I booked a long range course and never mentioned I was a gunsmith

Early this month I went down to the Canberra Rifle Club at Majura and spent two days on Long Range Shooting One with Jay Orange of Orange Accuracy.

Nobody there knew what I do for a living. Not Jay, not the other shooters. No mention of the workshop, the dealer's licence, the years of training I've sat through here and overseas, or the fact that I teach this sort of thing myself. I booked as a student, and that is exactly how I wanted it.

There's a reason for that, and it's the whole point of this review.

Why I went

Word of mouth, and a trip already on the calendar

Jay's name has been coming up in my conversations for a couple of years, and every single time it came back the same way: go and do it. In a sport this small, that kind of word of mouth is worth more than any advertisement you can buy. I'd wanted to get down to him for a long while. This year I finally made the trip.

I didn't go to audit him. I went to learn from somebody who came at it from a direction I hadn't been taught from before.

The timing had a second reason. My daughter is at ADFA in Canberra, training as an Army officer, and the trip down to see her was already on the calendar. Ours is a family with a long military history, so I was going regardless. Booking onto a course a few minutes up the road at Majura made the trip do double duty.

The obvious question

Why the entry level course

Part of it is simple: LRS-1 is the prerequisite for the Advanced course, so there was no way around it even if I'd wanted one.

But I didn't want one. If you want to know whether somebody can actually teach, you watch them teach the fundamentals. Anyone can look impressive covering advanced material to an advanced audience, because the audience fills in the gaps for you. Teaching the basics clearly, to a mixed group with mixed gear and mixed experience, is the hard part. That is where instructors are either made or found out.

And the fundamentals are where my own bad habits were most likely to be hiding. You don't find those in an advanced class. You find them when somebody explains, slowly and from scratch, the thing you stopped thinking about ten years ago.

Why I kept quiet

Walk in as "the gunsmith" and you stop being taught

Two reasons.

The first is practical. The moment you walk into a classroom as the gunsmith, you stop being a student and start being a second opinion. People look sideways at you instead of at the instructor, and the instructor starts teaching around you instead of to the room. I wanted the course as it is actually delivered, on a normal weekend, with a normal group. That's the only honest way to judge it, and more importantly, it's the only way to get the full value out of it.

The second reason is the one I'd happily put on the workshop wall. The fastest way to stop getting better at something is to decide you've already arrived.

Safety first. Data always. Ego never.

The ego part isn't decoration. Years behind a rifle and under a bench will teach you a great deal, and it will also quietly teach you a set of habits you no longer question. You stop hearing your own assumptions. The only reliable fix I've found is to sit down in somebody else's classroom, shut up, and listen to how they explain the same physics you think you already understand.

It worked. There were a couple of explanations over those two days that I had genuinely never heard put that way before, after all the training I've done. I wrote them down. I'm still thinking about one of them.

The instructor

On Jay, and on the course

LRS-1 is two days split between the classroom and the range, covering ballistics, wind reading, rifle setup and zeroing, and working out to the limits of what your calibre will do. That is the level Jay describes it at himself, and it is as far as I will go, because the how is his work and his livelihood and it is not mine to give away.

What I will talk about is the delivery, because the delivery is what you are actually paying for when you book an instructor.

It was one of the best presented, best thought out and best executed courses I have been on, anywhere, in any field. I say that having been through a lot of them, and having built and run training programs for a living on the other side of my business.

The structure is the first thing you notice. The balance of classroom to range time was spot on. Nothing dragged, nothing felt rushed, and every theory session landed on the ground in front of you shortly afterwards where you could feel whether you'd actually understood it. That sounds simple. It is very hard to get right, and most courses don't.

The depth is the second. Jay knows his subject to a level well past what the course requires, which means he can answer the question behind your question. There's a difference between an instructor delivering material and an instructor who understands it, and you can hear it inside ten minutes.

The third thing money can't buy. Jay teaches this because he's passionate about it, not because he's being paid to stand there. Anyone who's sat through training delivered by someone just working through the slides knows exactly how different that feels.

The honest part

Day two, in the rain, looking like a first timer

Day two was cold and wet. Properly wet. Wetter and colder than anything I've stood in since I left England fifteen years ago. As a pomme I should have been right at home. As an acclimatised Queenslander I was cold. So cold. I was also behind a rifle I had only just picked up and hadn't had the chance to settle into.

On paper at 100m, in the rain, I looked like I had picked up a rifle for the first time in my life.

Now, I could have said something at that point. I could have explained myself. I didn't, because that would have been the ego talking, and the ego has never once improved a group. So I worked the problem the way you're supposed to: slow down, go back to the basics, trust the process, build from what the target is actually telling you. By the end of the day I was finding plates at 926.

Being experienced doesn't exempt you from having a bad morning. It just means you should know how to fix one.

That is the real lesson from the two days, and it had nothing to do with the course notes. If you can't put your ego down long enough to go back to fundamentals in front of a group of strangers, your experience isn't an asset, it's a liability.

A word on our own training

Theory makes your range time count. It doesn't replace it.

People ask, so I'll answer it here.

We write a lot of free knowledge guides on this site, and we run First Round Effect, our long range eLearning course, which is twenty five modules and about twelve hours. We also built the CCG-LR ballistic app and gave it away, because the maths shouldn't be the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get into this.

We run that material for a straightforward reason: not everyone can get to a practical course. Distance, money, time off work, family. For those people, structured theory they can work through at the kitchen table is far better than YouTube and guesswork.

But I'll say plainly what I said to Jay: nothing replaces in person training. Nothing. Range time under an instructor who can see what you're doing wrong is the thing that actually makes you a shooter, and no amount of screen time substitutes for it.

What the theory does do is make your range time count. If you turn up to a course like LRS-1 already comfortable with the language and the fundamentals, you spend your two days building skill instead of building vocabulary. You ask better questions. You get more out of every round you send. Two days is not long, and the ones who arrive prepared come away with noticeably more.

Twelve hours at home against two days on a range is not a close trade, and that is exactly the point. The theory is the cheap part. Get it done before you spend the money and the travel, so the expensive part is all skill.

So if you're booked on a practical course, any practical course, do the reading first. Ours is here if it suits you, and so are the free guides.

First Round Effect course Free knowledge guides

The practical details

If you're thinking about it

LRS-1 is the two day course I did. It is the entry point and it is where everybody starts.

Advanced LRS is the three day follow on, and you need LRS-1 behind you before you can book it. It builds straight on top: ballistic profile trueing, wind formulas, moving targets, and tripod and angled shooting. That is the one I want, and on the strength of these two days I will be booking it.

Orange Accuracy is ACT based and travels. Courses run at Majura in Canberra and at Castlemaine in Victoria, with Rockhampton on the calendar for 2027 and dates still to be confirmed. Numbers are kept small, one to eight shooters at a one to four instructor ratio, which is a fair part of why the two days work as well as they do.

Dates, prices and the current calendar are all on Jay's website, and that is the place to check rather than taking my word for any of it. Book early. Courses do sell out, and he keeps waiting lists for the ones that have.

Course dates and booking

The verdict

Would I recommend it

Without hesitation, and I've already been doing it.

If you're serious about shooting at distance, book LRS-1 with Orange Accuracy. You will get an instructor who has genuinely done the work, a course that's been properly built rather than thrown together, and two days that will make you better whether you're brand new or you've been at this for twenty years.

I went down there to learn something new from a different perspective, having told nobody what I knew. I came home with pages of notes, a humbling morning in the rain, and a reminder I'll take over any certificate: there is always something you don't know yet, and the day you stop looking for it is the day you start going backwards.

Thanks for having me, Jay. If the Advanced course makes it up to Rockhampton, I'll be first in line and I'll help you fill it.

Loz Hemmings

Cap Coast Gunsmithing · Yeppoon, QLD