a few hundred) about my first experience owning and shooting it.
Well, one thing I knew about it from the day I got it was that its trigger was a bit too heavy when compared to the norm for 1911’s. Several people dry-fired it (all of whom knew much more about guns and 1911’s than me) and they all agreed that the trigger of my Taurus has between 7 and 8 lbs. The norm is 4 – 6 lbs. After my fire session I went to talk to the guys of knowledge in the gun range and one of them said that this is a Taurus thing – they deliberately make their triggers heavier because they consider these heavier triggers to be safer. In other words, if you break all rules for safe handling of a single-action handgun, it makes is (somewhat) harder to have an accidental discharge.
Onward..
I put 50 rounds of .45 ACP 230 grain (Federal Ammo) trough it today. It was the first time this baby saw real ammo after leaving the factory in Brazil. I should mention that after I received it and before I took it to the range today I thoroughly cleaned it from the factory grease and applied a light coat of the lube that I’m supposed to use on a gun.
Round one did not want to properly feed in the chamber – with the factory mag. I will scribble that to the fact that it was my first time feeding my Taurus real ammo and I might have been a bit more timid with the slide cycling than I should have been. Easily fixed – re-cycled and ammo fed in properly.
From there on I had one other hiccup due to the ammo, I think. Somewhere about 25 rounds down the road I pressed the trigger and I didn’t hear “bam”. What was interesting was that I didn’t hear “click” either. I waited about 30 seconds pointing downrange to make sure that it wasn’t a “hangfire” case – a situation in which the gun powder fails to ignite with the speed it should which can cause up to 30 seconds delay in the discharge.
I remembered the troubleshooting teachings from “The Book of Two Guns” (by Tiger McKee). Dropped the mag, partially moved the slide back to see if there was a cartridge in the chamber – and there it was, but it wasn’t properly fed – it had not allowed the slide to fully return to its firing position. I released the slide, letting it go back on the pull of its spring, put the dropped bag back in, tapped to lock the mag fully and was ready to go again.
I was determined to shoot only 50 rounds for this practice. After four full 8-round magazines (a total of 32 cartridges) my right arm started feeling tense and I noticed that I needed to take longer breaks in order to recover and get ready to shoot again. I decided to feed only 3 to 5 cartridges in each mag and I went that way all the way to the 50-th cartridge.
There were several reasons why my right hand tired quickly. Proper posture wasn’t one of them. The Book of Two Guns and a good amount of dry-fire practice made sure I don’t start off on the wrong track. At least the posture/stance I had down already before I went to the range – and that was my goal actually – to not go to the range with my new 1911 before I knew very, very well what I was doing.
One of the reasons was I was more tense in my arms than I should have been. That’s absolutely due to my experience with sending lead downrange being in the hundreds count and not in the thousands. But, another bigger reason was that heavy trigger pull of my Taurus 1911. When I would get in the “fire” position, aim and start pulling the trigger slow, making sure that I don’t tremble too much and that I don’t ‘anticipate’ it would take much longer time and much more energy squeezing on that damn trigger that by the time the gun fired my main (right) hand would go almost numb. I think as a result of the heavy trigger quite a few of my bullets weren’t as much on target as they could have been otherwise.
Any way, overall I think I did well. All of the holes the bullets made were in the human silhouette, non outside of it. Which means I’m hitting the target 100 percent of the time. Good on me (pad on the back). But, they weren’t in a group. And, this to an experienced eye says that I’m still a baby in shooting practice way.
Here is my target.
Not bad, thinks me.
When I got back home Silvia asked me if I had “anticipated” – that is have I fired shots trying to anticipate the recoil and, in an attempt to counter and control it, to have sent bullets lower than center-target. I tried to control for anticipation and to be aware of the phenomenon all the time. But looking at the target it seems that I might have “anticipated” for three or four of the fired bullets – the holes at the very bottom give that away.
Any way, good day of practice I think. My Taurus is happy – officially not a virgin any more.
One Response
Very nice!