Tuesday - April 21, 2009

Son of Gun

Ordered it online from Oklahoma on Thursday, paid for it on Friday, picked it up in New Jersey on Tuesday. It’s a keeper.

This is a 5 shot stainless steel double action .357 Magnum revolver with fixed sights and a 3” barrel. At 27 ounces, it weighs about a third less than my big Ruger GP100, but you can tell both models have an awful lot in common. Same internals, same locking concept, same hammer. If not two peas in a pod, they’re at least as close as cousins. Or as I’m thinking of it, Gun, and Son of Gun.

It took me quite a while to make this simple post, because I never knew how hard it was to take good pictures of polished oiled stainless steel with a digital camera that wants to use the flash all the time. So these aren’t the best snapshots, sorry.

This is a great little pistol. Even with the “big” 3” barrel it fits right into a jeans pocket and doesn’t imprint ...

It’s quite a bit smaller in the hand than the mid-sized frame GP100, but the SP101 is still big enough to get a good grip on. None of that extra finger off the end of the grip nonsense going on here.

You only get 5 shots, but that’s 5 shots of .357. Which is enough to utterly deafen an attacker, if nothing else. .357s are amazingly loud. Pull the trigger and the blast pushes the air right out of you lungs. Cool, auto-exhale!

It’s very easy to see just how similar the SP101 and the GP100 are. Ruger came up with a good idea, and they’re sticking to it.

For people with smaller hands, the SP101 should fit perfectly. The grip is shorter and thinner, and a bit more vertical, so the distance from the backstrap to the trigger is much less. About 1/2” I’d say. A bit more than half a dime, which is that blurry round thing in the next picture. This shot came out lousy, but come on. YOU try stacking two revolvers on top of each other, then zooming in for a close up when everything is shiny. It ain’t easy to do.

My wife and I have had this running joke for ages now. She calls my GP100 her pistol. At a slender 5 feet tall, her hands are quite small. I put the SP101 in her hands and her first reaction was “So when are you going to buy a pistol? Cuz this one’s mine now.” Which is pretty much exactly the reaction I was looking for.

Right out of the box the trigger on this little thing was a bit rough. There is a pronounced “flat spot” in the pull. You can both feel it and hear it. This is the gun telling you it’s about to fire. Pull the trigger just a tiny bit more, and SNAP! it goes off. Trigger pull is a bit heavy, but the pull is even throughout the range of movement. I like that. After dry firing the gun a few hundred times most of the roughness was gone. But it’s a Ruger after all ... which means you take it apart, carefully and gently polish the burrs off the internals, clean everything with mineral spirits then alcohol, then give the parts a dip in Mili-tec and an hour in a cool oven. Then coat everything up with Tetra-Gun or CLP and put it back together. Things will be much smoother after that. Wolff makes a spring kit too, which will take the trigger pull down a couple of pounds. I went through this process a decade ago with the GP100, and made that pistol work glass smooth. And Trausch makes a set of custom grips for only $25. So now you know my plans for the next few days.

More good news from Gun World - my dealer says the little Ruger LCPs are starting to come in now, in quantity. So if you’ve been eyeballing those online, stop thinking about paying the high prices, don’t! In another month you should be able to get them for well under $300. The LCP is a really tiny .380 semi-automatic, hardly any bigger or thicker than your wallet. I’ve got one of those on order too, so it’s time to go get another permit from NJ. The gun shop out in Oklahoma were I found this SP101 has more of them, but right now they only have the 2” barrel snubby. With or without the hammer spur. Same gun, just a shorter barrel. But it’s still a Ruger, and that means it’s a keeper. If you really want one of the snubbies, for the best price in the USA right now, email me.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/21/2009 at 03:45 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (13) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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