After a year and a half of tinkering with an old Nagant revolver that I had, I finally got around to putting it back together yesterday. I posted a picture of it (above) on Reddit last night and it was surprisingly popular. Several people asked for a range report, so here we go. This particular revolver was made at the Izhmash factory in 1943 and then refurbished after WWII. After I bought it, the nice folks at Yankee Hill Machine, added a Q.D. flash hider to the barrel and I had a gunsmith mount a 2″ rail to the top strap. I stripped off the old, worn-out bluing and parkerized it (well, it was a good first attempt anyway). A cheap NC Star red dot sight and some new grips (bakelite sucks) rounded out the rebuild . . .
For this test I swapped out the normal 7.62x38r cylinder for the easier-to-find .32 ACP cylinder. Unfortunately I didn’t realize until today that the extractor rod hits the ring on the flash hider and now you have to remove the barrel completely to swap cylinders.
The upside to .32 ACP is that there is essentially no recoil and it was surprisingly quiet even without a suppressor. The only problem I had was the ridiculously heavy trigger and the hammer getting stuck a few times. So it needs some work on the internals and if anyone has any suggestions on how to reduce the trigger pull please let me know. As a bonus, here’s a picture of it wearing a YHM titanium suppressor.
Some of you might ask why anyone would do this to a perfectly good revolver. The answer is, “why not?” Half the fun of shooting is trying new and outrageous things (within the boundaries of safety of course). It’s why Kirsten Weiss shoots while hanging upside down from a tree and why I make ridiculous modifications to a perfectly good service revolver.