Tuesday - March 31, 2009

The Pistol Saga: A REJECT

Fit and finish are pretty darned good. Everything is smooth and shiny. No metal burrs or sharp edges anywhere. This is an aluminum alloy framed gun, and the anodized finish is well done. It does not vary in color or in smoothness at all. The gap between the back of the barrel and the front of the cylinder is quite small. I didn’t measure it, as I was trying out somebody else’s personal gun, but you want that gap to be small. The cylinder was not at all wobbly in lock up, and the cylinder release worked easily and without a hitch. Nice.

It seemed perfect. Then I pulled the trigger. Or tried to, I should say. WTF???

The Taurus Model 650 is a “fully enclosed hammer” design. This means it doesn’t actually have a hammer, at least not one on the outside of the pistol. That means you can’t cock the hammer and fire it in “single action” mode. It’s “double action” only. You have to pull the trigger for the full stroke to cock and fire the gun. (Then you have to allow the trigger to fully return on the backstroke so you can pull it again. Well, no kidding; that’s how any double action pistol is, but some people don’t know this). And therein lies the problem. I have never pulled the trigger on a hammerless revolver before. I have never even handled a Taurus pistol before. So I can’t say if it’s the hammerless design, or just the way that Tauruseseses (Tauri?) are. BUT.

The trigger pull was about 17 pounds. Heavy as all hell. Worse yet, it was all or nothing. Actually, it was nothing, then all. Damn, I thought I had broken the gun somehow. I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The trigger did not move. I checked to make sure I had closed the cylinder, because if the cylinder is not locked in place a revolver will usually not function. No, that was Ok. So I pulled the trigger again. Nothing. I pulled the trigger harder. Nothing. What the hell?? So I made sure I had a good grip, and pulled that mother for all I was worth. The trigger did not move even a smidgen, and then suddenly - SNAP!! - and the whole thing went at once. Advance the cylinder, cock the “hammer”, fire the gun: all happen in a flash, after you apply tremendous pressure to the trigger. I did it again. I did it several more times. That’s the way this pistol works.

No thank you. Next.

I’ve fired revolvers for years and years. I know how they work. You pull the trigger a little and the cylinder starts to turn. You pull the trigger a little more and you can feel the hammer start to cock. Certain pistols - most notably Smith & Wesson - are world famous for how smoothly their actions work, and how their springs don’t “stack up”, and then they go off. Even my Ruger GP-100, a big honking chunk of stainless steel not known for a velvet trigger, is about 100 times better than this Taurus 650.

In a life or death emergency, yeah, you’d yank that trigger right out the other side of the gun if you had to. And it would go off. But it would be a stone bitch to practice with; jerky stiff triggers destroy accurate shooting, and accurate shooting builds confidence in the weapon. Without confidence all you have is a pound and a half of metal club in your pocket that goes bang. Sometimes.

I am also rethinking the whole “Get a .357 Magnum snubbie, not a .38 Special” idea. The owner of this pistol, Doc R (from previous .45-60 posts) is a big strong guy. A Marine. And this is a mid-weight pocket pistol; you can buy similar ones that weigh half as much. I asked him how it was with .357 ammo. “I fired it once.” he said, “It was like setting off an M-80 in your hand. Never again.” Yikes. Ok, sure, on the one hand it could be better to have the capability for .357s and never use it, just in case. OTOH, I don’t think there will be a huge difference in velocity between a .38+P and a full power .357 in a barrel only 2” long, so why bother? Perhaps 125 feet per second? The +P can put the bullets out there at at least 900 feet per second from that short barrel, and at across the room distances, that’s enough to do the job.

I’ll pass on this model Taurus. To be fair, as far as I can tell the Model 650 (called the Model 850 in .38 Special) is NOT the same design as their Model 85 Ultra-Lite. That’s a bobbed hammer design I think, so perhaps it has a much smoother and easier trigger pull. I can’t say.

I hear the new Ruger LCR has a really nice trigger that only requires a third as much effort:

The trigger pull is one of the best features of the LCR. The two that I fired at the factory had very good, butter-smooth trigger pulls. The few that I handled at SHOT [a trade show] did as well, so I was hopeful that the production guns would also have good trigger pulls. I was not disappointed. My sample gun has what is probably a perfect trigger pull for a small defensive revolver. Measuring seven pounds, ten ounces, it feels even lighter. The trigger is wide and smooth on the surface, and the pull feels more like five pounds to my finger.

Also, I can pretty much guarantee that Ruger’s SP-101 has the same trigger as my GP-100, since the two pistols share the exact same trigger module. And I know that a little $10 little kit from Wolff helps those triggers even more. No such kit exists for this model Taurus.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/31/2009 at 10:34 AM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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