AAR: Sig Sauer Academy Pistol 102/Rifle 102 8/2014

Andrew Y.

Regular Member
Handgun 102

Weather. - Partly cloudy with mid 70s to 80s, brief down pour in the afternoon that completely soaked everything.

Class details. This is the highest level handgun class you can take at Sig Academy without a prior class the 101 class is designed around the brand new shooter. 102 is the second step in a four tier system of handgun classes. We had 17 shooters in the class using a mix of supplied handguns and those who brought there own. First hour and a half or so was spent covering safety procedures and basic sights alignment and trigger press techniques. Our instructor was focused highly on accurate and precise terminology, which while different left clear expectations and led to smooth range drills.

Range work

Gear -
I shot a 9mm Sig p229, I have approx 3000 rounds through this gun, I used Sigtac support gear on my normal EDC belt from SOE. Round count was approx 250. Started the range work with the Wall drill that helps to identify trigger press issues, then we started live fire manipulation at 3-7 yards working on the fundamentals. Right before lunch we had an introduction to drawing from holsters.

After lunch we continued our holster work and efficiency of draw. Keeping it simple, we worked on moving in straight lines and consistent motion. The next thing we worked on was reloads, and we only worked on slide lock reloads. The instructor made a point to focus on strong bio mechanics during the draw, shot, retract to workspace, reloading, and moving back out. Near the end of this section I was feeling very confident in my reloads, an area which before I had found to be lacking. we also touched briefly on trigger reset, the instructor was totally against trying to feel the reset or working to maintain contact with the trigger, he really pushed us to make the reset happy before our sights were realigned. I struggled with this at first but it was definitely faster to shoot "reset under recoil". I will note that at this point I had two type 3 malfunctions, this is something of an issue with my gun, I've had 5 since I got the gun with a variety of ammo and magazines. as soon as the first happened I cleared and reloaded, reholstered and when I drew for the next rep , the first shot resulted in another type 3, I've never had two back to back like that so I called the instructor over, he thought it might be the extractor spring, so he offered to replace that after class, free of charge for the record. I didn't have any other issues in the next 70 rounds I shot.

We briefly worked on one handed shooting, dominant hand only, with two handed reloads. I saw a marked improvement using the techniques I had been taught in class.

The final drill was a progressive distance drill, the real emphasis of this drill was to "float the dot, shoot the shot" by which we focused on the font sight, floated the very center of the tritium tube over upper center mass and pressed the trigger. We shot 5 rounds from 3,5,7,10,15,20, and 25 yards, the goal was to keep all shots in the 8" center mass ring, personally I had 7 flyers, with one in the white, no great but better than I had been shooting and I have learned a lot to work on.

After this the instructor went over cleaning and maintenance and answered any final questions.

He did replace my extractor spring and I fired 10 rounds with no issues. I plan to really work the gun and get this issue resolved. I learned a lot and can't wait to work on my issues. Really looking forward to handgun 103,104 where we get into moving and other more advanced stuff. Any questions ask away, I all answer best I can

Rifle 102

This will be kept brief,

Weather was excellent. We spent approx half an hour going over safety and gun/sling setups then hit the range.

We worked on basic gun handling and high ready, low ready and front ready positions, the instructors were very patient and thorough since some shooters had never handled a rifle before and most had done only bench shooting.

Next we moved into working on trigger press and understanding sight offset. At this point we began live fire drills at 7-15 yards. We were really forced to focus on safety manipulation and the fundamentals of getting the gun from a ready position to a shooting stance and working with your sling instead of against it.

After everyone felt confident with knowing how their rifle worked we moved back to 50yds to work on zeroing. This was done from the prone position and was the only time we got out of standing position.

After lunch we came back and worked on magazine changes and moving the gun purposefully on target. We spent a lot of time on magazine changes and good weapon handling. The day ended with a walk back drill with tightest group winning 10 shots each at 15,25,35 yards. No shit, I won that and got a resqume tool. After class we went over want we had learned and anything the class could improve upon.

For me, I ran my DDM4 with a vortex strikefire 2, used all pmags and went through approx 250 rounds. I carried mags in a war belt, most just ran them out of their pockets. The only thing I would like to have done differently is have not preloaded ALL of mags because on the reload drills they would have us down load to less than 10 so we could practice more reloads.
 
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