Bought some new guns

[Nyles]

Honestly I have a friend that fell in love with my HS and I was thinking of selling it to her now that I have the Woodsman.... and then I took it apart.

Yeah I couldn't believe the price either. It's not a shop that typically prices low either. I half expected an issue but it worked beautifully when I test fired it. Wouldn't eject CCI Quiets (but then I didn't expect it to), Remington Targets work great. Yours is awfully nice too! What year is it? Is it set up for high velocity ammo?

[Jcordell]

Originally Posted by Nyles

Honestly I have a friend that fell in love with my HS and I was thinking of selling it to her now that I have the Woodsman.... and then I took it apart.

Yeah I couldn't believe the price either. It's not a shop that typically prices low either. I half expected an issue but it worked beautifully when I test fired it. Wouldn't eject CCI Quiets (but then I didn't expect it to), Remington Targets work great. Yours is awfully nice too! What year is it? Is it set up for high velocity ammo?

1928 and I fire sub-sonics in it. It is not set up for the high velocity loads. Which means I have to work the action, but that's okay. I have a Browning Buckmark Camper for hardcore plinking. The Woodsman isn't a kit gun. Oh and I paid $750.00 for mine. Which I think is a great price, but you got me beat all to hell. Congrats.

[Nyles]

Oh, so they're almost twins! Mine's also standard velocity only (as is my Hi Standard, actually). I prefer to use that stuff anyways, even if the guns could shoot it I'd probably only ever use it when it was all I could get.

[Jcordell]

Originally Posted by Nyles

Oh, so they're almost twins! Mine's also standard velocity only (as is my Hi Standard, actually). I prefer to use that stuff anyways, even if the guns could shoot it I'd probably only ever use it when it was all I could get.

Back before the Great 22 Panic I used to buy a brick or two of 22LR just out of habit. I have about 3,000 rounds of 22LR. None of which I can shoot in my Woodsman. I have 200 rounds of subsonic 22LR and I was lucky to find that. So the Woodsman is relegated to Safequeen status, but then many of my pieces are. They go to the range once or twice a year for six to twelve rounds. It's more about owning the classics. If you're a collector it makes sense. I have a few pieces that are Real World and go more frequently, but I don't consider myself to be an Operator.

[Nyles]

Yeah, I'm very much the same. Honestly I'm lucky if I can make it out to the range once a month in the summer - to saying nothing of actually finding ammo for some of the more obscure stuff in my collection.

[Jcordell]

Originally Posted by Nyles

Yeah, I'm very much the same. Honestly I'm lucky if I can make it out to the range once a month in the summer - to saying nothing of actually finding ammo for some of the more obscure stuff in my collection.

Yeah. I would really like a MAS 49/56 in 7.5mm French (instead of one of the .308 conversion jobs), but ammo is like non-existent. One of the big reasons that I try to stick to .38 special revolvers.

[Nyles]

Picked up a couple of guns this month that, believe it or not, I've been looking for since 2009. They're both WW1 French issue "Spanish 92" revolvers, from when the French were desperately short of handguns and bought anything they could in 8 x 27mm M1892 from the Eibar gun trade.

The first is one of the best, a Trocaola S&W M&P knock-off. It's actually mechanically closer to a Colt on the inside, and has a couple clever improvements over a real S&W - a much wider rear sight notch than found on contemporary Smiths, better suited to combat shooting, and a wide hammer spur for the same. It's obviously not a S&W in terms of fine workmanship or materials but is still quite decently made, enough so that I wouldn't feel terribly badly armed with it.




The second is one of, and probably the, worst. It's marked "mle 1915" (modele 1915) and is obviously a knock-off of a Pieper revolver, but quite badly made and there's no record of by whom. It's covered in rough hand-cut tool marks and has just an awful trigger, and requires a bit of fiddling to open. The French didn't buy many of these and passed apparently passed them on to the Romanians as soon as they had anything else on hand to use instead.



Any of these French WW1 Spanish 92 revolvers are very hard to find in Canada - I got a screaming deal on the Trocaola in an auction and probably overpaid for the Mle 1915 from a dealer, but I figure together they balance out.

I also picked up a couple of bayonets from a local antiques store, the first of which was a rather large and impressive Portuguese M1885 yatagan sword bayonet for my Kropatschek (note how its side-mounted):



The other, though missing the scabbard, is a super-rare Finnish M27 made by Fiskars (they probably made your scissors). You won't find many Finnish Mosin-Nagant bayonets as Finn soldiers apparently preferred to fight with their hunting knives and often ditched their bayonets. Oddly this doesn't fit on my Finn M27, I'm not sure why.