It's an aluminum frame and cylinder gun (steel liner in the aluminum barrel), so it's really, REALLY light in weight. S&W touts it as their "Kit Gun", and due to it's light weight and J-framed small size, I can understand how it easily would fit in a tackle box (well, not in MY mess of a tackle box
) or back pack, or whatever. It's an 8-shooter, with a 3" barrel & an adjustable rear sight.Some thoughts on shooting it today:
It has a pretty heavy DA pull, but counters that with a sweet, crisp & light SA pull. It has a nice fiber optic front sight, but $&W kinda had a "Fail!" execution of the rear sight blade. The rear blade's notch isn't deep enough for the top of the front sight to sit level with the top of the blade AND be able to see the fiber optic's dot. With the top of the front sight level with the top of the rear sight, the fiber optic's dot almost disappears, kinda negating the fiber optic's benefit. It makes for a somewhat inconsistent sight picture hold when shooting.
Nevertheless, my wife loves the gun! It fits her hand well, she likes the light weight, and the fact that it still has low recoil. She has a really nice shooting Ruger 22/45 (Mark IV?) that she likes to shoot, but doesn't like "the manual of arms" as far as how to make it safe, reload, deal with the safety, mag release, and etc.. She's really diggin' the sheer simplicity of the revolver, and understands how to swing the cylinder out, push in the extractor, and then have either a gun that's easier for her to reload (magazines give her "issues"), or a gun that's safe.
Now, please don't think I'm baggin' on my wife, or throwing her under a bus or something. I simply can't get her out to the range often enough, and like I said above, when I do get her out to shoot, she's kind of forgotten all she needs to do to safely run her semi-auto guns. She enjoys shooting her semi auto guns, but doesn't like everything else required to deal with them. But she's got the wheelgun down, so she just feels more confident about poppin' some caps with her revolver. She just needs a hubby to twist her arm to go shootin' more often. I think it's gonna be easier with this gun.
We shot around 80 rounds of CCI Mini Mag this afternoon. In spite of what I feel it a tough sight picture to deal with, I thought it shot some decent SA groups at 10 yards. My wife's group is shown in the pic with the gun.
I shot a couple of cylinders of DA shooting, and only succeded in embarrassing myself with the groups I got. I'm more of a 1911 guy, even though I shot a sweet 686 in Action Pistol matches many moons ago. My DA skills have definitely diminished. My wife shot a few rounds of DA, but quickly switched back to SA to be able to hit the target easier. We'll eventually work on her DA shooting. She shot off of sandbags for her shooting. I want her to have every chance of hitting a decent grouping, so she'll enjoy shooting more. And for her, hitting where she points the gun makes her (and me) happy.
- IMG_1092.JPG (5.27 MiB) Viewed 496 times
