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Monday, April 25, 2005
Rama: Romancing the Rugged Ruger
By KARLON N. RAMA
STAGE FIVE
AFTER two weekends out of circulation – the first giving a teambuilding training in Nalusuan Island Resort and Marine Sanctuary and the other attending a training given by somebody from Indiana University’s Bradford Woods – going to the firing range last Saturday was a return to everything customary and comfortable.
With a shiny new roscoe, one that came merely three days before Saturday by way of the Twin Pines Inc. gun store along Ramos St., fixed firmly in a compartment inside my gun-bag, the trip to the range was for me like being five- years-old again and going to the candy store.
The new roscoe was a Ruger SP101 model KSP-321XL – a stainless steel, double-action only, five-shot, fixed-sight revolver with a 2 and ½” barrel (read: snub-nosed) and a bobbed hammer, chambered in the .357 magnum cartridge.
After consulting with gun gurus Dr. Tyrone Mercader and Adrian Gregory Tadena, I ordered the firearm from Twin Pines’ Erlinda Sitones-Pacaldo. After all the documents, permits and other requirements were completed late last month, I received the pistol some three weeks after.
STOUT BELLY GUN. Sturm, Ruger and Co. introduced the SP101, which writer Jeff Quinn describes as a “stout little belly gun,” some fifteen years ago as it’s offering into the small-framed and concealable-carry revolver market.
It was basically a scaled down model of the Ruger GP100, a six-shot service revolver, and was initially offered in .22, .32 and then in .38 special, before it was offered in the same caliber as its “mother” model, .357 magnum.
There may be those who’ll find abhorrent the prospect of shooting such a little gun – by limiting its capacity to five shots, Ruger was able to make the SP101 very compact – with a round as powerful as the .357 magnum; the evolution of this spitfire round to be taken up in a separate piece sometime later.
But taking the gun apart and looking at the way Ruger designed the mechanism will be enough to stamp all doubts away.
Most small frame revolvers on the market, whether five or six-shot models, are built on revolver designs that are over a hundred years old and were carved out to handle the low-pressured cartridges of the period. When magnum cartridges came into being, manufacturers just made the old designs larger to handle the extra intensity of firing the magnums.
However, Ruger, in its revolver designs, followed a path less traveled. If fact, they made their own way into the wilderness through an array of sophisticated design features that make traditional revolvers obsolete.
In the GP100 and the SP101, the cylinder is triple-locked – at the rear by a strong alignment pin, at the front of the crane by a locking bar that engages a matching slot in the frame, and at the bottom of the cylinder.
FRAME INTEGRITY. Frame widths are increased in critical areas that support the barrel; both sidewalls are solid, integral sections of the frame, with no removable side-plates to compromise the frame’s integrity. Also, the ejector rod is built off-center of the cylinder, sitting lower than normal, allowing more steel on the underside of the barrel and at the frame where it joins.
All in all, and unless the owner dunks the gun in a festering tank for 30 odd years, the Ruger SP101 is bound to outlast the owner.
The only thing not going for the SP101 is its weight – a full 25 ounces.
However, for that added weight you get a gun that is much stronger, easier to shoot well, has much less felt recoil, and will withstand years of hard use.
The Ruger SP101 is a gun that I would not be hesitant to recommend to those looking for a reliable and rugged snubby. Even Massad Ayoob, the most respected among all gun writers in the United States, writing for the Backwoods Home Magazine, sang praises to the SP101, calling it his “personal choice” for a snubby.
HOLLOW POINTS. He recommended it loaded with 125-grain hollow points and assured that it is “as accurate at 25 yards as a much larger service revolver, and is by far the most rugged of the small frame .357s, as well as the most comfortable to shoot.”
Writer Quinn, in an article dated December 2003, range tested the SP101 with various ammunition – 158-grain jacketed hollow points (JHP) from Black Hills, 110-grain JHPs from Cor-Bon and various handloaded .357 Magnums stoked with 125-grain JHP bullets.
The Ruger, he said, gobbled up every round without a problem. Even with the heavy 187-grain loads, recoil was quite manageable, and induced no pain.
I shot the Ruger with ball .357 ammunition from Armscor and Tactical Edge, which are about the most commonly available brands of .357 cartridges nowadays, and the results were satisfying. While they were hitting about one half to one quarter of an inch lower than point of aim, the cause could be the rather heavy pull standard on all double action revolvers.
Shooting it with my range buddies Andy Chua, Ken Yap and Roger Yu, the gun performed flawlessly, hitting six and eight-inch round plates at 15 yards with 158-grain lead round nose bullets loaded at Stronghand Inc.
Rapid two-round shots at a pair of International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) paper metric targets set up by shooter Brandon Lariosa, meanwhile, showed two alpha hits, distanced about two inches apart, from 10 yards.
(knrama@sunstar.com.ph)
(April 25, 2005 issue)
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