I went to the Saginaw Field & Stream pistol range this morning and fired a practice 900 bullseye course with my Ruker Mk II .22.

A couple months ago I upgraded the iron sights on the gun. Up till this point I’ve shot with the original Ruger sights, except for a couple years in the 90s when I shot a dot scope. I ordered Bo-Mar style rear sights for the Ruger from a company called Champion. The sights are very high quality and the sight picture is great—a big improvement over the stock sights. I brought the gun to Dick Williams Gun Shop near Saginaw, MI and he installed the rear sight for me.

Unfortunately, when I brought the gun out to the range to zero it in, it turned out that the front sight wasn’t the right height: I maxed out the elevation adjustment and it was still shooting about 5 inches too high at 25 yards.

So, after emailing and calling Ruger’s customer support with no great luck, I called Clark Custom Guns and they suggested I try a different size front sight from Ruger. Clark had an extra in their shop, and I purchased it from them. It did the trick, and the gun is zeroed in beautifully.

This is one of those upgrades that I should have done years ago. The little improvement in the sight picture makes a world of difference.

While my slow fire scores this morning weren’t outstanding, I do feel like I’m on the cusp of really getting the 50 yard line figured out. Slow fire has been the bane of my scorecards for as long as I’ve shot bullseye pistol. Now that I have a really clean sight picture, I’ve been able to trust my minimum arc of movement. Sure, it’s probably all in my head, but it makes a difference. That phrase has almost become my mantra for each slow fire shot: “Trust your minimum arc of movement.”

Here are the scores for this morning’s practice.

RF2 I shot as a 14 shot alibi. I had a stovepipe and was looking for a reason to fire off an odd set of 5 rounds.