Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Graduating to the Next Caliber - .45ACP

A while back I wrote that I was considering getting another gun. At one point, I was very close to buying a Walther PPK (actually, a Manurhin-made PPK). It didn't quite work out as other obligations came up. However, acquiring another handgun has been on my mind.

After much thought I decided to pass on getting the PPK. I wanted to go with a bigger caliber - either a .40cal or .45ACP. Then last month, I went to Greg Block's Intermediate Handgun class where half the class had 1911's in .45ACP. I asked a ton of questions during class and became convinced that .45ACP was the way to go. The main reason...check out the following:





The .45ACP is on the left and the 9mm is on the right. As my wife stated when I first showed her the .45ACP, "You can kill someone with that." Hopefully I won't ever have to use it, but if I did have to, I wanted something with a bit more stopping power.

The hard part of all of this is deciding what 1911 to get. There are many manufacturers of model 1911 handguns - Colt, Smith & Wesson, Kimber, Springfield Armory, Dan Wesson, etc. I wasn't interested in a full size Government model (5-inch barrel) as I have small hands and liked the length of my Walther P99 (approximately 4-inch barrel). I began searching for a Commander or Officer's model. I did a ton of research online and narrowed down my choices to a Nighthawk Custom T3, a Kimber Pro CDP II, and a Kimber Compact CDP II.

I read tons of posts about these 3 models - how the handgun operated, its accuracy and reliability, the type of customer service offered by the manufacturers, etc. At the end of the day, Nighthawk Custom won out. The T3 received an excellent online review at the M-1911 Forums and Nighthawk Custom's reputation for top notch customer service won me over.

The T3 isn't in my possession yet as I have to wait out California's 10-day waiting period. However, I will soon have it and cannot wait to post pictures. For a sneak peek of what I'll be getting, check out the following quick review I found on YouTube:

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Any of those 45 are great choices