Laser Pointer with simple on/off switch

[Chia]

So for those of us without unlimited funds, electronic trainers are a pipe dream. In the meantime, I noticed that we have these lovely laser pointers that show up beautifully on a white wall with a target taped to it. Going through the shot process with it a few times told me a ton about how I lifted and held on a target. Of course, a laser pointer is not a gun, and the grip is very different, so that leads to my question.

Does anyone know of a laser pointer on the market that operates with a toggle switch instead of a pressure one? Preferably small and can be taped or otherwise attached to an air pistol. I'm thinking something that could be taped to the bottom of the air cylinder. Cheap is preferred, but not as important as functionality.

Thoughts?

[C. Perkins]

What is the purpose or gain from using one for precision shooting ?

[SamEEE]

It should prove to be a reasonably trivial matter to wire in a microswitch between the battery and the battery terminal. Then manual override the regular push button switch with a cable tie.

[renzo]

On second thoughts, I´d be very cautious in the use of your proposed method.

Electronic trainers allow you to study your shot process AFTER you´re thru with it, using a laser pointer will make you switch your focal point to the target instead of the front sight, thus deteriorating your technique, and that is apart from the quality or the price of your chosen equipment.

Maybe (and it´s a BIG maybe) if you arrange a digital camera focused on the target and execute your shot process without looking at the laser trace while shooting, you could retrieve your movements afterwards................ but if you ask me, it will be far more rewarding in terms of improvement to use that time and effort in dry shooting.

[C. Perkins]

On second thoughts, I´d be very cautious in the use of your proposed method.

Electronic trainers allow you to study your shot process AFTER you´re thru with it, using a laser pointer will make you switch your focal point to the target instead of the front sight, thus deteriorating your technique, and that is apart from the quality or the price of your chosen equipment.

Yep; we have the correct answer in my honest opinion.

[Chia]

It should prove to be a reasonably trivial matter to wire in a microswitch between the battery and the battery terminal. Then manual override the regular push button switch with a cable tie.

I'm afraid I lack the technical knowledge or the tools to do that.

On second thoughts, I´d be very cautious in the use of your proposed method.

Electronic trainers allow you to study your shot process AFTER you´re thru with it, using a laser pointer will make you switch your focal point to the target instead of the front sight, thus deteriorating your technique, and that is apart from the quality or the price of your chosen equipment.

Maybe (and it´s a BIG maybe) if you arrange a digital camera focused on the target and execute your shot process without looking at the laser trace while shooting, you could retrieve your movements afterwards................ but if you ask me, it will be far more rewarding in terms of improvement to use that time and effort in dry shooting.

This is a really good point and one I hadn't considered. I definitely agree with you that if I was focusing on that instead of the front sight, there will be a decrease. I noticed as such when I attempted a variation of the exercise. That said, I do have a few advantages that still make this viable. First, I have a digital camera that I use. Second, I have my wife who can observe both me and the laser and let me know if I'm moving. Sure it's not feedback from a trained coach, but who has one, honestly?

Also, this process is clearly inferior to electronic trainers. I don't dispute that at all. But to someone who has never been able to measure how they lift the gun or how they hold on the target (I creep upwards and lift the gun from a right to center motion, both things that were corrected after I learned about them by using the laser. My scores improved as a result.) this type of feedback is still useful. I am not suggesting this in place of shooting, rather as a supplement to evaluate certain aspects of technique that I wouldn't be able to pick up on as easily otherwise.

Does that make sense, or would you still advocate dumping it entirely? I certainly don't want to have my technique deteriorate, but I am currently seeing some advantage to it as a supplemental method to address problems I can't with ordinary shooting feedback.

[Pat McCoy]

It should be possible to tape an infrared laser pointer to the air cylinder, then record it with your camera on a tripod. You'd need the proper filter on the camera lens to pick up the IR.

You could then give an oral call of the shot, and short oral synopsis ( npa, hold, trigger control) of the shot, and review the film later.

Not as good as the "high priced spread", or a good coach, but probably better than nothing.

[rmca]

...but if you ask me, it will be far more rewarding in terms of improvement to use that time and effort in dry shooting.

+1
If you want to improve, dry fire is far more important.

[renzo]

Does that make sense, or would you still advocate dumping it entirely? I certainly don't want to have my technique deteriorate, but I am currently seeing some advantage to it as a supplemental method to address problems I can't with ordinary shooting feedback.

The point I was making is that your arc of movement will decrease in size as a result of CORRECT training, and you can do it far better concentrating in your stance, and dry firing will let you check your NPA every time you hold your pistol. I do check my NPA often during matches, as because of my age I don´t stand in the same body position all the reglamentary time, sometimes I find myself needing to lay back a little to improve my balance due to fatigue and that shifts my NPA.

Furthermore, by checking the trace on the target you´ll be concentrating on sorting parallel errors, which are nowhere as damaging at 10 meters as angular errors, the ones you´ll commit by losing attention on your sights. Also, electronic trainers let you know your movement AFTER releasing the shot, so you can detect execution (triggering) errors. I doubt a non-trained person could detect that by simply watching, and you won´t be able to analyse it later, because there´s no record of it.

I may sound dogmatic, but I´ve had the occasion of being close to Olympic shooters in my country (two of them in my club) and I mean shooters who WENT to the OG, PAG medalists, who told me that having bought SCATT trainers, both of them resold them as without expert coaching the results of its use were irrelevant or sometimes counterproductive. Their word, not mine.

I´d stick to my recommendation of dry firing, we all know it´s sometimes boring, but it´s tried and true. Obviously, you´ll need discipline and avoid over indulgence, but you must remember to make a distinction between training and practice. Shooting a match every day is practice, which means the testing and application of adquired skills; training means DEVELOPING those skills.

Good luck

[Chia]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. This was really helpful!

[Gwhite]

Here's a (potentially) better option:

https://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/kill-t ... ng-system/

It's trying to be a low cost ($150) SCATT/Noptel system. It should be easy to make a rail adapter that would clamp onto the pistol of choice.

There's no mention of how one "zeroes" the system, or how it accommodates different target sizes. I suspect it doesn't actually provide any real "score", only a graded system based on your pointing error. I'm guessing it just uses a solid state inertial system to track motion of the pistol. It is reversible, so I don't think it uses an optical system, unless they put one on both ends.

It's an interesting idea. For a small fraction the cost of a "real" electronic trainer, it could still have some benefits.

Anyone looked into this or played with one? For $150, I'm tempted to test it against my Noptel for use with the team I coach. I've sent them a couple questions & will report back.

[SteveT]

I have trained using a laser pointer on the gun and a video camera. I mostly used it with a red dot sight. That way I could "hide" the laser dot behind the red dot. I tried using open sights. This kind of worked but not real well. I hoped to be able to catch the trigger fall to make a poor-man's-electronic-trainer. But there are some serious limitations to the usefulness of this setup.

Just watching the video was not terribly useful. The dot squiggles around but mostly I just saw my natural wobble area. Shot errors were not that obvious. A standard video camera records at 15 frames per second (fps) and an HD camera records at 30 fps. This is not fast enough to reliably capture trigger errors. I used a PS3 Eye camera that can record up to 120 fps and installed a driver that can record even faster but the resolution and clarity drops off when the frame rate is increased.

I tried using 2 laser diodes, one continuous to track me as I settled on the target and a laser diode that fits into the chamber and is triggered by the firing pin (I forget which one). The laser blink was very short, only a few milliseconds, too short for a camera to pick up except at very high frame rates.

I used the software package http://www.kinovea.org/ which is pretty amazing. It is an open source sports performance analysis software package. It can track things in a video, such as the hands of a batter, the head of a golf club or the dot of a laser pointer giving a squiggly line or a list of time vs distance from center, very similar to what you get from electronic trainers. The problem is that the process is manual. Electronic trainers give you feedback immediately with little or no action needed. In Kinovea you load the video, find the start of settling on the target, tell Kinovea to track the bright red dot and move forward to the time of the shot. If I wanted fancy things like different colors for the 1/2 second or 3 seconds before the shot, then manually go backwards that amount of time and tell it to change the color of the trace. With practice I could do it in a few minutes per shot, but we are still talking about the better part of an hour to analyze and export 10 shots.

In summary, dry firing is probably more valuable.

[Gwhite]

Here's a (potentially) better option:

https://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/kill-t ... ng-system/

It's trying to be a low cost ($150) SCATT/Noptel system. It should be easy to make a rail adapter that would clamp onto the pistol of choice.

There's no mention of how one "zeroes" the system, or how it accommodates different target sizes. I suspect it doesn't actually provide any real "score", only a graded system based on your pointing error. I'm guessing it just uses a solid state inertial system to track motion of the pistol. It is reversible, so I don't think it uses an optical system, unless they put one on both ends.

It's an interesting idea. For a small fraction the cost of a "real" electronic trainer, it could still have some benefits.

Anyone looked into this or played with one? For $150, I'm tempted to test it against my Noptel for use with the team I coach. I've sent them a couple questions & will report back.

Well, they responded quite quickly. It is an accelerometer/inertial system, as I suspected.

There is no "zeroing", it only stores about 1 second before the shot breaks, and it uses your hold during that period to set the "zero".

They claim there is considerable interest from other air pistol shooters. They didn't specifically address my concerns about precision. In order to determine within 1 scoring ring in air pistol, the system needs to resolve errors significantly less than 0.05 degrees (8mm ring separation at 10 meters).

It will be interesting to see how this evolves...

[Kifsif]

On second thoughts, I´d be very cautious in the use of your proposed method.

Electronic trainers allow you to study your shot process AFTER you´re thru with it, using a laser pointer will make you switch your focal point to the target instead of the front sight, thus deteriorating your technique, and that is apart from the quality or the price of your chosen equipment.

Maybe (and it´s a BIG maybe) if you arrange a digital camera focused on the target and execute your shot process without looking at the laser trace while shooting, you could retrieve your movements afterwards................ but if you ask me, it will be far more rewarding in terms of improvement to use that time and effort in dry shooting.

If you aim at one target and the laser is pointed at the other one, what is the problem? In other words: two targets one below the other. You aim at the higher one, the laser and a web camera aim at the lower one. Shooting without a pellet will give us an audible signal. Then we stop the recording, and rewind the video to the beginning and watch till the sound of shot.

Can this bring anything useful to the process of training?