Which Handgun Designs Interest You The Most?

BBarn

New member
Which handgun designs interest you the most, and why?
For me it's...

1911 – I like that it has no screws (except for the grips), no roll pins, and can be easily disassembled completely. Also the very comfortable grip.

Hi-Power – The early ones. The most comfortable (to me) grip of a double stack magazine pistol. Super easy takedown. I also like the interesting trigger system that doesn't add width to the frame. Unfortunately they messed up and added roll pins to save a few bucks on the later ones.

Glock – Such a simple design using very few parts, with easy takedown. Very innovative and essentially trouble free from the start from someone new to firearms design (at the time of introduction).

The Colt Woodsman – The roots of so many fine 22 pistols lead back to this Browning design.

Compared to the above, I find most other auto pistol designs of little interest. I like some aspects of the CZ75, but the use of several roll pins leaves me cold. I also don't care for the vertically short slide necessitated by the outside frame rails. The result is small slide serrations that make racking the slide more difficult. But the CZ75 is still a nice gun.


Smith and Wesson double action revolvers – many of the ones made in the last 50+ years, because of the trigger. They manage to offer competitively priced revolvers that feature a very good trigger.

Ruger Redhawk – The clever use of a single spring for both hammer and trigger return. The crane latch at the front. The solid frame. A gun designed for magnum cartridges from the start. And it shows. Over the long haul.

Ruger Old Model Blackhawks – A maintaining of the good features and much of the handling of Colt's SAA with much more durability. Yes, it's practically just a 5 shooter (like the SAA), but it makes that great clicking sound when the hammer is cocked.

Ruger New Model Blackhawks – Yes, according to some they ruined the Blackhawk. But it's a true 6 shooter and I like simply opening and closing the loading gate to load/unload safely. Yet another great design effort by the Ruger team.
 
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1911 is my cup of tea. I own several and love how easy they are to tear down. It's an ingenious design, still in full force 106 years later.
 
Beretta 92, I remember when I first got mine and It seemed like every day I was learning something new about it, When I tore it down to bolts I learned even more I kept finding my self impressed by the design.
Everything has meaning on this gun You may not realize it at first all the nuances but nothing was done by chance, nothing is random.

Hi-point pistols.. Odd thing on the list right? Who would find a shooting brick interesting?
Study the schematic or tear one apart and see for your self.. This gun is very cleverly designed, some will say crude maybe, but the simplicity is rather ingenious.. they actually use the striker pin to double as an ejector, the safety is nothing more then a piece of stamped steel, the drop safety on it is a counter weight (hi-point rattle)
The gun doesn't have much in the way of a slide rails instead the barrel and slide retaining pin take up most of the duty of keeping the slide on the gun.

It ain't pretty but I was impressed how many corners they cut and still had a functional firearm, the material construction often gets dogged and yet we see torture tests where the hi-point holds it's own.

The finish is powder coat which is utilitarian, cheap and durable.. ergonomicly I actually found the gun to "point" really well.

Very interesting design if you get to know it.

C96 broom handle, Always been fascinated with this gun, I've never owned one but I hope to some day get a Red 9 (9mm chambered) model.
Same goes for the Luger p08.
 
My S&Ws from the 70s....a M19...M17...M29....all P&R...TT...TH...TG...polished and blued with pride...all 6 inchers

My S&Ws from the 80s....to semi retire my Blues.....M629..5 inch...Classic....M686..no dash..4 inch...M617...4 (which was the last S&W I bought, when QC seemed to go away....

But the ones I enjoy the most...are my four Ruger Old Army's...first one...SS in 1974....have sent more round ball down range than any other handgun I own...added over the years a 7.5 Blued....5.5...Blued....and the last one a High polished...SS...5.5...
 

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I'm also interested in the Beretta 92. I have a friend who recently bought a trade in one, and he was shocked when he took it apart to clean it(It was beyond nasty). He thought it would be the same as his Sig and S&W 5906 inside.

I really like the S&W N and L frames.

But most of my time has been spent over the last 40 years I've been shooting has been with Dan Wesson 15-2's and 715 .357's. At this point, I can fix any problems and I've built up a large assortment of parts. I've only had to use about 3 total. If you do a search for Karl Lewis, the designer, you can see some of the early prototype guns he made for Browning that eventually became the Dan Wesson design.
 
FN 1899 and 1900.

First pistol with a slide. The FCG is ridiculous. It's striker fired, except the recoil spring is the mainspring. That spring rides above the barrel, resulting in an incredibly low bore axis.

It's really neat, and the basic design hasn't ever been reused outside of concurrent copycats. Disassembly is a little weird, and it was intended to use a fixed barrel, but those could be updated.

The Makarov is also very neat. Fewer parts than a Glock, and it's a DA/SA. FCG parts contain their own pins. Most parts do two or three things. The slide release is the ejector. The mainspring is the trigger return spring and magazine release. It's pretty wild.
 
+1 disseminator
P226 is solid and accurate.
Trigger on the Mastershop variant with short reset is very good.
 
From a historical perspective the Borchardt, Mauser C93 and Luger are most interesting. Then Browning's 1911, the Hi-Power and Walther's P38 follow closely behind. The H&K P9S and P7 as well as the Benelli B76 and Steyr GB also deserve honorable mentions. The 3rd generation of S&W semi-autos, IMO, ranks very highly as top tier all metal semi-autos. The classic SIG offerings are solid as well.

As for wheelguns, the design and craftsmanship of the Colt Python tops my list (although S&W occupies much more space in the safe than do Pythons.)
 
All modern firearms are interesting to me in various ways. From the least interesting but classic"normal" designs like the 1911, to the simplicity of Glock, and the more unique like my Remington R51.
But the most interesting are much more dated designs. Two in particular are the sliding cylinder 1895 Nagant, and the Webly-Fosbery Automatic Revolver.
 
Just a Fudd, here. I like the Browning designs, too. BBarn has
something, here, guns are more fun, if they look cool.

I also the Beretta 92. The Desert Eagle
weighs a ton, but it's fun to look at, as well as shoot.
 
Wilson Combat 1911's...

and the pre-Internal Frame lock S&W revolvers ( K, L and N frames --- but the N frames are my favorite )..in .357 mag and .44 Mag......
 
SIGSHR said:

Dan Wesson. Which is basically an update of the Merwin & Hulbert.


SAY WHAT?!?

Sorry, but no way can those two be compared. The Dan Wesson is a side break solid framed double action revolver. The Merwin Hulbert were break open frames with a "pull open" design.

Bob Wright
 
Mechanics-wise, the Luger P-08. It's just a beautiful design.

Then, others for some specific design details, like the Petter Modele 1935 (the firing mechanism), and the Sig-Sauer P-220 (the barrel lock).

And finally, the Mauser C-96, because it's just damn gorgeous, besides being the only handgun ever used outside the Earth's atmosphere.
 
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