The Satuit Nimrod

Pistol

We had 11 shooters in total which included two junior shooters for the Miss and You're Out! match on Saturday, March 16th. 

Round 1 ended in a tie between Paul Figueiredo and Mike Guidicci with Mike winning in the shoot-off on the dueling tree. Round 2 resulted in a four-way tie between Mark Baker, Gary Bowes, Paul Figueiredo and Mike Guidicci. Mark and Gary shot it out on the dueling tree with Mark prevailing. Paul and Mike then took their turn to shoot it out with Mike narrowly beating Paul. The final shoot-off in this round to establish a winner was between Mark and Mike, with Mike winning.

Round 3 ended with a tie between Mike Guidicci and Gary Bowes. Gary was a fraction of a second faster than Mike and took that round. Mark Baker won Round 4 in a shoot-off with Maura Devine, Laura Mann (guest) and Mike Guidicci. Round 5 was the last round and a short one as most of the competitors was starting to tire. Alex Koines won in a shoot-off with Paul Figueiredo.

At press time, a date/time/format for Pistol Match in April had not been announced.

Skeet and Trap

Trap shooting on Saturday mornings only until the Spring. Skeet continues to shoot on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings.

The plan to rebuild part of the high house to allow better access to the thrower and have better storage for the clay targets is underway.

Cowboy Action Shooting

After putting in a good performance at the  SASS World Championships in Phoenix, the Gunnysackers hightailed it for Florida where they competed in several matches before heading for home.

The Wild Bunch match scheduled for March 23rd was abandoned due to extremely wet weather. The Cowboy Action match on the 30th attracted 10 shooters, seven of whom were club members. There were some residual puddles on the pistol range that were a minor inconvenience and had to be worked around.

The Gunnysackers who shot the match were Eastern Tenderfoot (Phil Lennon), Frisco Kid (Drew Thompson), Yankee (Ron Rice), Nantucket Dawn (Sue Lennon), Queek Draw (Chris Mullahy), Big Jake (Jake Mullahy) and Col. Travis (Mark Baker). With the exception of Frisco Kid and Big Jake who both shot in the 49er category, the remaining Gunnysackers shot solo in their categories.

The next  Cowboy Action match is scheduled for Saturday, April 27th.

The Day the (Pistol) Universe Changed

by Tamara Keel, posted on March 28, 2024 in NRA Shooting Illustrated

The landscape of the combat handgun in America was very different at the dawn of the 1980s. For starters, the U.S. was still largely revolver country, but it’s the world of duty/service pistols that I’m looking at.

Pistols hadn’t changed much over the preceding few decades since World War II, although the experience of the war had changed how they were made.

Prior to “The Big One,” pistol design was exemplified by sidearms like the classic Colt Government Model and the Browning GP35 Hi Power. To build a pistol, you took big blocks of steel and machined away everything that didn’t look like a gun part.

Even the simplest bits of the lockwork were made this way. If you’ve never seen a pre-war trigger from a genuine G.I. M1911, it’s very different from the current ones, which are a sheet-metal loop bent into the stirrup shape of the bow, with a cast metal or plastic trigger shoe affixed to it. Back then, the whole thing—bow and shoe—was all one piece, machined from steel.

But, this is time-consuming, leaves a lot of raw materials lying on the floor in the form of metal chips and doesn’t necessarily result in a part that’s any more functional. (In the case of 1911 triggers, the heavy original ones limit how light the pull can be, lest the gun “double” under recoil as the inertia of a steel trigger trips the sear again. Those plastic or magnesium shoes found on comp guns aren’t just for looks and convenience.)

The pressure of churning out zillions of firearms during World War II caused manufacturers to explore ways to simplify and speed up production.

Going back to 1980, the pistols that best exemplified the postwar art were the semi-autos from Smith & Wesson, which were slowly gaining a foothold in the duty holsters of America. While the frame and slide were machined from forgings in the classic antebellum style, much of the lockwork consisted of precision stampings.

Smith & Wesson’s pistols weren’t the only semi-autos spreading across the marketplace back then. Beretta’s Model 92 was an evolution of its earlier products, marrying the Walther-esque locking block of the Model 1951 9 mm duty pistol with the double-action trigger mechanism and double-stack magazine of the Beretta .380-chambered Model 84 Cheetah.

The construction of the original Model 92 was largely a throwback to pre-war norms, though, being machining-heavy and largely devoid of stampings or castings. Not so with another pistol introduced in the 1970s, though.

SIG Sauer’s P220 was designed originally for the Swiss military, that needed to replace its P210 service pistols—which had become too costly to produce—with something less machining-intensive. (Ironic, since the P210 itself was a cheaper-to-build replacement for Swiss Lugers.)

In fact, the reason we know the company as SIG Sauer today—and this is a bit of a simplification—is that Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft of Switzerland partnered with J.P. Sauer & Sohn of West Germany to construct the pistol, in large part for the stamping techniques that Sauer had pioneered coming up with volkspistoles during the war.

Read the complete article here.