I received my new Special Forces R9s from my FFL last Thursday during lunch. A big THANK YOU to Tom at The Irish Guard for ordering it and shipping out to Colorado for me. The process was very straightforward with Tom and he kept me in the loop the whole time.
Overall, I'm impressed with the little pup. My first impressions were "wow, that's built like someone cared about it" meaning it's very sturdy, no rattles or sloppy tolerances and it feels like it's built to last. My FFL dealer agreed that it's by far the best double action trigger pull he's ever felt. I agree. Very smooth.
I promptly placed it in my pocket to get a feel for it, went back to the office and forgot it was even there 2 hours later. Compared to my usual carry (Sig C3, below) the pup isn't going to take much time to get used to.
The Armor Tuff finish looks really sharp.
I took it apart to get it a cleaning and a lube and noticed some things I thought I might share with everyone.
The first thing I noticed was some metal filings or flakes inside the frame and slide assembly. (If you know what the gold flakes look like in a bottle of Goldschlager schnapps, that's exactly what they looked like except silver.)
It looks like these are coming from where the barrel impacts the frame. Small shavings are being made when this happens. You can see the "pocket" in the above picture where this occurs.
I'm hoping the Armor Tuff finish holds up on the pup. You can already see wear marks on the barrel. I'm assuming the factory shot it twice (there are 2 spent cartridges sent in the box) and the rest of the wear is just from cycling it a few times.
[[EDIT: Factory actually shoots it 5 times and sends 2 cases.]]
I also noticed a sizeable difference in length of the recoil spring that was shipped in the gun and the new one that was in the box. Again, the gun has only been fired twice [[EDIT: 5 times]] to my knowledge and cycled by hand a handful of times. It's about half a coil's worth of size difference between brand new and barely used.
The butt end of the firing pin and the retainer clip are about the only 2 things that you can see on the exterior of the gun that aren't finished in Armor Tuff.
All in all, I'm very excited to head to the range this week. After cleaning I'll post a range update and see if any other metal shavings are produced after my range visit. Hopefully they will stop appearing after "breaking in". I'm also interested to see how the Corbon ammo performs.
