The range nearest Many Words Press Keep-The-Lights-On Day-Job HQ is the sportsman’s1 club to which I belong. When parvusimperator’s Open gun came in, we therefore decided that waiting for a weekend was silly, and instead took a long lunch to drive up to the range and see how it went.
Of course, while he was doing that, I had to entertain myself some other way. Enter the Dot Torture drill, which I believe I’ve mentioned previously. It’s a great way to spend a box of ammo, and also to work on fundamentals of marksmanship. We’ll come back to that in a bit, because the real highlight was putting the C-Zed through its modular paces.
The C-Zed, as you may recall, is a CZ P-09 frame with slides for both USPSA Carry Optics and Limited competition. The P-09 is a perfect choice for this, because it 1) comes in Limited-preferred .40 and Carry Optics-preferred 9mm, 2) has enough factory and aftermarket support to have 140mm magazine base pads, Limited-standard fiber optic front/black rear sights, and a sight dovetail red dot mounting plate, and 3) can be swapped from a Limited-preferred cocked-and-locked safety to a Carry Optics-required decocker. Very few other guns hit all the requirements2.
The dream, then, is to be able to toss two slides and some magazine bodies into my range bag, and shoot two different divisions morning and afternoon at local matches with the same gun (at least as far as the ATF is concerned). Is it plausible to do so?
Yes! In between my 9mm dot torture target and my .40 dot torture target, I did the full swap between divisions on the clock: pop off one slide, swap the safety to the decocker or vice versa, put the new slide on, change the magazine bodies, attach or remove the magazine well. On the clock, the changes to the gun proper took about two and a half minutes, and the magazine swap took two minutes more for three magazines3. I may not end up making the swap and shooting two divisions at this weekend’s match, but the option is there, tested, and eminently practical.
Back to Dot Torture. Having both a .40 pistol and a 9mm-with-dot pistol at the range made it easy to compare my accuracy performance with dots against irons. Obviously, I was more accurate with the softer-shooting dot-equipped pistol, but it wasn’t as big a difference as I expected it might. One thing to try next time I go out is moving the target closer. The Dot Torture target packs ten circles onto an 8.5×11 page, and is designed for use at three yards (to start with). I’ve done it at five yards so far, which accounts for part of my poor performance4.
And finally, it’s time for some bonus content. Parvusimperator gave me ten-or-so shots out of the Open gun. It really is something else. It was sufficiently soft-shooting that I kept forgetting to actually grip it, so the dot moved as the slide went back and forth. Had I done a little better with my fundamentals, I doubt it would have moved at all. There’s no real point to discussing the trigger profile, because it doesn’t have one—both the pull and the reset are so short as to seem instant. It was a good get, and I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.
It also got me thinking about a project gun for the upcoming offseason. Look for a post on that coming soon.
- It’s actually a sportsmen’s club, in the sense that it belongs to a number of sportsmen but not the entire category of sportsmen (sportsmens’), but plural possessives are just the worst, so I won’t hassle them too much. ↩
- Striker guns can, but I prefer a hammer where it’s a viable option, and with minimal work besides replacing the hammer and disconnector with Cajun Gun Works parts, the P-09 has a better trigger than any striker-fired gun. ↩
- I have four in total, but only three 9mm bodies, so the last one is a perma-.40. It feeds 9mm well enough for what it is, which is to say a magazine I should never need to touch, given that the other ones contain 72 rounds. ↩
- The rest is that offhand shooting is terrible. ↩