Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Shooting Bowling Pins

I tried shooting bowling pins with the Glock last night with mixed results. First the good news. The low powered loads I've come up with to mitigate the recoil on my arthritic hands will take a pin off a 2 foot table with ease. They would probably be adequate on a 4 foot table as well although I'd be inclined to up the powder just a bit or use a heavier bullet.

The bad news is that the Glock, being much lighter and 2 inches shorter than my Rossi .357 revolver, takes more effort to get it carefully aimed so that speed is taking a bit of a beating to get the accuracy. Practice is in order I suppose.

Which brings me to this: How about an all paper pin match? Use this target:

 Two shooters each get 2 of these, side by side, at 3-1/2 yards as this target is about 1/2 scale. Each shooter gets 6 shots, 3 on each target and must alternate between targets. Whoever has the most hits in the circles is the winner with ties broken by whoever finishes first.

3 classes: Major = any centerfire pistol over 9mm, Minor = any center fire pistol 9mm or less, and rimfire. Sharpen your skills without having to clean up the wood and plastic debris.

Update: Revised the target.

4 comments:

Merle said...

Is this a go?

Merle

Billll said...

It is if you want to try it. I've been thinking about this and wondering what's to keep a very slow shooter from beating a faster but only marginally less accurate one. A low-speed bulls eye match isn't what I'm looking for. Maybe as soon as the first shooter fires his 6th round, he calls "Done" which limits the other shooter to only one more round.

Or maybe it will work as is. If I know the other shooter is slow but accurate, the onus is on me to be equally accurate, but a bit faster.

Get some people together and give it a try and let me know how it works out.

Sailorcurt said...

One of the things I've found in bowling pin matches is that the higher velocity rounds like the 9mm, wad cutters or hollow points work best. Using fmj ammo, the bullet zips through the pin, usually knocks it down, but often doesn't transfer enough energy to knock it off the table and takes an extra shot or two to clear it.

Using your low-powered rounds would help with that as well. You may have already factored that into your loads, but I just thought I'd mention the observation.


Of course, this assumes that your pin matches use the same rules as the one's I've participated in. In our matches you have to clear the table of pins, not just knock them down.

Billll said...

To my observation, a pin match is more about inertia than muzzle energy. The 9mm guns will lay the pins over and if struck squarely, the bullet goes in and stops. The pin falls over but seldom leaves the table. The big, slow bullets take the pins off just fine.

At Bristlecone we still have to clear the table, but the 2 foot deep table is cleared much more easily. I wouldn't expect my low-powered .40 to do all that well on a full sized table.