Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Sports

Pellet Trap

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.

benmartens April 5, 2013 Sports

Trap Shooting

I picked up a copy of Breaking Clays: Target, Tactics, Tips and Techniques by Chris Batha in hopes that it would help with my trap shooting. The first half of the book is an introduction to shotgun sports while the second half covers the various sports and doesn’t spend a lot of time specifically on trap. I did get a few good tips though which are shown below:

  • When you miss, it has little to do with the ballistics of the shotgun – choke and cartridges give you inches where you miss in feet. A miss is more often caused by a breakdown in the fundamentals.
  • If you can keep the muzzles on the line throughout the shot, you limit your misses to in front or behind. You instantly achieve a fifty per cent reduction in missing. You also gain a significant second benefit. As a competitor, if you miss, you need to know the fault or the cause and understand the correction. If you can stay on the line, it becomes easier to recognise the fault. You miss either in front or behind, now you can analyse the cause and apply the correction. You can improve the odds even more. You can make sure that if you do miss, it is in front of the target.
  • Raise your eyebrows just before you call for the target. This simple action gives you a twenty per cent increase in light-gathering vision.
  • Clay target shooting is different from other sports in that there is little physical activity to relieve stress build-up which increases incrementally as scores increase.
  • The inability to suppress left brain activity is what leads to ‘choking’.
  • My approach is, they are all one-bird competitions. You should take each target one at time. See the target – break the target. Concentrate on each shot as an independent and all-important target and forget about everything else…especially your score!
  • There is no such person as The Natural. I will allow that there are a few participants in any walk of life who can learn a motor skill quicker than the average person. But there is still a ceiling to their progress – they just reach it quicker. The learning curve of any activity is never a straight line; it consists of peaks and troughs and very often long plateaus of little progress.

The book also taught me where the term “trap shooting” comes from. It started in England when they would place a bird on the ground and cover it with a box. You would move the box, pick up your gun, and shoot the fleeing bird. When people got too good at that, they attached a string to the box and moved farther back. When the sport came to America there was a shortage of pigeons and doves so they switched to the clays instead. In the 1920s, England made it illegal to use live birds in trap shooting.

benmartens March 21, 2013 Books, Sports

Choke Tubes

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.”

benmartens February 22, 2013 Sports

How To Shoot Trap

Logan and I took the “Break More Birds” class at the Kenmore range last weekend. It’s a two hour class that includes two rounds of trap and only costs $35. it’s an incredible deal and I want to take it again in a couple months. Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard for the whole class, but that didn’t stop us from learning a lot.

The class started with us shooting at paper targets to check the spread of our shots at about 40 yards. The spread on my gun was a bit too large and explains why there have been a couple times when I know I was right on the clay but it didn’t break. I’m going to go two notches tighter and pick up a full choke to keep the pattern tighter. That means I have to be more accurate with my shots but it also means that there shouldn’t be any chance of a bird squeaking through a good shot.

From there we talked about foot positioning (I was too wide), arm positioning (my right arm was low) and some other details about how we mounted our guns. After that it was time to pull the trigger and they let us shoot at some birds and critiqued each shot. A lot of us were having trouble smoothly swinging the gun all the way through the shot so they let us load two shells and had us shoot twice to mentally force us to keep the gun on the bird through the first shot. That was a ton of fun. I’ve never loaded two shells into my gun at once and while a pump isn’t the best option for two shot trap, it was fun to pump and shoot again.

It turns out I’m not as sloppy as I thought I might be but they did have some good tips. It will take me a little while to adjust to the suggestions, but hopefully the end result will be positive.

Here are some of the things I remember them telling me during the class. This isn’t a substitute for taking the class yourself, but maybe it will give you a few ideas:

  • Elbows up! You want to form a nice solid triangle with both arms. As you raise your right arm you’ll form a pocket that holds the butt of the gun.
  • Your left index finger (for righties) should be pointed forward. It helps you to naturally point at the target with the gun. I picked that one up by watching the Olympics.
  • Feet should be shoulder width apart with about 60% of your weight on the front foot.
  • Swing through the shot. Don’t jerk ahead of the target, stop, and then shoot.
  • Pull the trigger quickly. Don’t pull slowly like you do for rifle and pistol.
  • Hit the bird on the way up. As it hits the apex, the bird levels out and the cross section is a lot smaller.
  • Each station should have it’s own stance. The more angle of your front foot really affects how easily you can swing to hit all of the shots that you might get from that station.
  • As you start at station 1, start your gun on the left edge of the box but your eyes in the middle of the box. The opposite is true for station 5. It helps you cheat to catch those shots to the sides.
  • In competitions, guys wear blinders and stare at the ground ahead of them when it’s not their turn so they aren’t affected by people who miss or hit behind them.

All in all I’m really impressed with the class. Two instructors for five students, two rounds of trap, and all that was only $35. Kudos to the Kenmore range for a great class and thanks to our instructors, Wayne and Nathan, for all their help.

benmartens January 30, 2013 Sports

Whitewater Rafting

Last weekend was crammed full with activities. Saturday was beautiful so we hopped on the motorcycle and had a picnic at the Ballard Locks. Since we were so close to the zoo, we stopped there to use our wedding gift zoo memberships. The zoo was packed but it was fun to see some of the new exhibits including the meerkats and the tree kangaroo that we adopted last year.

The weather on Sunday was wetter, but we headed east across the mountains for our whitewater rafting adventure. I got a half price deal through Groupon a while back and this was the day we scheduled to do it. We had no idea what to expect so we were a little nervous about what to wear, especially because it was much colder than I had hoped it would be. We wore underarmor and a swimsuit under the provided wetsuit. Then on top of the wetsuit I had a dry shirt, fleece, raincoat, and shorts. Do NOT wear any cotton on any layer.

We met Orion Rafting Expeditions in Cashmere and road a bus into Leavenworth where we hopped into a boat on the Wenatchee. There were about 6-8 people per boat plus a guide. I was surprised that we were on the river for over three hours. It sure didn’t feel that long. The trip itself was a mixture of relaxing floating and high adrenaline rapids. I ended up in the front of the boat so I got completely soaked. There were times when waves were crashing over my head and I was blindly trying to comply with “Ahead!” instructions from our guide.

The river is 100% mountain fed and that means it’s mostly snow melt this time of year. The water was around 45 degrees but somehow neither one of us felt cold. We even finished the trip in sunshine. The river was running at about 10,000 cubic feet per minute which is about as high as it will go and still be open to commercial rafting trips. They were rated as Class 3 rapids and I think that was just about perfect for our first time.

We don’t have any pictures of us in the raft, but the one I used for this post might as well have been taken on our trip. That’s what our boat looked like, and the only difference is that we had seven people including the guide.

If you get the chance to try rafting, don’t pass it up!

benmartens June 10, 2010 Outdoors, Sports

Cornhole History

On Thursday night, Tim, Chelsea, Tyla and I met after work to play some cornhole. In the very first game, Tim made cornhole history. I’ve only seen three people have ever gotten three out of four bags in the hole in one inning. (I am one of them, go me.) Four seemed impossible. Until Thursday.

Tim nailed the first three of the inning. I had put one in during that time as well and had another resting on the lip of the hole. Tim tossed his fourth bag. It arced gracefully through the air, landed on mine, hovered there for a second and then they both fell in. Four cornholes in one inning. After much celebration and picture taking, the girls took their turn. Tim started off the next inning by sinking the first one for an incredible five bags in a row. How this didn’t make SportsCenter’s Top 10 plays, I will never know.

Tim, I submit to your cornhole skillz. You are the true Corn Star.

PS. This is a photo of Tim posing by his four bagger calling someone on the phone to share the news.

benmartens May 4, 2009 Sports