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View Full Version : AAR: Vickers Tactical 1911 Operator



paulee
10-02-11, 22:02
"The 1911 is like a woman: Either you control it, or it controls you."
-Ken Hackathorn
Many thanks to Larry Vickers and Steve at Cawthon Cartridge Club for putting on this class.
If you haven't been to CCC, it's a very good facility, complete with air-conditioned classroom with a fridge and restrooms. Unfortunately, thanks to the Texas drought, they were out of order, but ports-johns were on site.

Day 1 started at 9am, with a safety briefing from LAV, which is basically the NRA's 4 rules applied to the real world. Next up was to make sure that everyone was properly equipped. Various holsters and rigs were examined and commented upon.

Larry has a pretty standard set of ball and dummy drills that he uses which have been commented on multiple times previous. There is nothing magical or special about them, except for the fact that they work.:smile:
There's an old story about a professional golfer who visited a club, and a member asked him for a "professional secret" that would improve his putting, only to be disappointed with the answer, "Practice."
That's pretty much what Larry's drills do: They provide you with a practice routine to improve your problems, but you have to go out and work them.
The rest of the day we worked buddy and team drills. And pressure brought out several gremlins. Nothing quite like running a timed team drill, and watching Larry behind a shooter doing a pantomime of "Screwing Your Teammates":D
The day was concluded with walk back drills.

The next morning involved the heart of the course: Taking the beast apart and figuring out how it worked. Also what would make it not work. Larry walked us through what he felt a 1911 should be built like, along with all the little modifications he would recommend, and then performed them on student guns.

After lunch, we were back on the range to run function checks, then onto some more drills. And there was a certain backsliding amongst many students (especially me) with trigger pull. El Snatcho reared his ugly head quite a bit. Larry called us in and ran some remedial drills to put us back on track. As he put it, "I can't in good conscience just have you throwing rounds down range." And in my opinion, this is the sign of a good instructor. I've been on some courses where the instructor had a set of drills he plodded through, regardless of whether or not the students were getting better.
We finished up with some more team drills (along with Larry's mimicry), and closed up with another walk back.

Larry refers to this as the "Glock Appreciation Course", and halfway through the first day, you could see why. All sorts of guns were present: Baers, Browns, Springfields, Wilson's, Colt's.
And we had all sorts of malfunctions. Twice, guns jammed so badly that it took a screwdriver to dislodge the jam. Some were caused by extractors, some by ejectors, some by ammo, some by mags, and some by the design of the gun itself. Larry called the entire class in to point them out, and explain how each was caused and how it might be avoided with some tweaking of the gun.
In a couple of the team drills, malfunctions wound up costing the team several seconds. One gun choked so badly on it's ammo, that the shooter couldn't do more than 2 shots before it jammed. Larry loaded up a mag of the troublesome stuff into a more modern pistol, and it run it just fine.
Larry pointed out that the 1911 is not only the king of feedway stoppages, but also capable of causing amnesia. You'd have the gun jam up on you 3 or 4 times, and leave the course swearing that it ran just fine.
If you carry a 1911, or are considering carrying one, you owe it to yourself to get to this course and figure out if this gun is for you.

This course is also filled with a ton of LAV observations about everything from the state of the gun industry and the training industry, to the design and manufacture of 1911's, to the quality of various rock bands (helpful hint, LAV does not consider Gn'R to be equal to AC/DC:D)

Great course, and I can't wait to attend another!