I've been wanting to do this post for awhile now and since I've got a bunch of free time, I figured today was the day for me to start. This is the first of a two part special edition of "Guns and Gear Review" I like to call the "Where are they now ?" edition.
Over the past ten years, a few guns have come and gone from my collection and as many knives have as well. Some I sort of regret selling and others I was happy to get rid of because they just flat out sucked.
Let's start with the one that sucked. My Model 1895 Nagant revolver, or as I liked to refer to it as, "Fugly".
"Fugly" was a Model 1895 Nagant made sometime in 1939. It was built early enough to have seen action in the early years WW2 and probably killed its fair share of enemy soldiers (and probably a few Soviet soldiers who got on the bad side of the Soviet political officer who carried it.). This gun would not win any beauty pageants, but then again, it wasn't built to do that. It was built to be a sidearm to the Soviet soldiers and officers of WW2 when there weren't enough Tokarevs to go around. Which happened more than you'd think. Anyway, "Fugly" was a neat little gun that was cursed with a horrendous trigger pull weight. I never checked it myself, but others who owned Nagants have said that the trigger pull was very heavy. And gritty in some cases. I don't know the exact weights, but some folks have said it felt like 50 pounds in double action, but manageable in single action. Manageable being about 5 to 6 pounds.
Another strike against "Fugly" was the expensive ammo it used. 7.62x38R ammo was damn near non-existent in the US at the time I owned "Fugly" and when I was able to find a box or two, the ammo was close to 40 bucks a box. Others got around this by fitting cylinders that allowed one to fire .32 ACP ammo through the Nagant, but I never found one. Nor did I really want to spend the extra cash to fit one to my particular gun. Some folks also went as far as to fire .32 S&W Long or .32 H&R Magnum through their guns. It was technically safe to do so, but it wasn't recommended for long term usage. So I just stuffed my Nagant back into its holster and stuck it into my nightstand drawer.
And I forgot about it for a long time. At least until a friend of mine commented that he wanted to buy a pistol for his 21st birthday. I mentioned I had a cheap Russian gun and my friend jumped on it for the right price. Ten minutes and 100 bucks later, the gun was his and I was relieved of my burden of buying expensive ammo and having to deal with a horrible trigger pull weight. The 100 bucks was promptly spent on more ammo for the other three guns I had at that point.
The next gun on the 'Where are they now?" list is the Rock Island Armory GI Tactical 1911.
I purchased this gun back in March of 2012 at a local FFL that also doubled as a butane gas sales place. At first, the FFL ordered the wrong 1911, but he was able to get the one I asked for. No problem for him since he was able to sell the other 1911 pretty quickly afterwards.
So I get my GI Tactical and a friend from a web forum I'm a member of sent me a care package of 1911 goodies. Being that I'm left handed when it comes to handguns, my friend included a couple left handed holsters along with some magazines and a really nice double mag pouch made by Galco.
This 1911 would serve me well for a few years as my nightstand gun along with my Mossberg bullpup shotgun. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to try out a higher capacity handgun and after some searching, I settled on the Glock 21 Gen 4. So the G21 becomes my nightstand gun and the 1911 goes into my safe, where it sits until another friend expresses interest in getting a 1911 to practice gunsmithing on. We work out a trade and I end up with a Ruger P89 9mm pistol.
In the time I had my RIA GI Tactical 1911, I had maybe two failures with it. Both being failures to feed, which were fixed by dropping the mag, reinserting it and trying again. Until I traded it, I had planned on getting the feedramps polished, which is a common fix on 1911 pistols. The trigger was good, the accuracy was typical 1911 and it was reliable once I worked out the issues I had.
Looking back, I actually do regret trading that pistol and have plans on buying another 1911 at some point. There's a lot of good entry level 1911s being sold now and a lot of them are pretty decently priced.
The Ruger P89 I traded my 1911 for ended up being sold this year in order to fund a Ruger PC9 carbine purchase and while I miss that gun as well, I'm pretty happy with where it ended up. A fellow Ruger fan in my AO purchased it from me and was excited to get it because he had been looking for one for a long time. I won't say it was his "Grail" gun, but it might've been pretty close.
My personal "Grail" gun is a Winchester Model 1895 Russian Contract Musket made during WW1, but unless Winchester decides to make a reproduction of it like they've done with the Roosevelt .405 Winchester Model 1895, I'm out of luck on ever owning one.
That is unless I get really lucky and find one at a pawn shop or a gun shop and it's not priced too outrageously. It's doubtful that'll ever happen, but hey, I can dream, right ?
Well, I'd say that's enough of me yammering on, so I'll go ahead and bring this edition of "Where are they now?: Chimp's guns" to a close.
As always, this is 12-Gauge Chimp signing off.
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