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A Portal to my areas of interest. |
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The definitive online Bullseye resource. If there is information you need that you cannot find here, you are trying too hard. |
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Free pistol — more iron sights fun ! |
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I recently traded away my uber-frustrating Pardini GT-45 for a Pardini PGP75 Free Pistol. This is a semi-bizarre looking firearm, but I really dig it in a strange way. Out of the Box — Of Course There Are Issues!! After receiving the pistol from Larry’s through my usual local firearms dealer (Hemlock Gun Shop), I didn’t have a chance to do much of anything with it for several months. I finally had some free time the last couple of weeks and figured I would do a little dry firing to get comfortable with the handling characteristics and loading procedure of this gun — before heading to the club for a little live-fire testing. Things seemed pretty straightforward; set the trigger with the lever protruding from the front of the trigger group, and let her rip. Pressing the set trigger produced …. Nothing! Figuring that I must be doing something wrong, I gave Larry a call; he confirmed that there wasn’t any trick to the mechanism that I had overlooked. He offered to take the gun back and straighten it out, but I figured I’d take a crack at it first as it was most likely a simple trigger or sear adjustment. One online visit to the 10P files at Pilkingtons later, I had a diagram of the trigger group and adjustment instructions for trigger weight and sear engagement. It only took a few minutes of fiddling around to see what was wrong, and a short time later I had the trigger adjusted comfortably and working properly—whew! Believe me, I was thinking “OH NO — NOT AGAIN” the whole time!! My first trip to the range to sort things out was a disaster. As I’ve detailed in my Blog, the rear sight was a little screwed up; I had to put it back together after sussing-out what was going wrong with it. What is it with me and sighting mechanisms? I’m happy to report that the initial gremlin-fest hasn’t dulled my enthusiasm for the firearm or the discipline — I am keen on competing as soon as I can. A quick overview of the Pardini PGP75 Free Pistol: The grips are a light to medium hardwood (probably Walnut) and are on the small-ish side. The sights are Pardini units, adjustable but not overly so (no adjustment of the front side blade or rear notch is provided). Considering this gun is probably a 20 or 30 year-old design, I am not disappointed or surprised. The loading mechanism is a rotating bolt design, seemingly very solid and very simple to operate. Hopefully, I won’t have to worry about broken parts any time soon! The cocking mechanism and trigger, as mentioned above, are a rube-Goldberg looking design that in practice works well. Load, cock, reset my grip—a comfortable rhythm and an easily repeatable pre-shot routine. Initial impressions—this is a very accurate firearm, and also (as I’ve heard of the Free-Pistol breed) very unforgiving. Follow through is critical. I shot a quick “practice-match” and was satisfied with the results—as my comfort level improved, so did my results. I was intentionally not shooting for score, only for groups; even so, it was easy to track progress as each group was smaller and better centered in the black than the one prior. I’ll be detailing my improvements to the grip in the Training Log. |
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An excellent target shooting message board run by one of the great vendors in the sport. Not a Bullseye site, but an excellent resource. |
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