DPM3 Three Gun and 4 new tips.

I just finished with the DPMS 3 gun championship in Del-Tone Minnesota. Congrats to Randy Luth and the crew at DPMS for another great match with an incredible prize table. I think the list of sponsors took over 10 minutes for Randy to go through. [There was over $130K in prizes on the table and $1750 in cash for each division winner! Happily, I was one of those taking the Open championship edging out Jerry Miculek by about two points.
The Match:
The only thing the match was missing was any significant distance shooting. The range is limited to 200 yards. The types of shooting were quite varied including weak hand, strong hand, single gun stages, multi-gun stages, etc. The scoring was quite different also in that every stage was worth 100 points no matter how big or small. Most of them were time + penalty stages and one was a points earned stage.
On the points earned stage, you had a target at 25 yards with only the A zone available and an 8” steel plate. The same set up but with a 12” plate was also at 10 yards. It had 6 times at each position. 5, 4, 3, 2.5, 2,1.5 seconds. The plate was a stop plate and if you hit it under time you were able to progress to the next string. When 6 strings are over or you don’t make the time, you go to the 10 yard part of the stage and start at 5 seconds again. The most points you could earn were 120. Five points per hit in the A and only the paper scored points. Hits on the steel only moved you to the next string. Jerry Miculek rocked the stage and shot 110 points! This was quite an interesting stage to practice and learn to work under time constraints.
The other pistol only stage was supposed to be quite different than the one we shot in the match. You started at the back of a trailer, ran forward around several baffles, and then shot two to the body (all three had hard cover also) and one to the head on each of three targets, mandatory reload, repeat strong hand, mandatory reload and repeat weak hand. A lot (most) of shooters had misses on this stage.
Okay, on to how the match went for me. Extreme ups and downs would be a good description.
The first stage of the match that I shot was a shotgun stage that had you open a door by shooting a piece of lathe where the lock would be. FOUR shots later and the damn thing finally opened up. That added an extra speed load right off the bat. Got lucky at the end of the stage and hit the slug bonus plate. Ended up winning the stage in spite of the extra issues.
The second stage (shotgun) went a whole lot better. Rocked that shotgun stage. Borrowed some speed sticks from Ron Filho that held 6 rounds. That made a huge difference. The primary problem for an open gun that holds 11 rounds was that each of the 5 shooting positions had 7 rounds minimum. This is a very messed up count for 4 round speed loaders as you are empty by the middle of the stage. The 6 rounds sticks rocked! Going to attempt to make some this week and may document how to do it if anyone is interested.
The third stage was the trailer pistol stage. Shot just fine but had a 5.98 second jam on the stage. Still haven’t figured out what happened. Racked it twice then pulled the mag out and it went into battery. Luckily that only cost me first place on the stage and didn’t hurt me too much for the match. Of course it would have helped if it hadn’t happened, but, it isn’t a perfect world.
The third stage (pistol) was the points stage that I have described earlier. Ended up with 85 points. Made all the times but had several hits just above the A box. Will check and see if America West caused the C-more to move a bit or whether it was just me. Would have made more sense if they were off to one side or the other not high if it was my fault though.
Okay, so it pretty much went to hell on the next stage. They could have named it f***ing nightmare. Sorry, I am still pissed about it. Anyhow, you start out shouldered on the rifle prone in the back of a truck with 5 rounds and 4 mini-poppers and 1 half popper at 103 yards. Not hard shots at all especially with a Trijicon TA11. A little harder when your gun goes off four times. I think I floated the gun too much against my shoulder and it bump fired. I hit the first round and had one left, hit that one and dumped the mag and bi-pod as I jumped up and ran to the next position to pick up the next mag and shot five pretty close targets. The mover and 10+ head shots were next at 78 yards from inside of a bus. The velocity of the mover was painfully different on each pass. I timed it and figured the calculations were varying from 6.5 -14 miles an hour.

Had one miss on the head shots. Then cleared the rifle and grabbed a preloaded 870 pump and knocked down five plates on a platerack. Dumped the empty shotgun, ran out of the front door of the bus, picked up the handgun and shot 5 (?) steel, then ran 30 yards shot the mover again and some final targets through a couple of ports. My raw time was 90 seconds plus 50 seconds in penalties. At that point I thought the match was over for me. Hard to overcome that much in penalties. Later I found out that Jerry had shot a 100+ on the stage and had 20 seconds in penalties so it didn’t hurt as much as I thought.

On to the long range rifle stage. I started out with a S&W 45 revolver and shot 6 IPSC targets from 1-3 yards. You only got six rounds so if you didn’t hit an A it was a 10 second FTN (failure to neutralize)! I dumped the gun, grabbed my rifle, loaded it up, then off a 55 gallon drum (modded to “look” like a horse) and shot 12 rounds at paper targets and 13 steel plates. Hopped off the horse and went kneeling behind a large tub filled with water that had a couple of pieces of lathe attached to the top. Even though the stage had only 38 rounds of rifle required I went and used a Beta mag.

Ended up with a time of 63 seconds and beat second place by 7 seconds. Felt kind of good after coming off that previous stage.

Now I went on to a shotgun/pistol stage. This was the DQ stage of the match for a lot of people. When you are right handed and move to the left with a long gun, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR MUZZLE DIRECTION! If you run to the left like normal you would break the 180. When you are right handed, if you have the muscle strength, take your weak hand off the shotgun and keep your muzzle in the center of the berm down range with your hips rotated toward your movement direction. This will allow you to still move quickly and yet not have your entry fee be a donation to the prize table. Rocked the stage in a 41 plus a 10 second penalty for a miss on the slug target. No idea what happened on that shot. In the second position I loaded a single slug, shot the popper that threw a clay straight up (flipper type) and then went at the 40 yard slug target. I think that I rushed the shot on the slug target to get to the aerial clay. Oh well, off to the next stage.

Short range rifle with all the no-shoot targets they could find seemed to be the theme of the next stage. I don’t think any of the 16 targets were open. With my C-more canted off to the right with a nice big dot, I treated it as a pistol stage and shot it entirely on the move. 32 rounds and about 24 yards of movement, that one went well at 15 seconds!

The last stage of the match was pretty stressful for me. It was the shotgun stage was where the previous year I pretty much lost the match on the trap targets. I hadn’t shot any sporting clay or trap type targets with a JP sight on a shotgun up to that point. Last year Jerry Miculek hit 7 aerial clays and I only hit three! This year I had practiced shooting Five Stand as at Red Mountain gun club several times. I hit 8 and Jerry hit 9 this year. That practice helped out a lot. Shooting a shotgun with a dot sight on aerial clays is very different than using a bead sight. You can actually do exceedingly well with it and learn leads much easier than when not having the floating dot reference point.
We really didn’t know who won the match until they called out the results. Was pretty surprised to win it after a total of 70 seconds in penalties and a 6 second jam. Now I am off to Raton, NM for the Rocky Mountain Three Gun Match. Will let you know in a week or so how it goes! Best of luck to all and keep an eye out for new stuff coming out soon!

TIP 1
To calculate the speed of a mover you need the following information.
Distance the mover travels visibly in feet. (Walk down to the mover and use a LRF (laser range finder) and stand at the edge of one side and paint the other side. Convert it to feet.)
Time it takes to cover that distance.
Now to get the miles per hour use the following equation:
Distance in feet / time in seconds x .6818 = MPH

To calculate the lead on the mover you need the following:
A ballistics program such as the Horus Atrag or the http://www.shootingsoftware.com/ shooting lab.
Distance in yards from the mover.
Ballistic data of your ammo. (velocity, BC, and weight are the critical)
Run your calculations and figure out what the lead is in inches not mils. That would be easier to figure out what the visual lead looks like. If the lead is 18” and you are shooting at an IPSC target you need to shoot 9” off the edge of the target.

Tip 2

How to keep a Beta mag working!

I know everyone complains about keeping Beta mags working. They are the 100 round dual drum mags for the Ar-15’s.
1. Keep them full of the dry graphite!
2. Use 6-8 times and sell it and get another new one!
3. Keep an eye on the lips and the front of the feed area for any damage.
4. That’s it!
That’s how I keep my Beta’s constantly functioning properly.

Tip 3

How to keep your AR mags working!
1. Buy the MagPul anti-cant followers. http://www.bizplaces.com/magpul/
2. Use dry graphite on the follower and in the mag.
3. Replace the springs if there is any sign of weakness or bad angles.
4. Load them to 28 or 29 rounds and unload them when not in use.
5. Slightly bevel the top inside front edge of the magazine so that the tip of the bullets have a smoother ride into the chamber.

Tip 4

Shotgun aerials and reloading tip!
Okay, learning to reload on a shotgun can be really boring and frustrating to do at home or even on the range. What you can do to learn to reload under pressure is to go out to your local sporting clays club and “bribe” one of the pullers. Put only two or three shells in the gun and have all your appropriate shell holders filled up. Get them to pull a clay every second or two until you run out of ammo. Five stand is the most fun and if you just let the puller send whatever clays he wants, it is definitely interesting since you have to look for each bird. Start one string and do single loads only. Do the next string doing two shells and so on. After a few hundred shells, your loads will settle in and you won’t feel rushed getting to the birds. If you just do this a couple times a month it will make a huge difference in your shotgun shooting.