Guns and Gear Review #28: Ruger PC9 carbine

 Hey folks, 12-Gauge Chimp here. Got another G&G Review for y'all today. 

Today I'll be looking at the Ruger PC9 carbine. 

This is my most recent firearms purchase and it's one that's been on my list for awhile. 

Thanks to some selling off of my collection as well as of some other stuff I didn't need anymore, I was able to pick up a brand new PC9 carbine. 

I had originally planned on buying a Glock 19 Gen 4 because a friend had gifted me a couple older G19 mags last year. Well, my quest for a G19 went sideways and I ended up looking at the PC9 instead. Mostly because I already had a G17 and could use the same mags thanks to Ruger including a magazine adapter that allows the PC9 to use the common Glock style magazines. 

Unfortunately, I seemed to have gotten into the PC9 market at the wrong time. It seemed that no one had a PC9 in stock. Gallery of Guns was out of stock, so was Bud's and a few other sites I frequent. I found one on Armslist, but the seller that had it wasn't very good at communicating and seemed to have chosen to ignore me instead of selling me their PC9. Oh well, their loss. 

Feeling like I'd have to wait a longer period than I'd hoped, I decided to check out a local farm supply store that also had a large firearms section one day. As I browsed the damn near empty cases, I asked one of the employees if they had a PC9 carbine in stock. At first, the employee said they had sold the only one they had, but he offered to check the gun room and see if maybe they had another one. 

After a few minutes, the employee comes back and says they have one left in 9mm, which is what I was looking for. I thank God and tell the guy I'll take it. He brings it up to the counter, I check it over to make sure it is indeed a 9mm PC9 (Ruger also makes them in .40 S&W now, by the way) and fill out the required 4473. A couple minutes later, I'm good to go, pay for my shiny new gun and I leave really happy. 

Now that this little backstory on how I got my PC9 is over with, here's the details on this handy little carbine. 

The Ruger PC9 carbine has a 16 inch fluted and threaded barrel and comes with two magazine adapters. One is for the SR9 pattern magazines and the other is for the ubiquitous Glock pattern magazines. A quick swapping of adapters and mine is set up to use Glock mags. I've got a few of those and none of the SR9 mags aside from the one that comes with the PC9 from Ruger. 

The receiver of the PC9 features a built in picatinny rail and a charging handle that's able to be swapped from left or right depending on shooter preference.  The front sight is a simple fixed post that's protected by two ears and the rear sight is a ghost ring style that's adjustable for windage and elevation. The front and rear sights are mounted on the barrel, which is removable from the receiver via a little lever similar to the Ruger 10/22 Takedown. Matter of fact, the PC9 is kind of like a 10/22 on steroids. Aside from the charging handle, the magazine release is swappable from left to right, again all dependent on shooter preference.

I've had some previous experience with the PC9 and that previous experience is what prompted me to purchase my own. Since purchasing my PC9, I've added an AR Stoner A2 style muzzle brake (this necessitated the purchase of a muzzle brake timing shim kit since my A2 brake didn't want to line up properly with just a crush washer.) as well as a Butler Creek sling from Walmart. 

I've got plans to purchase a Midwest Industries freefloat M-Lok handguard (which will make my PC9 look sort of a like a modernized PPsH-41, just in 9mm instead of 7.62x25) for my PC9 as well as their buttstock spacer with a built in QD sling mount. I've also got plans to purchase a few more Glock 17 mags for it as well. I'll probably pick up a few of those 33 round mags I've seen a lot. I might also pick up a red dot optic for it as well. 

Once the weather warms back up, probably next March, I'll take my PC9 out and put it through its paces. But until then, it's mostly dryfire practice and getting it in just the right configuration. 

I guess it's not really fair to call this a review just yet, more of an overview I'd guess you could say. 

Anyway, I like it and I'm glad I was able to pick one up when I could. So if you're in the market for a handy little pistol caliber carbine and want something that's not an AR style, the Ruger PC9 carbine might be just what you're looking for. 

As always, this is 12-Gauge Chimp signing off. 

Guns and Gear Review #27: Where Are They Now ? Part 1

Hey folks, 12-Gauge Chimp here.

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. 

I'm back....Sort of.

 Hey folks, 12-Gauge Chimp here.

So, it's been awhile since I last posted anything and I've got good reason for that. 

Ok, so, it's not exactly a good reason, but more of a "I ran out of stuff to talk about and I sort of got burnt out and disappeared for awhile." type of thing. 

Anyway, I'm sort of back and I just wanted to start off by apologizing for my lack of content over the past year. When I did the long term review of the Kailash Blades Scourge and Sirupate kukris, I was in the beginning stages of a move that took way longer than I had hoped as well as me not really having much to say about anything. That and I really wanted to find some stuff worth reviewing for the site. 

Also, I got selected to be a moderator on a forum I've been a member of for about 11 years now and that's taken up the bulk of my time. So between my moderator duties and the lack of anything worthwhile to review, coupled with me getting burnt out for like the third or fourth time in the decade this site has been active, and you get one tired Chimp. 

But, all is not lost, my friends. I do have some things in the pipeline to review and I'll probably have a new review up within the next few weeks. 

So the site is not dead in the water, as it may have appeared for the last year. 

Those of y'all who stuck by me and came back to the site over the last year to read the old reviews and just to check in despite the lack of updates, thank you. I really mean that. Thank you for sticking with me. I really do appreciate that and I really am sorry I sort of abandoned the site for so long. 

So, with that said, I'm sort of back and may very well disappear again, but I will try not to be gone for over a year like I was. Also, I'm writing this via mobile since I haven't gotten on my computer for awhile. I need to fix that since writing on mobile is kind of awkward for me. 

As always, this is 12-Gauge Chimp signing off.