I haven’t seen a post about this from Padeye yet, so I’ll start.
The air was a cool crisp 90 degrees at 8:00 this past Saturday morning when I met up with Padeye and his friend Dave at the Phoenix Rod & Gun club at the foot of South Mountain. Since I’m much more experienced with firing rifles than hand guns, I started off with the .22. There was a bit of a learning curve for me as far as how hand guns function compared to rifles (“Whoops! Evidently that button is not the safety.”), but I quickly got the hang of it. After I got used to the .22 I moved on to the .45 revolver, .45 auto, and Padeye’s new '51 Navy Colt cap & ball replica. My shots with each tended to start way outside of where I was aiming and then spiraled in toward the center of the target. I think my favorite was the .45 revolver. It’s somewhat of a classic and I seemed to have the best grouping with that one. The cap & ball replica was pretty nice too. I enjoyed getting a low-down on the history from Padeye and Dave.
Padeye and Dave know their firearm history. I started to tell them about the Japanese rifle that my grandfather acquired when he was serving in the Pacific and later gave to my dad. As it turns out, they knew more about it than I did. The conversation went like this:
Me: My dad has this rifle (continue to describe Japanese rifle)…
Dave: An Arisaka?
Me: I guess. Is that what they used?
Dave: Yeah. Bolt action?
Me: Yup, that’s it.
I was about to mention that when the Japanese surrendered, they filed off the chrysanthemum-shaped emblems from the tops of the barrels before handing their weapons over, but the one my dad has still has the emblem - very rare. Before I could mention it, however…
Padeye: Does it have the chrysanthemum on top?
Me: Yeah. As a matter of fact, it does!
I was impressed, but not surprised, at the level of safety observed by the gun club. You shot until the whistle was blown by Coach, the guy who runs the show. After that, you finished firing your rounds and placed the weapon down (still pointed downrange) with it open to indicate that it was unloaded. After this, you stepped back from the weapon. After it was verified that all the weapons had been put down (you weren’t even supposed to touch it at this point) and that they were all unloaded, you were free to go check/repair/replace your target. Once everyone was back off the range and behind the tables, the whistle was blown to start shooting again. I imagine that if you do anything stupid there, you end up leaving early - with Coach’s boot print on your ass.
Padeye gave me some excellent instruction and provided valuable tips to help me improve my shooting. He tells me that Coach is an excellent instructor although I didn’t find out first-hand since Coach was a little occupied instructing a couple of ladies that day.
The gathering broke up at 11:00, when the temperature hit 105-110 (somewhere around there). The black (unloaded) .22 had been sitting out in the sun and was quite warm. I fired one last clip out of it but didn’t worry too much about my precision; I just wanted to empty out the clip and put the damn thing down. I had a great time and look forward to improving my target shooting at future schuetzenfests. Thanks goes to Padeye for being such and excellent host.
