Pau Ferro and .38 Super go to the range and have fun

Pau Ferro and .38 Super went to the range and (stop me if you're heard this one) had a fine old time. That's Pau Ferro on the right, my new grips for my Sig P229, center is my CZ P07 9mm and left is my EAA Witness-P Compact with its new .38 Super slide.

Actually the range is closed until August because it's at at Millstone 4-H Camp which is overrun with kids. How inconsiderate, that kids would want to use their 4-H camp and shut us old farts out of the firing range. I mean why wouldn't a bunch of kids want bullets flying around all over the place while they have fun camping and boating and hiking and riding horses and doing kid stuff at 4-H camp? What is this younger generation coming to!

Where was I? Oh yeah, since the range was closed I went to my fallback spot nearby, an area known to locals as "the claybank." It's a 10-12-foot-high bank of clay alongside the highway. I have no idea what's on the other side of the claybank, but it's been used for a free shooting range for a long time and the only folks who seem to object are hunters who lease the land and don't want the deer scared off during hunting season. It's out of season here in the by-God-it's-hot-already! South, so today was no problem, other than being 97 in the shade and there won't no shade at the claybank.

So I shot my three pistols for the day and got out of there and came back home to the air-conditioning. First up was my EAA Witness P-Compact with its new .38 Super slide, which shoots great. The first target is about 65 rds. of .38 Super FMJs, all I had with me. At first I thought it was shooting pretty far right, but the more I shot it the more the pattern seemed to move toward the center, as you can see from where the ragged hole appeared. Close enough.

Now to order some more mags, a smooth trigger and an ambi safety from EAA. The milled trigger surface is still slapping my left trigger finger just as it did with .45 ACP, which was the original slide that came with the pistol. It's not slapping as hard as it did with .45 ACP, but still an irritation. I'm hopeful EAA has a smooth trigger I can get to replace it but haven't checked yet. Maybe that will make it a pleasure to shoot in .45 ACP, which at present it ain't.

The EAA did fail to lock the slide today with an empty magazine, but it the slide did lock when shooting .45 ACP, so it's probably just the magazine. Not a really big deal but another irritation. Hopefully when I get some new mags, that problem will go away. Generally speaking 12 rds. of .38 Super or 9x23mm ought to be sufficient to solve most problems I could get myself into that need percussion to end. But slides are supposed to lock when the pistol is empty. In a deadly situation, that could cause a really bad day.

Lastly I shot my CZ P07 9mm and the P229 .357 Sig to check the grips of the latter and some more hollowpoints with the former. I was shooting both rapid fire just to check function. And the Sig P229 did something unexpected. It has the Short Reset Trigger and I've shot it fast before, but today I had an unintentional double-tap. The trigger reset so fast I squeezed off a second round right on the heels of the first, bam, bam! It surprised me. I think the hole in the bottom edge of the black is the double-tap but I didn't stop to check at the time, I just kept on shooting to slide lock.

The Pau Ferro Sig grips shoot great and I ran a mag of hollow-points through the P07 in rapid fire, also just to check function. The last three holes in the upper left of the bottom target are three rounds of the new Winchester Bonded PDX1 147-grain loads which I bought after I did the initial JHP testing with the P07. I was aiming at the small cross at upper left. Close enough for standing at 7 yards, which is how I shot today.

Did mention how much fun it is to shoot holes in stuff on a hot Saturday the day before the official start of summer? Life is good.