Studio711.com – Ben Martens

After the first 26 races in the NASCAR season, 12 drivers are chosen to compete in the “Chase” which basically is NASCAR’s 10 race version of playoffs. The specifics of how those drivers are chosen are a bit tricky but basically it’s the top 10 drivers in points and then two wild cards. My favorite driver, Ryan Newman, was right on the bubble for the last wild card position. Lap by lap the standings would change and he’d move in and out of the chase. With the race winding down, Newman was driving his heart out and had pulled into the lead. A victory would have guaranteed that he beat out Martin Truex, Jr for a spot in the chase. With just a few laps remaining, Truex’s teammate Clint Bowyer was told over the radio that Newman was going to win the race. Then they asked Bowyer, who had poison oak on his hand, how his hand was feeling. “Is your arm starting to hurt? I bet it’s hot in there. Itch it.” At that point, Bowyer spun bringing out a caution. After the pit stops, Newman was no longer in the lead, didn’t win, and Truex got into the Chase on a tie-breaker with Newman.

NASCAR cracked down incredibly hard on Michael Waltrip racing which owns both the Bowyer and Truex cards. Investigations revealed they had also played games to help Joey Logano in his points standings. Truex was kicked out of the chase and Newman was put in.

Getting into the chase based on a penalty isn’t the super strong year fans want for Newman, but it’s great to see justice done and fun to see him in the Chase. This is his last year with Steward Haas racing before he moves to the vacant Jeff Burton ride with Richard Childress in the 2014 season. (I lost a lot of respect for Tony Stewart when he fired Newman to hire hot-headed, whiny Kurt Busch but that’s a topic for another blog post.)

Logan and I grabbed our temporary badges and headed to the Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club with Don for our first shots as members. Being a Saturday, I expected it to be swamped with people. There was a hunter safety class between 9 and 3 so we arrived at 3 and found a nearly empty range. In fact, over the 2+ hours that we were there, we had the range to ourselves for a good chunk of it.

Logan and Don brought four of their rifles and some pistols. I brought my brand new Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX .22. I put at least 100 rounds through it and had a blast! I’m far from a crack shot but I already found this gun to be incredibly accurate. Someone had left a golf ball sized whiffle ball out at the 25 yard berm and I hit it on my first attempt. It feels good in my hand and was very reliable. I only had 1 shell that half ejected, but that was easily remedied and I was on my way.

It takes me 40 minutes to get to the range so it’s not super convenient, but I think this place is going to be a major source of fun for me over the years (and for Elijah when he gets older!)

There’s a small shooting range at the bottom of the hill on 202 leading up to Snoqualmie Falls. You’ve probably driven by it numerous times and never noticed the dirt road leading off into the woods. MikeF took me there as a guest a few months ago and I’ve been trying to find time to join the club ever since.

That time finally came in July. Logan and I headed to the monthly club meeting to turn in our paperwork and pay our dues. Then we attended a one hour safety briefing at the range and received our badges with the gate code.

Why join the club? We always shoot trap at the range in Kenmore, but their rifle/pistol ranges are very restrictive. You can only put one bullet in your gun at a time, the longest range is 100 yards, and more than a few people have told me that the rangemaster loves making people feel like idiots. No thanks. For the cost of less than six range days at Kenmore, you can get unlimited access to the Snoqualmie club. It’s basically a big field with a bunch of safety rules that are policed by the members who are present. The range is 200 yards long and there aren’t too many rules about what you can shoot or how you can do it as long as you’re being safe.

The club has been around since 1946 but they had been closed to membership for quite a while. A couple years ago they opened up applications again and have been getting a steady stream of 10-20 new members every month. They’re now up around 800-900 members, but apparently traffic at the range has been pretty low. Once the ammo shortage clears up and our national leadership changes out, I expect traffic to pick up again. Since there is no room to expand the range, my guess is they will shut off new applications again. As long as I keep my membership active each year, we’ll always have a great place to shoot!

Let me know if you’re interested in checking it out. Members are allowed to bring a guest or two on each visit.

As I’ve started to get more involved in shooting sports over the last couple years, I’ve been thinking about why people view it any differently than golf. Whether you go to a gun range or a country club, you’ll be surrounded by retirees joking around and having fun. It’s a very similar environment. Somebody could use either a golf club or a gun to kill you, but most people don’t have an irrational fear of golf clubs. Why?

One theory is that people generally only see guns in the news or a movie. That image is usually showing something that is illegal. Unfortunately, that represents the vast minority of gun use in the world. Just about every round fired through a gun has a happy sport shooter behind it. While it’s always good to have a healthy respect for any device that can injure you if used improperly, there’s no reason why a gun should be immediately correlated with violence.

I don’t know if that will ever change, but if you’re interested in seeing the most common use of guns, I’d be more than happy to take you along to a range where you will see normal humans enjoying a fun sport. Even if you decide it’s not a sport you enjoy, at least you’ll have one other picture that might pop into your head when you hear about a gun.

While I’ve sent quite a few rounds through both a rifle and a shotgun, I haven’t spent much time with handguns. I decided to add one to my collection but which one to buy? I ended up with a Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX. It shoots .22 LR bullets which some view as kind of wimpy, but the big upside is that each bullet costs less than a nickel. If you’re shooting a 9mm, .45, or one of the more popular big sizes, you’ll be paying ~$0.40-0.60 per bullet. I read more than a few websites that said everyone should own a .22 handgun because it’s so cheap to shoot. Why spend lots of money learning with more expensive ammo? If you figure you’ll shoot 1000 rounds to learn how to shoot a handgun, you can buy a .22 handgun, 1000 .22 rounds AND a 9mm handgun for the price of a 9mm gun and 1000 9mm rounds.

I bought the gun at Cabela’s. Washington state imposes a 5 day waiting period on handguns but waives that if you have a Concealed Pistol License since you’ve already been through a huge background check. For some unknown reason, the quick background check that they always do when you buy a gun raised a little flag (maybe somebody fat-fingered data along the way?) so I had to wait two days to get the gun, but that wasn’t a huge deal.

Ammunition of any kind is difficult to find right now, but they sold me a box of 525 bullets that they keep in the back room for new gun owners. Score! It just so happened that 800 12-gauge shotgun shells that I had ordered two months before had finally arrived too so I walked out with quite a haul!

I look forward to getting to the range to try this gun out!

Last week, MikeF, a friend from work, took me as a guest to the Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club. If you’ve ever driving up to Snoqualmie Falls from Fall City, there’s a big hairpin corner before you wind your way up the hill to the falls. There’s a small dirt road with a gate that leads off the outside of that corner, and at the end of the road is the gun club. The grounds aren’t very fancy, but they’re a lot of fun. The rifle range is 200 yards long and the pistol range is about 50. There is also an action pistol area for competitions if the rest of the range is shut down. There’s no rangemaster and everyone present is responsible for safety. If you want to go out and set up your targets, you get everyone to agree to a cease fire and flip a switch that activates a loud siren and flashing lights.

The nice thing about the club is that it’s very informal. You shoot what you want at what you want as long as you are being safe and you clean up after yourself. While I love shooting trap at the Kenmore range, their rifle/pistol range is extremely restrictive. The biggest annoyance at Kenmore is that you can only put one round in your gun at a time. The Snoqualmie club has no such restriction.

Mike let me shoot his newly refinished 1891/30 Mosin Nagant. It’s a bolt-action, internal magazine rifle developed by the Russian army in the late 1800s and used through both world wars. In fact, there are still a lot of them in use today. Mike’s gun was made in 1943 and came with the original bayonet and the kit that the soldier would have carried. There are so many of these guns floating around that you can pick one up for under $150. It shoots 7.62x54mmR ammo which is pretty big. It’s just over three inches long and there’s no mistaking what’s going on when you pull the trigger. He hadn’t done anything to sight in the gun yet, but we were having good luck with it shooting a paper target at 50 yards and we were even able to hit a metal torso out at 200 yards without much trouble.

He also brought his sub compact 9mm Ruger with a 13 round magazine. I’ve only shot a handgun once in my life so it was fun to give it another shot (pun intended.) We didn’t win any awards for accuracy but we blew through a couple boxes of ammo.

Even with the downpour while we were packing up, it was a great day. We met some great people at the range and I left wanting to join. They only offer signups once per month and I’m booked for the next 2-3 months on those days, but after that I hope to join. I don’t have a rifle or pistol yet, but that’s going to change before much longer. I’m looking to pick up a .22 handgun. The Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX and Ruger Mark III Standard are the top contenders right now. Sure it’s not the most manly gun, but ammo is cheap so it’s a good way to practice. If you buy in bulk, a .22 round is a little over 4 cents. A 9mm is about 45 cents per round.

But then again, that Mosin was a lot of fun to shoot and it’s pretty cheap. Maybe I need one of those too.

Mom and Dad got me a great CO2 powered pellet revolver for Christmas. I’ve had fun shooting it but instead of shooting cans in the yard and dumping a bunch of little lead pellets into it, I decided to build a pellet trap. You can buy them premade on the Internet and people often use them for indoor shooting, but I wanted to build my own and I figure I use it mostly outside.

I headed up to Monroe to make it with Tim and we basically designed it on the fly using scrap wood. The basic design is there’s a clipboard with the center cut out that holds the target and lets pellets pass through. The box is a little taller than the clipboard and about 8” deep. On the inside of the box, the back is lined with some metal tie plates and then covered with about an inch of duct seal. It’s all glued and nailed together but the top is screwed on for easier access in case I need to change out the duct seal.

After about a hundred test rounds, we give it two thumbs up. The pellets are stopped by the duct seal and either stick in to it or fall to the bottom of the case. The clipboard does a good job of holding the targets and a handle on top make it easily portable. It was a fun afternoon project and I think we were both amazed that one of our projects turned out about how it looked in our head.

When Logan and I took the trap shooting class, they suggested that I go two steps tighter on my choke tube. The choke of your shotgun determines how the shot flies out of the barrel. As the shot gets farther from the gun, the area it covers expands. That’s good but if you expand too much then your target might fly right through the middle of your pattern. You can screw different choke tubes into the end of your gun to constrict or free up that pattern. To test the pattern, you can shoot at a piece of paper placed at a specific distance and see what the pattern looks like.

My Remington 870 came with a modified choke which is about in the middle of what you can do with choke tubes. I ordered a full choke. It probably only takes about 4-6” off my pattern size, but it should get rid of some of the holes in the pattern. There have been a few times when I knew I shot perfectly but the bird never broke. Hopefully that won’t happen anymore.

My first attempt at the range went pretty well. In the second round I tied my high score. Hits give a much more satisfying explosion because more shot is hitting the target.

I’m reading a book about trap shooting. The author says it’s easy to get too wrapped up in choke tubes. He says you should pattern your gun, pick a choke tube, and stick with it. “Choke tubes change inches while misses happen in feet.”