Alternative Drastic Plastic

G

George Hill

Staff Alumnus
There are a lot of people talking about all kinds of plastic framed automatics. I think danged near every one of them have been talked about to death. There is one out there that is not getting much discussion at all.
The FN Forty-Nine
Now it seems to me that this gun is a hands down good looking pistol. The grip angle seems ideal... the sights are good... there are no gimicks or gizmos or anything flashy... It's just a simple and straight forward design. However it looks very good with clean lines... kinda like the handgun equivelant of a BMW.

How come no one is talking about this gun? Is it too boring?
It has design features of all sorts of different and successful pistols... is this thing a Sgt York?
 
A couple of reports...

...from ranges with rentals haven't been real encouraging to me. I think second-strike capability is vastly overrated (If I hear a *click*, I'm going to be well into a tap-rack-bang before you can say "pull the trigger ag..."). Ergonomic in my hands, but not sufficiently more so than a Glock and much less so than a SIG or 1911. Trigger is okay, but nothing to write home about. No such thing as non-gelded mags for it.

Might get one for the collection someday, but it just sits right in the middle of too many niches that I already have filled with capable guns for me to want to run out and plunk down the long green for one. There's nothing wrong with it, but much like the Steyr and P99, I already have pistols that do that job just fine. If I didn't already have a plethora of Glocks, SIGs and HKs, I'd put it on my list to consider.
 
The FN 49 must be one of the more goregeous plastic pieces. Yet I reckon the name is to generic, it doesn't stand out from the [growing] crowd of Steyrs, Walthers, Sigma's, H2000s, and especially the Glocks.

If GIAT had marketed the FN 49 has the Browning High Power II or GP36 Special Captain, it might have provided a "history" unlike its competitors.

Maybe like the HK VP70 [the original plastic fantastic] its just a case of right gun at the wrong time.

Are there any Mil/LEO organizations carrying the FN 49, I can't think of any ?
 
No Airforce in the world picked up the F-20 Tigershark either...
Yet is was a fantastic aircraft with a great deal going for it.
 
Played with the pre-production gun, and told the factory guys, 'I WANT ONE NOW!!!!' Needless to say, when it actually came out for sale, the response was 'KEEP IT!!!'

The reason? The pre-production had THE FINEST trigger I have ever felt on a polymer gun.....and compared favourably to fine single-action target triggers (smoother than glass, enough weight to keep you from accidentally touching one off. Perfect). The production guns had a cheaper trigger on them. In fact, it felt just like a Sigma. Cheap, clunky, jumpy on release. FN was supposed to go back and improve the triggers, but I haven't tried one of the newer-production guns. Kinda disappointed when I was told that the same guy who designed the Sigma designed the FN. Supposedly, an almost identical design. Don't know about that (don't WANT to know), but it is kind of a turn-off to me.
 
Also, the one I handled was huge. Bigger than the Sigpro even. Although the grip was nice, I just couldn't justify the cost for what I would get.
 
The FN Forty-Nine has one of the worst triggers I have tried. It is almost as accurate as a brick thrown at a crowd (somebody will get hit, just who is the question). It has a price tag like an HK USP without all that pesky reliability. Other than that I can't think of a reason to not like the FN. It may have been that the one that I fired was one of those poor specimens that sometimes slip past the QC inspectors, but for the price I wasn't impressed.
 
I read a review of it in one of the Gun rags a few months ago.

It seems that its a nice piece but has a very heavy trigger (12lb...even though the FN web site says 8-10lbs). Apparently it was designed as a police sidearm and whoever they had in mind when they designed it likes a real heavy trigger for safety reasons (don't remember if it was a US or European police force they designed it for).
 
The pre-pro gun had a heavy trigger (like 10lb), but it was so smooth, I didn't really notice or care. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.....
 
Hmmmm....a terrible trigger, takes major effort to make it go boom? Does this mean that every government agency in the US will soon be clammering to buy them?
 
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