May 2013 Newsletter

Inside Information
Page 2 World According to Me
Page 3-7 Dave Holmes
Page 8 Double D Shooting Clinic
Page 9 Wood Sales LLC
Page 10 DeVault Winners Box
Page 11 Cindy’s Corner
Page 12 Closing Page
May 1st, 2013
With any kind of luck we have seen the last of winter in North East Ohio. Last week on Tuesday it
was 80 degrees and the following day it was 33 and spitting snow. I think enough already with the
winter time stuff. Our prayers go out to the families of the folks that were injured or killed during the
Boston bombing, a senseless act of violence. As a concerned citizen it is time for all of us to step up
and talk to our leaders and let your voices be heard. People in Washington need to be held accountable for all the mistakes that are taking place. This includes our current President on down the line.
Write your congressman and let him or her know that you are unhappy with the current state of affairs. Time to forget politics and get to work. With all the new gun laws in place how did the oldest
terrorist from the Boston Bombing obtain a gun to get into a shoot out with the police and later it was
reveled that the terrorist had a felony conviction in 2009. How did he obtain the gun? As a felon he
could not legally buy a gun so all the gun laws in the world could not have stopped him from having
one. He can’t buy a gun legally so other methods are used. Remember none of the laws that are being written have to do with gun control it is about people control and nothing else. A politician could
care less about your well being it is all about control and all of us that enjoy our shooting sports need
to join the NRA and write to our leaders before it is too late.
The World According to Me ~ “Dennis DeVault”
Hello to everyone for May. I am going to take a little break this month so thanks to Dave
Holmes for taking up the slack. Cindy and I are going on a much needed non-shooting vacation. She
loves to fish and we are headed to Dale Hollow Lake in Tennessee. We rented a 60 foot houseboat
with another couple and we are excited about doing this and just getting away. So for anyone that
needs me I will be out of touch for 7 days starting the 17th of this month. The shop will be open everyday and if you call in you will speak to Mike.
We have a Double D Clinic scheduled for the 11th and 12th of May at the North Lawrence
Fish & Game Club if anyone is interested in taking this. If you have an interest please go to our web
site http://ddshooting.com/ Complete the shooter profile form and at the bottom of the page hit submit
then you can click on the button to go to the on-line store and pay your deposit.
At the end of May, Cindy and I will be at the Cardinal Shooting Center in Ohio for the Buckeye
Classic that starts on the 29th of May.
Bill Boyd from Boyd Safe Case will be there with me with his full line of fine gun cases. If you
have the opportunity stop by and see us to say hello or look at the used guns and cases. We will
have a bowl of candy ready and look forward to seeing everyone to start the season here in northern
Ohio.
If you have the opportunity please take a look our used gun section as we have added several new guns and I will be adding 5 more this weekend. Click on the following link to go directly to
the used gun site: /http://devaultind.com/
Again I apologize for the lack of a letter this month but I will be back in June. Thank you to
everyone that receives this letter it really is fun to do and good luck this shooting season. Remember
if you have a winning score and are using our products send us an e-mail so we can showcase you
in the winner’s box for the month.
Rodeo Man Out,
Dennis R. DeVault
A Key to Better Scores by Dave Holmes
While I’ve been laid up with a knee replacement, I’ve read some articles I likely would have skipped otherwise—the
old idle hands causing problems holds true. I have discovered that clay shooting is much too complicated for my feeble
mind. I need a pre-shot routine, a plan, a post-shot routine and a post shoot review. In depth dissertations on each facet encompass thousands of words. Various folks have nifty acronyms to help with the process. I can’t remember the acronyms,
but I know one was seven steps. It seems to me that a lot of folks are trying to make this a lot more complicated than it
needs to be.
It’s easy to sum up a pre-shot routine as just doing everything the same way each time. Let’s substitute the word
“routine” for the word “plan”. We’re creatures of habit. We eat the same foods, drive to work the same way, watch the same
shows, wear the same style clothes—we love routines! An effective pre-shot plan is simply the routine stuff, routinely applied.
A shot plan needn’t be complicated either. See the targets. Find the spot you see it, where you want to break it and
establish your hold point. A hold point is just that: a point, not a general direction. It is a defined spot that you can recreate
for every shot. Once you find the spots, you need not think about them again, unless an adjustment is needed. Define ‘em
and get ‘em out of your conscious mind.
Each target of a pair will have the same requirements. Perhaps the weak link in this process for many shooters is the
transition from one target to the other. That move needs to be, well, planned. Where do the eyes go? Where does the gun go?
But don’t make it a Herculean mental task. Tick through the list. As a decision is made, eliminate thought about that aspect,
and just “do it”.
The post-shot routine should be a fairly simply process, too. Did you really see the target? If the answer is “no”, the
adjustment is to use your eyes to their fullest capacity on the next pair. If the answer is “yes” and you missed….
Was your shot timing right? Did the shot “flow” or did you have to rush to get to the target or wait too long for the
shot to develop? If your timing was off, i.e. you had to work at the shot, adjust the hold point, which means you may need to
move your feet a bit as well. If your eyes did their job, shot timing is determined by hold points. (Perhaps the most common
hold point error is having the muzzle too high. A ton of targets are missed before “pull” is uttered due to those high hold
points.)
Answers to all these questions should be one word if possible, three at the max. You are looking for correction
points, not discussion points. While one has several questions to answer, hence decisions to make when stepping into the
station, as each of those questions and decisions is made, that issue leaves the conscious mind. Your goal is to stack the answers until you have nothing left to do but look hard at the target. Set your feet and they no longer exist. Got the break
point? (Maybe you use an area rather than an exact point. Shooters do it both ways.) That is used to establish the hold point.
When the hold point is established correctly, you can miss anywhere, but the breaks are going to happen around your break
point because the hold point establishes the timing of the shot. There is no more thought given to the break point once the
hold point is established. It is preordained.
Once the decision on your hold point is made, that tree limb, rock, pile of dirt, or whatever it is that you’ve chosen, the hold
point is something physical and need no longer occupy your mind. You are done thinking. Now you need some “thing” in
your routine that shuts off your conscious mind. It doesn’t have to be much. I use a deep breath and let it out slowly. Gebben Miles uses a scripture or spiritual thought. Some use closing the gun. It’s whatever works for you. Have you heard of the
“quiet eye”? It works for a lot of folks. Before you say pull, let your eyes settle for a couple seconds on your pickup point,
while you think about abso-stinking-lutely nothing.
The post-shoot review is simply time to reflect on whether you accomplished what you intended at the shoot. Yes,
score will likely enter into the process, but it shouldn’t. Score is determined by reading targets correctly, setting up correctly,
executing the shot correctly and making good adjustments when one of the first three doesn’t happen the first time. Unless
you are shooting cupcake targets, score is simply a reflection of execution. With that thought foremost, your reflection time
should focus on execution. When you can define what you didn’t do well, you’ll know where to spend your practice time.
The joy of the post-shoot review is that you can be as verbose as you choose as long as you conclude with what you’re
training issues are when you are done. That should be done before you go to bed the day of the shoot. The garbage
goes in the garbage. You only take the good stuff with you.
It really is simple. There is a young lady in my area who has shot on her own for a couple years. She does reasonably
well, but, after keeping track of her scores for a bit, I knew she could do better and I knew she wanted to do better. I enjoy
working with shooters and needed a reason to drag my sorry butt back to the range, so I called her and asked if she would
like to work on her shooting. I got exactly the response I anticipated.
My friends, who had watched her shoot, told me she missed a lot of targets high. They thought there was a gun fit
issue. I knew the gun she shoots and thought there could be an issue with gun weight—a lack of it in this case. She is an outdoor girl, rides horses, runs coon hounds and such, yet she was shooting a 7.25 pound gun. I was more worried going in
about her controlling the gun during the swing than I was how it fit.
That said, I checked the fit and found a common situation. She needed a bit of offset than couldn’t be gotten with
her synthetic stock. Her eye position said she might shoot high, but I don’t believe that anymore until I see it happen on targets. She was making one small error in her posture that could lead to some high shooting. It was a quick correction.
I quickly found she didn’t understand hold points. She shot high on targets because her hold point was often too
high to begin with, even with higher targets. She mentioned having problems with low targets, but when I set up some and
got her hold point down where it needed to be, they just kept breaking. If you have problems with low targets, it isn’t because you suck at shooting low targets. It’s because you suck at setting up for low targets. She shot swing through at most
everything and that light gun was flying across the sky with a bit of excessive enthusiasm. I switched her from her all gun up
style to shooting all but narrow angles gun down. Now she stays in front of targets instead of coming from behind. Those
two changes took away all the excess gun speed, which was the main reason she shot over targets. And she doesn’t have any
thoughts of going back to gun up shooting. Her comment when I asked about the change was “The targets seem so much
slower now.”
She isn’t ready to compete on a National level, just yet. She needs more experience and she needs exposed to better
targets than she’s seen locally. But she sets up quietly and efficiently. She learning to make the decisions and leave them behind her. She’s always looking for a piece of the target. And she never gets bogged down thinking about too much stuff. She
just concisely answers a few short questions and then applies the answers.
It really is a simple game.
A Different Shoot Approach
In a sporting world where most every shoot is an organizational reproduction of every other shoot, Randy Travalia,
at the Minnesota Horse and Hunt Club has a fun approach to an annual event held there. It is the Players Championship and
Gun Makers Showdown. The shoot format is the same as others, but the payoffs have a twist. Five gun makers, Beretta,
Blaser, Browning, Krieghoff and Perazzi pony up $10,000 in purse money. The winning team score is derived from the
scores of the top four shooters using each of the participating brands of guns. It makes for a fun bit of speculation on Saturday night and some happy shooters on Sunday when they drive away with $2500 checks.
It typically doesn’t draw heavily among the big-name shooters, so no maker has four shooters waltz in and clean up.
It’s a chance for an average Joe or two to leave town with a pretty big pay day. If you like FITASC targets, there will be 200
of them there to go with the sporting. Randy loves FITASC and you can rest assured there will be some good targets to
shoot.
It’s June 14-16. Take the other half. It isn’t far to Mall of America! Register at www.winscore.com.
Until Next Month please enjoy the Spring that May can Bring !
There are
four
“where”
questions to
this game.
Where do I
want to
shoot the
target?
Where do I
see the target? Where
do I hold
the gun?
Where is
my head?
Answer
those correctly and
you can be
“Happy,
happy,
happy!”
The Double D Team of Dennis DeVault & Dean DeBow are ready to go again.
Dean and I both had a rough 2011 and 2012 but we are ready to begin teaching
again. If you have a club or group of shooters that would like to host a shooting
clinic, contact Dennis and I will help you to arrange the event. We have traveled
from Coast to Coast giving clinics and it’s time to get back on the horse and do
it again. The cost is $ 400.00 per shooter. We will do a general fitting session for
each shooter, pattern each gun and then you will have two days of lessons from
two instructors. Dean and I have proven over the last 3 years that this tag team
approach gives the shooter the ultimate in a lesson and the ability for the greatest improvement. We teach you to shoot your way and not like Dean or Myself.
Think about an event at your club and give us a call.
330-456-6070 ask for Dennis
We have a clinic scheduled for May 11th & 12th at the North
Lawrence Fish & Game Club in Ohio. If you have an interest
go to our web site and sign up today. Thank You
Wood Sales LLC
This company has been set up to offer hard to find large blanks that will accommodate the new High Rib guns that have dominated the market for the
past few years. If you are in the market for a good piece of wood that is dry
and ready to carve have a look and come back from time to time to find your
dream piece for your next project. The site can be found at:
http://www.customwoodblanks.com
We recently purchased and inventoried over 50 new blanks. If
you are in need of a new stock take a look at the above link
and pick a nice piece of wood for your dream project.
Just a sample of some of the wood
The pieces below are Turkish Wa lnut
DeVault Winners Box
Bill McGuire ~ Blaser ~ DeVault Custom Stock & Rib ~ Gamaliel Cup Champion 185 x 200 ~ Prelim. Champion 93 x 199 ~ East Coast Championship ~ Champion 197 x 200 Fitasc Champion Runner-Up 94 x 100
Bobbie Fowler ~ Browning ~ DeVault Custom Delrin Add–On Rib ~ Texas State Sporting Clays
Champion 184 x 200 World English Fitasc Championship San Antonio, Texas, Champion RunnerUp 190 x 200 Five Stand 3rd ~ 94 x 100
Don Blue ~ Kemen ~ DeVault Custom Stock ~ World Fitasc Super Senior Veteran Champion in 20
gauge
Doug Swaggerty ~ Blaser ~ DeVault Custom Stock & Rib ~ East Coast Championship ~ 5 -Stand
M3 Champion 45 x 50
Yeah!! May is here and I have kissed winter goodbye our weather has
been beautiful. I have been busy with working, family and all the extra
curricular activities going on that time is passing me by fast. Softball season has started and so has the corn hole tournaments. I have a new
niece that was born on the first of May and Dennis’ parents have been
married for 60 years on May 2nd so May is starting out to be a pretty
good month. My sister has had her last chemo treatment and her scans
are scheduled for later this month, so there is a little anxiety I am trying
to deal with.
I am so looking forward to my vacation in a couple of weeks and it is
non-shooting related if you can believe that. Dennis is not allowed to
bring his shotgun……..only his fishing poles. We rented a houseboat on
Dale Hollow Lake in Tennessee for a week of nothing but fishing and relaxation, which sometimes is impossible for Dennis. We are going with
another couple so there will be witnesses. Have you have seen the
movie with Danny DeVito “Throw Mama Off the Train”? Well depending
on how much cell phone activity and shop talk that goes on, there may
be a new version of that movie “Throw Dennis Off the Boat” He is so excited about his new shotgun he can’t stop talking about it. Looking forward to eating fresh fish everyday that will keep his mouth busy Ahahah.
When we return we are home for just a few days and it is off to the Cardinal Center for the Buckeye Classic. So I hope to see a lot of you there,
stop in to say howdy. I’ll be the one with the goggles and the facemask
on.
Yes it is going to be a good month.
I know last year I gave you my recipe for Truckers Beans but this recipe
is also a very good one. A trapshooter’s wife gave it to me and I made it
for the gun club I used to cook for. So Tommy this is your recipe if you
recognize it.
Happy May Everyone
Three Bean Casserole
1 pound lean ground beef
1 pound bacon
1 small onion
4 regular size cans baked beans
2 cans of butter beans, drained
2 regular size cans kidney beans
1 cup of brown sugar
4 cups of ketchup
Cut bacon into bite size pieces and fry and drain.
Dice onion and fry with beef and drain any grease.
Mix all together and bake at 350 for one hour or until you think they are done. You can alter your
ketchup and sugar if you like depending on your
taste. I make mine just as it written and I never
drain my kidney beans.
You can cover pan if you want, but check during
cooking to make sure steam is not making too much
water.
What an awesome display of one of God’s creations
DeVault Industries LLC
3500 12th Street NW
Canton, Ohio 44708
Voice 330-456-6070
Fax 330-456-5330
e-mail: [email protected]
on the web: http://www.devaultind.com
on the web: http://www.ddshooting.com
on the web: http://www.customwoodblanks.com