Range Officer Training

Range officer training tomorrow, Saturday the 15th of September. I will note this is SSAA training, and I'm not happy with it. On their list of priorities they list safety at number 14, and they list respecting people's rights at number 1. I'm going to switch those around, because everyone should go home unharmed, and no one has a right to shoot, the R/O can and should tell anyone they think is unsafe to go home.

Grant Committee Meeting

At the club meeting on Wednesday they assigned three members the job of applying for grants. The subgroup met today and the following was decided:

• That the range is to be brought up the standards as instructed by the Range Inspector. Our 1st action item is to contact him and ask for specific details about what he requires. We nominated Cedric as the contact person. Broad latitude was assigned to Cedric to make the contact and ensure that we meet all of the Inspectors requirements.
• Once we understand what is required we then have to decide if those actions require a DA, or not. If they do require a DA, we have to find the old DA the range was constructed on, and find out if our requirements are met by that DA. So the next action item will be to request the old DA from council.
• If the old DA doesn't cover the requirements then we have to submit a DA, which will be done, but it is unlikely to be provided on time for the grant closure date of the 5th of October.
• We then will chat to the Grant approval group / coordinator to find out if we have already submitted a grant, in which case we are ineligible. A general query will be asked if we are eligible and if it's worth while applying.
• We will then either submit a grant application for all of the items if we have a valid DA, and or we will submit a grant application for those items that don't require a DA, for example barricades/fences, and or we will not put in a grant application if we are ineligible.
• If we don't submit a grant, then we will submit a DA, this will be very broad in scope and include a secondary range so when the next poor soul who tries this later on, well they will have less steps to take.

Our commitment is to continual improvement, and we have a vision statement, the text of which will be added later.

Click go the shears

The ringer looks around and is beaten by a blow.

I have no one to blame but myself, according to my own stupid rules a p650 (unlicensed) shooter has no handicap, so if the secretary lends the newbie shooter a mark 3 with a trigger job and a red dot, which he then fires 2 hands he gets to score without penalty.

So until Wednesday I was coming 2nd in the club competition behind the secretary coming 1st, my best chance to get my name on the trophy I purchased. Now, I'm 3rd and my name is off the list.

How crappy is that, I mean one handed with iron sights I'm the current 2nd best, but in the championship I'm now third.

It just CREAMS MY CORN!

Working Bee

On Saturday the 8th September 2018 we will be doing an impromptu working bee until say 10:00am, so there will be a delay to the shooting.

A baffling problem

Ok, so we want to ipsc shoot, or practical shoot, or something. The question now becomes how to we do it. We know we need a baffle and eyebrow baffle as a fixed shooting point, so two baffles for every forward fixed firing point. Just how many fixed firing points do we need and at what distance do we need them now becomes the questions to ask.

Is it 7 feet, or 7 metres, and is it then 12 feet or 12 metres, or is it 15? Also what do the police/cops need, what do the ssaa comps need, and what does ipsc need, and finally can we fit all that in on our range with our turnings targets in place?

Oh what about leaving a path down to mow, do we leave one section with hinges so we can open it up to drive down?

Got wood

We had a successful working bee, and we have another one planned for wednesday, we now have covered most of the metal down range and we have a workable plan for more baffles. Thank you to all the people who attended.

We followed up the 1st working bee with a second one, and then a third one.

To date we have:

Covered the metal compressor box on the left side of the range.
Covered the metal posts on the baffle
Removed the metal posts on the right side of the range
Removed or covered up the concrete on the right side of the range.

Working Bee

We will be doing some work on Friday the 31stm bring drills, bits and chargers, also a sense of humor, if you are politically correct you can get lost probably shouldn't come to this working bee.

We will be screwing off wood onto metal downrange.

Dreamers

We are a bunch of dreamers. We have such grand ideas, usually right after finishing shooting when we are shooting the breeze with idle conversation.

In our dreams we have an ipsc ispc practical, or something range. We have everything built and fixed just right, and we are such good shots at all our new competitions.

The reality is that we haven't even got the metal covered up downrange, we yell and cry, and bitch and complain, and gossip, and dream and dream and dream and dream even more and do the normal politics crap, but we haven't even got the basics done.

So working bee to follow soon, and when the metal is covered, then we can talk about the earthen stop butt, and when that is finished then we can talk about the gutters, and then we can talk about the trench being filled with gravel, and then once we have done all that, then we can talk about the future.

The rest can wait.

Cessnock pistol range closed

The necknock pistol range was closed by the range inspector until they come up to code. The guy who won a commonwealth gold in 50m pistol uses that range. The inspector still shut them down.

We need to get that mound raised asap. We need to cover metal downrange asap.

Next Shoot

We will be shooting on Saturday the 28th of April 2018 at 9:00am Australian eastern standard time at the Wingham pistol range on rifle range road Wingham.

Taree Wingham SSAA guests are welcome, the fee is $10 and you get one target, we shoot 60 rounds at each target so bring spare ammunition, additional targets can be purchased for 66c per target. We will shoot 2 to 3 rounds or 60 shots, and we will shoot standard pistol. No charge to members, new shooters who want to learn should get in touch with the executive, but you can show up on the day and chat, we are a friendly bunch and welcome everyone except if you are a nutcase who might be dangerous with a gun.

Sydney international shooting complex

Here is what the 50m olympic range at sydney looks like. Cool baffles!

Pictures of Armidale Range

These are interesting, just to show you what they have. This is a shared 50m small bore / pistol range exactly like ours. Note their rear and side mounds would be lucky to be 3m high. They have residential houses 500m past the rear mound, and it's reasonably flat ground. They don't have a mountain behind their range like we do. They got approved because their numerous baffles makes them a limited/no danger range.

Their baffles aren't anything special, old railway track and or 50mm pipe about 600mm in the ground, about 2500mm high, and they just screw 50mm x 200mm sleepers onto the metal, and put a bit vertically. Basically, it's a very cheap option compared to our over engineered baffle. It seems to functionally work, the police approved it.

The future of the range

Ok, so the executive has made it very clear that whilst we could get a no danger / limited danger range which would give us the option to shoot on the same days as the ssaa, that in their opinion under no circumstances will they ever approve dual shooting, simply because of the possible chance of a mistake, so the limited/no danger range option is flushed down the crapper, we probably still have to do it, but there will be no benefit accrued to us by doing it other than the blessing of the firearms registry.

Which leaves us with two more things to do to the range
1. Raise the height of the butt stop mound to 8m which is the current requirement on the range approval book for a 50m range. (note, the 6m option with a wall on top is a very bad idea)
2. Install more baffles, and baffles that function as eyebrow molds. If we do it right, we make multiple firing lines down on the range so we can bring back practical shooting / ipsc / cowboy action and so on. See this picture for an example of an eyebrow mold baffle:

This is the firing line up at Armidale, and they don't have a mold like ours, they do a baffle about 1m away from the front of the line which functions as an eyebrow mold, and that lets them shoot. Our aim should be to to put one of these right behind our mid-range baffle and that way we can move forward to the mid-range and shoot as that becomes a fixed firing point.

The long term plan being to install:

1. an eyebrow baffle behind our midrange
2. a second mid-range baffle and a second eyebrow baffle behind that.

We could have 3 fixed firing lines the original one in the shed, the one at the mid range baffle the 2nd one at the turning targets.

Nice huh?