Canadian source for USPSA/IPSC targets???
- Thread starter flintyboom
- Start date
SVISTI1911
CGN Regular
- Location
- Kitchener, Ontario
If you are in BC you might want to check in the US, often their shipping is cheaper, but you will have to factor in exchange.
Murray sells them if you're in the lower mainland. Double Tap Sports sells them with better shipping than IPSC BC. But if you have a box in the USA you can usually get free shipping from Action target or National Target on paper and/or cardboard ones.
Here's a question: Would there be a problem shipping targets from the U.S. to an address in the U.S. but just over the border, and going and picking them up and bringing them back? Are paper or cardboard targets something that will get you flagged? Asking for a friend....
I do it all the time. I get paper targets from National Target and Action Target sent to my US box. No issue bringing them back at all. National even makes a nice paper target version of the IPSC target, with a white face, for practice, that is a lot cheaper than cardboard.
I thank you profusely for your timely reply. I am looking at ordering some B-27E targets and Target Repair Centers from "Action Target". They don't ship to Canada but I dealt with them in Mexico. Our two movers on the San Miguel/Queretero gun ranges are from Action Target, and they're excellent! Dealing with them was also excellent. They delivered the Movers where we wanted them and they were delivered when they told us they'd be delivered. That really worked for us.
A neat "Action Target" item is the balloon-target. If you don't hit the balloon the target keeps on coming.
The Mover can be set up to run across the range, or right towards the shooter -- or even at angles. I taught my daughter to shoot down attackers with her Glock using the balloon mover. (Relax, hand-wringers, she doesn't live in Canada.) A T-shirt over the target means you have to practice aiming at the center-of-mass. Great fun.
I'm ordering the B-27E target because so many of the basic Mexican courses are Bianchi-style/PPC based. Mexico is supposed to be actually affiliating with IPSC this year or next year but that will be a Club out of Mexico City starting that off. I believe the San Miguel/Queretero group will join their efforts, but Mexico City will run the IPSC and SMAGTO/Qto. will stick with their Bianchi/PPC matches and training clinics. At least, the last time I talked with the Mexico City guys, that was going to be the deal. I'm really interested in this, because apparently, SEDENA (the Mexican Army) is open to registering one Production Class 9 m.m. caliber firearm to the IPSC members. 9 m.m. is a prohib caliber for civilians in Mexico, so if all I gotta do is stay current with IPSC/Mexico and they'll give me nine, I'm up for that. Any 9 m.m. out there can be had in .380 Cal and the power is the same, but there'd be a certain panache to having a legal 9 in Mexico that makes the investment in time (again) to do the IPSC thing seem worthwhile.
A neat "Action Target" item is the balloon-target. If you don't hit the balloon the target keeps on coming.
The Mover can be set up to run across the range, or right towards the shooter -- or even at angles. I taught my daughter to shoot down attackers with her Glock using the balloon mover. (Relax, hand-wringers, she doesn't live in Canada.) A T-shirt over the target means you have to practice aiming at the center-of-mass. Great fun.
I'm ordering the B-27E target because so many of the basic Mexican courses are Bianchi-style/PPC based. Mexico is supposed to be actually affiliating with IPSC this year or next year but that will be a Club out of Mexico City starting that off. I believe the San Miguel/Queretero group will join their efforts, but Mexico City will run the IPSC and SMAGTO/Qto. will stick with their Bianchi/PPC matches and training clinics. At least, the last time I talked with the Mexico City guys, that was going to be the deal. I'm really interested in this, because apparently, SEDENA (the Mexican Army) is open to registering one Production Class 9 m.m. caliber firearm to the IPSC members. 9 m.m. is a prohib caliber for civilians in Mexico, so if all I gotta do is stay current with IPSC/Mexico and they'll give me nine, I'm up for that. Any 9 m.m. out there can be had in .380 Cal and the power is the same, but there'd be a certain panache to having a legal 9 in Mexico that makes the investment in time (again) to do the IPSC thing seem worthwhile.
Georgian Pistol
CGN Regular
- Location
- Georgian Bay
That is cool!
How do you reset it?
How do you reset it?
The cardboard target is like a square box with a head (they ship you like a dozen with the target, all folded up. After 10 years I think we are like still on our 5th one, they last and last and last). There is a piece of rebar hanging down from the mover mount. You pick up the target and get one cousin to hold the target with the rebar through the holes on top and the bottom of the cardboard target box and then you inflate a new balloon into the chest cavity so it pegs it onto the rebar, slide the T-shirt back down and run it again. Quicker than it sounds.
The cardboard target has two or three "balloon compartments" (two in the body and one can be placed in the head) that you can use to seriously complicate matters, forcing you to have to shoot the target up all over it's center area to drop it. But we generally just use it with one balloon. It's serious fun. And you can just buy the replacement balloons anywhere, they are not special balloons.
A few friends with several boxes of ammo each can waste a nice afternoon in the sun, believe me. And it holds up well. We've had no damage to either of our two in 10 years and thousands of rounds. We use these things in the matches -- usually with Bianchi targets but sometimes with the balloons -- so they've been shot at a lot.
There already is IPSC in Mexico, friends of mine shoot it in Quinta Roo, and have been for at least a few years now. But they have to use 380 as the government won't approve 9mm yet. Having been, um, detained, previously in Mexico when travelling to Ecuador with 9mm and pistols, I know all too well how they view civilians with 9mm.
Yes, I know some of those guys but have never made the trip to Merida to actually talk about a mass-affiliation with them. Allen Galindo did go and meet them, I think their main person out there was Manuel Evia -- but again, we never got it off the ground. In 2004, I tried to get "the powers that be" to change the wording of the IPSC rulebook to read that minimum caliber would be 9 m.m. (as it reads now) with minumum case length 9 x 18 to allow the .380 Cal, but the answer was "no". .380 Cal has a power factor of 140 in it's regular load, 155 to 160 in it's +P load and 172 in it's powder-packed fully-supported 1911 / 6-inch loading. But it was "no".
If SEDENA is serious about giving IPSC/Mexico members a 9 (SEDENA is notorius for throwing out bones they never intend to honor), it's worth some effort to pursue. And if they never give out the 9's, we still have the .380 Cal. I personally don't care if we're really affiliated with IPSC, or just "fake affiliated" with IPSC. As long as we're shooting.
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I was an IPSC Section Co-ordinator (Manitoba) when Jeff Cooper was the World President. I feel -- honestly -- that the more power a pistol generates the more chance the shooter has of ending a deadly aggression that was not sought after or hoped for. If three guys with AK's crash the dinner party you are attending and you are armed and willing to defend yourself, you really need them to be incapacitated when you shoot them. People who spent their whole lives pampered and worrying about storage laws will find that to be a harsh statement, but it goes on all the time in the "real world" and will start here soon enough once only the gangs have guns. Good luck with that, by the way.
To me -- and I know Manuel Evia, I've talked and chatted him up several times over the years -- the idea of getting an exemption for a caliber that isn't adequate for the job is a step in the wrong direction. Still, it's not my call right now, and it's certainly not what I teach when I do teach these days. Shooting IPSC for the sake of shooting IPSC doesn't seem like much fun if the power factor is being thrown out the window -- which it has to be if factory .380 is being allowed.
But again: it's not my call. In Queretero we allow the factory .380 or light loaded Aguila 130 grain .38 Special ammo in NRA Action Pistol matches and PPC matches. For IPSC matches (in Queretero or San Miguel) we have three scoring systems on the cardboard targets: Major caliber (5, 4 and 2) and Minor caliber (5,3, and 1) and Mouse (5, 2 and 1). Steel must fall over. If you have to shoot your .380 factory pistola six times rapidly to down a Popper set to fall for a 125 power factor loading, well that's just tough. It's probably reflecting what happens on the street -- or at the dinner party.
The real-life world of Central Mexico doesn't seem like the place to let such mamby-pamby concepts creep in, but I do know in my heart-of-hearts that it has because I've had competitors argue with me about my "stance" at our Queretero matches. I always reply "Well, if you want to live in a fantasy land just because the Government won't let you have a pistola powerful enough to make real-world minor caliber, do it on your range." Like really, anyone who can register a pistol can build up a .380 Cal and load the 9 mm +P power factor ammo the cartridge generates, they just have to want to. (Aguila "sponsors" a lot of shooters in Central Mexico with 200 rounds a month of Aguila .380 ACP and obviously, the "sponsored" crowd -- referred to as the "tink, tink squad" by the Queretero, SMAGTO shooters because their little guns only go "tink, tink" on the steel without knocking it over -- want to be able to compete equally. Nobody likes being in the "Mouse" category, but hey, it is what it is. And they certainly don't want to power up to .380 Cal and install a locking barrel into their slide because then their freebie Aguila ammo wouldn't cycle, wouldn't even begin to cycle. I mean, it's so wrong, it's just so wrong, why call it IPSC at all, but yes I know it's where things are going.) Cooper washed his hand of IPSC by the mid-'80's I think, but as he commented at the time: IPSC had already proven whatever needed to be proven about the modern technique -- good and bad.
I personally can't wait to get back to the Central Mexican matches. But not everyone agrees with me. They didn't all agree with Cooper either, by the way, but I happened to. When IPSC was setting the power-factor, I lobbied for 180 as "Major"* but Jeff set it at 175 because of the Detonics. Later, after Jeff, the next guy Jean Paul Denis I think lowered it to 170 because 175 was eating up the guns. Fine. But it was the real visible beginning of the fall of the realism in favor of the gamesmen in IPSC.
*In Queretero-San Miguel PPC matches, we occasionally throw a "Big Boy PPC", and specify a Power Factor of 180+ to enter. Now, you can do that out of a stock K-38 loading the 200 grain Lyman bullet up to 900 fps using 2400 powder. If you want. Almost everyone has a remarked .357 registered as a .38 Special anyway, so a Lee 160 grain LSWC loaded to a mild 1,125 fps in .38 Special cases gets you there. That would be equivilent to a 1930's Heavy Duty .38 Special loading. But it makes the PPC a lot more exciting for darned sure.
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