Indoor Bench Rest Event

Heavy snow, cold weather and a touch of cabin fever seemed like a good reason to hold an informal indoor bench rest competition.  

Cake Dave and Robert showed up with their sporter guns. Dave was shooting a tuned .22cal Marauder and Robert shot a Dominator in .177cal. They also kept busy wheeling and dealing finding some nice Used Guns that had just arrived in the shop the day before, a  Beeman .22cal R1 and an older Santa Rosa labeled Beeman R1. 

Dave (Grumpy) Goldstein made it out with his Steyr .22cal AZ tuned rifle.  He set up with borrowed bag and rest and had no problem shooting a clean 250 with 13 X's.  Dave finish the match with a total 746 - 35X.  

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Rod and Ryan Parks - father and son team, both shooting Steyrs had a great afternoon.  Ryan only dropped one on his first card, not satisfied, he then proceeded to shift to an alternate pellet which allowed him to achieve  clean 250's on his next two cards.  Ryan's third and final card had 21X's.  Congratulations Ryan on a new shop record! 

Rod's first card was a 245-6X. He made an adjustment on the velocity of his Steyr, basically turning up the velocity to approximately 875 with JSB 8.4's.  Wow -what a difference. Turning up the velocity was definitely the right move. His second card was a clean 250-19X,  third card another 250 - 22X!  Sorry Ryan, as they say records are made to be broken.  Your dad now holds the high card record for the shop.  

Rod's target shot at 50 feet indoors
250-22X

Mark Maher shooting a .177 Steyr had his rifle dialed in perfectly from the start.  Consistently and effortlessly shooting 250 cards.  A 10X, 17X and a strong finish with a 20X on his third card.  

Shawn Henn shooting his AZ tuned TM1000 shot a 249-10X,  249-15X, and a 248-8X.  Shawn helped organize and run the match.  He also managed an interesting side shoot. An air pistol running bore event.  Participants fired a few practice shots at a stationary target, then each shooter was allowed four shots at a moving target.  Target was a 1" orange dot and made two passes at slow speed (5 seconds) and then two passes at the fast speed 2.5" seconds crossing speed. Everyone including myself found out this is tougher than they thought it would be.  Mainly because of the open sights on the pistol.  It is normal for your eyes to want to focus on and follow the rapidly moving orange dot.  You then need to go the pistol sights front and rear, in which case you momentarily loose the dot, then when you reacquire the dot you loose the site set on the pistol.  At the end of this challenging event, I was lucky to be the only shooter to put a pellet in the orange dot.  This entitled me to the $10.00 cash prize. Yeah!

I also held my own on the bench rest.  Slow and steady gave me the high over all score. Shooting 250-16X, 250-16X and 250-18X.  Looking forward to finding some time to tweak my Steyr in hopes of matching or bettering the current shop record.  Is a 250 25X in the horizon, we can only hope.

I would say our group is really progressing well in the sport of airgun bench rest.  

1st - Jim S.: Steyr LG110 FT .177 - 750 50X

2nd - Mark Maher: Steyr LG110 FT .177 -  750 47X

3rd - Ryan Parks: Steyr LG110 HP .177 - 749 51X

4th - Dave G: Steyr LG110 Hunter .22 - 746 35X

5th - Shawn Henn: RAW TM1000 .177 -  746 34X

6th - Rod Parks: Steyr LG110 HP .177 -  745 47X

7th - Cake Dave: Benjamin Maruader .22cal -  713 15X

8th - Robert: Dominator 1250 2 cards 441 4X

Thanks to my wife Nancy for setting us up with chili and cornbread for the event.  Thanks to Shawn Henn for all your help running, providing targets and scoring the event.  Thank you to everyone for coming out and all your help with the set up and take down. Always a days fun with the great commendatory and conversation. Looking forward to our next April event.