.22, .44, .45 and 9mm Day down on the farm at Dewitt's Range

Bad news is state budget cuts has closed the public range at Millstone 4-H Camp where I've been shooting for the past few years.

Good news is private enterprise is alive and well in Richmond County, NC. I found out a local sporting clays range has expanded from shotguns to rifles and handguns so I visited there today to check it out.

Shot six of my pistols, I'm happy as a pig in deep crap and joined up on the spot.

The range is Dewitt's Game Farm and you will find me there most Saturdays from now on, as long as the Good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise -- or I have to work Saturdays.

The Sig .22LR slide conversion kit I bought for my two Sig P229 .357 Sig pistols is not an immediate hit. For some stupid reason, I took two different Federal .22 loads to shoot in it, high velocity and hyper velocity, and it didn't like either. Feed problems. But that's stupid because I know Sig .22 pistols like CCI and I didn't try CCI first, then others later. Next week a diet of CCI for the Sig P229 slide, which fits and works equally well or badly on either the rail model or the non-rail model.

There were two unqualified successes of the day. First was the .45 ACP slide I just got for my Sig P220 Rimfire Classic. Shoots like a dream, witness the .45 holes in the target. It's easy to see which are .45 and .22 aside from the size. The .45 holes, all eight of them, are in the black from 10 yards standing, while the .22 holes are mostly high as I fiddled with the sights until I gave up on misfeeds.

Second unqualified success is what I did with the extra bucks leftover from the sale of my Glock 20 10mm after buying the P220 .45 ACP caliber exchange kit. I'd had my eye on a Hy Hunter Six Shooter .44 Magnum single-action pistol for some time, a copy of the Colt Single Action Army with a 6" barrel and genuine fake pearl grips. I even took it out for a test run some time ago and found it to be a great shooter (one of the benefits of working in a gun shop, shoot before you buy with used guns).

So I finally had some money for a fun gun and brought the Hy Hunter home the same day the P220 slide kit arrived. I did a bit of research on it and found out it was made by J.P. Sauer & Sohn in West Germany in the 1980s before the Iron Curtain collapsed. Sauer later merged with the Swiss pistol company Sig and became what we know today as Sig Sauer. So you could technically say I shot not three but four Sauer pistols today. Three Sig Sauer semi-auto pistols and one Sauer single-action revolver.

I also shot my Dan Wesson .22 revolver a bit and ran a few mags through my S&W 469 9mm pistol. They're both new-to-me so they need the work and so do I.

It was fun and as Bogey said, this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship: me, my pistols and rifles and Dewitt's Game Farm. See you there next Saturday.