When I got into law enforcement and determined that I'd eventually become a competitive shooter and instructor, over forty years ago, I built up my recoil tolerance by working up from mild to 'pretty **** stout' with a Super Blackhawk and then a 4" M29. I was burning over a K of handloads a month and got to a pretty fair level of ability shooting quals, matches, 'real' IHMSA silhouette and home-grown cowboyish shooting before they invented SASS, which never has done anything in my area anyway. Long story short I never expected to have recoil bother me. Farther along, due to a PPC addict Sheriff who became the president of the group and changed our local law enf matches from 'hosting agency designs each match' to a fixed, unchanging match format which is largely derived from PPC and FBI's RQC, thus focusing on X-ring accuracy on a B27 and generous time frames, all 'action' aspects fell by the wayside. Therefore, the rule-beater setup is wadcutters at squeaker-load levels. If it'll get from the 25 to the targets and shove its way through the paper and backer, good. Despite our rules saying 'no match guns', if you want to be in Master or High Master with the other sharks and barracudas, your revolver and auto (and for a short time, side-match big bore revo) had better be sent out for matchification and your ammo had better be quality, and poofter-level, as well. So I retired my M66 to the safe and got a 686, sent that and my beloved 29 to Frank Glenn and my beloved 1911 to a bullseye-oriented smith, and stocked up on 231. I worked up cat-sneeze HBWC loads in .357 and .44 mag cases so the front band of the M-P bullets would sit in the throat, played with charge weights and recoil springs til the 1911 was likewise emasculated and would probably break if I shot duty loads in it, and wound up unintentionally letting my recoil tolerance atrophy. I also sustained multiple tears in both rotator cuffs and took a medical retirement from my agency and took a hiatus (two seasons now) from match shooting. THEN - I realized at age 66 that I was about to lose part of my unclaimed military pittance, er, retirement if I didn't file for it, I did so and when the lump came in I suddenly had a new addiction - watching gun auctions. I acquired a couple of much-longed-for Smiths - a 624, an 18, a 1905-4 in .32-20, and a 625-6 skinny barrel .45 Colt. As soon as I get a Smith, I do an action job on it, replace the rear sight leaf with a Weigand match version and slap either Gripper Pros or Hogue Monogrips on it. Side note - one of my sons had briefly owned a .45 Vaquero, and while he was overseas I loaded quite a bit of cowboy ammo for it and started working on re-acquiring my lost point-shooting skills, but the little .45 got stolen and a quantity of that ammo got stuck in my bunker to await the arrival of another .45 LC. When the 625 arrived, I dug out the SAW can full of (I thought) cowboy loads and took off to the range to warm up the Mountain Gun/get some use out of the cowboy ammo. Unbeknownst to me, my son, who had earned his Master's in nursing and is in Asia working for some global medical supply firm that made him Eastern Hemisphere Poo-Bah, had loaded several boxes of near Casull-level RNs, RNFPs and SWCs in the .45 LC brass and stuck them into empty PMC cowboy boxes WITH NO LABELING. The first cylinder gave me a stabbing, burning pain in the ball and palm of my hand. It also needed a mallet for extraction and put so much garbage under the extractor that the gun wouldn't completely close again til I got it home and blew it out with Shooter Lube solvent and compressed air. My hand was still stinging the next day, and I thought that between the 'blue pill' loads and diabetic nerve pain (which has not yet actually shown up in my hands), carpal tunnel, arthritis and loafing along shooting wadcutters, my hard-earned recoil tolerance had bitten the dust. As I scrolled through reviews of the various makes of shooting gloves I called the errant scion and asked what the hell he'd been thinking when he made those bombs, he sez quote: "Yeah, Pops, those are Casull-in-a-Colt loads for another Ruger I had for a while; if your Mountain Gun is still in one piece you can consider it **** well PROOFED."
I told him to get hold of whoever has that Ruger now and get the chambers checked for bulges JIC. Now, I have had arthritis/bursitis problems all my life and between the active Army, SWAT and hairy patrol work, and operating in the Guard, I haven't babied the musculoskeletal structures involved. I've run the gauntlet of available OTC and prescription remedies, and I think that some combination of CBD, glucosamine/condroitin and krill/fish oil may be as close to relief as I'm gonna get. I still crank out ammo, although I haven't done any casting since we moved two years ago, and I took up container gardening which keeps me busy humping five-gallon buckets of water from the creek to the 'garden', so I figure all that counts as therapy and I should be able to shoot matches again by the 2020 season, although I'll probably do it with some 98 grain WCs at about 650 out of the little 1905. BTW nothing written about .32-20s not liking WCs has applied to this jewel so far - it likes everything from 72 gr RNs to the Reed 130 gr SWC and its absolute favorite so far has been the Meister and Reed DEWCs. As soon as I can get Miha to answer his email, I'll have one of his HBWC moulds for the .32-20 and another for the .45 LC & Auto Rim.
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Originally Posted by WRideout
