A104744

I’ve been around shooting since I was a kid. My family had a decent amount of property when I was growing up and I started shooting .22 caliber rifles and shotguns in the back yard just for fun. When I was young, I remember going to the grocery store with my mom and looking at the gun magazines while she shopped. I remember seeing an article on competition shooting in one of the magazines and noticed this crazy looking pistol with a huge magazine hanging off the bottom and a scope looking thing on top. I didn’t do much with pistols until I turned 21 and started buying and trading different pistols just to try them out. In my 20’s I would usually go to an indoor range once a week and lane shoot about 100 rounds or so just working on accuracy with whatever pistol I owned at the time. I still didn’t know much about competitive shooting at that point but I always had a lingering interest and wanted to learn more.
In my early 30’s I started learning more about shooting sports and became more interested in competition. A local indoor range started hosting IDPA style matches so I thought I’d go shoot one and see what it was about. I enjoyed the IDPA style matches and they were a great introduction to competitive pistol shooting for me but I wasn’t really comfortable with all of the rules on reloading behind cover and engaging the targets in a certain order. That same range also started hosting a USPSA style match once a month that I attended and that’s when I became hooked. The USPSA guys had all the flashy guns that I’d seen in the magazines as a kid and I knew I wanted to be a part of this.

I started shooting in Production division with a DA/SA gun I was using at the IDPA matches but the image of that crazy space gun with a scope I saw as a kid always stuck in my mind. Shortly after I started shooting USPSA, Carry Optics was introduced and I decided to try out the red dot on a pistol. I made A-Class in Carry Optics after shooting that division for about a year with a couple decent finishes at major matches. While I was finishing up the season in Carry Optics I began learning how to build Open division 2011’s. With my background in machining and computer programming I felt pretty confident I could end up with a functional gun to shoot.

I finished up testing on my first Open gun and began shooting in Open division at the beginning of the 2018 season. Once my gun was running well I was able to start focusing on practice and training for USPSA competition. I made a regular practice routine of 1 hour dry fire practice in the morning 5-6 days a weeks, 2-3 days of afternoon dry fire practice incorporating movement, live fire practice every Friday afternoon, and a match on Saturday or Sunday each week. Following this routine I made Master Class at 92% in Open division by the end of 2018 and finished the year at the Florida Invitational with 2^nd Master and 5^th overall.

I live in South Carolina and shoot in Area 6 where there is never really an off-season. It does get cold here but we’re not forced into hibernation due to feet of snow everywhere. It was during one of the 30 degree winter matches when I started having trouble with the gun lubricant I was using at the time becoming too thick and starting to cause malfunctions. A good friend of mine; Bill Baker, introduced me to Gun Butter that he’d been using for a while and said it kept his guns running no matter the temperature. I started using Gun Butter that week have not used anything else since. It took care of the gun malfunctions I was experiencing due to the cold weather and it stays in place on my gun even during the 100 degree days we experience here in the summer. I’ve used Gun Butter in a couple 1000 round training classes and my gun kept running without issue. Many of the ranges here in the southeast have very sandy surfaces in the bays and dust and sand get into everything. Gun Butter keeps my guns running even when things start getting dirty and it’s easy to clean off when it’s time to strip the gun down.

I was offered an Open division slot for 2019 USPSA HiCap Nationals so I’m spending the rest of the year leading up the event practicing and getting ready for Utah. I’m confident that Gun Butter will help me achieve my goals by keeping my guns running smoothly so I don’t have to worry about my gear and I can just focus on training.

- David Lyell