Ok, well I guess it's time for the much anticipated (by me) review of the Sarsilmaz SAR K2.
Starting at the beginning... I couldn't find any CZ85 Compacts & started looking at the railed versions of the EAA Witness that are available; ended up at the EAA main website and saw the profile of this SAR K2 with the 14+1 capacity on their site. Immediately, assumed it was a misprint on the capacity, but kept researching nonetheless. Obviously, it is in fact a high cap .45 acp based on the CZ 75/97 platform, and having just recently been enamored with the FNP45 Tactical hi-cap and played with one at the local Gander Mountain...I couldn't resist Grabagun.com's $442.64 delivered price and rolled the dice on the SAR K2 sight unseen.
Price is now up a few bucks there, but they still show in stock:
http://grabagun.com/european-american-armory-sarslmz-k2-45acp-14rd-4-5-bl-as.htmlAcknowledging that it was a dice roll proposition, I was admittedly predisposed to want this thing to work out. That said, I'm not a .45 acp fanboy. I like my 9mms...a lot... With that disclaimer out of the way:
This thing is pretty bleep awesome. If I dare say, Sofa King awesome.
I got back from the range around sundown & snapped a few pics, just before I lost decent lighting. Basic left & right shots with a few pics of the insides to show the similarities. Most folks like their gun porn simple, so this should suffice:
You're stuck with grainy cell phone pics, at least until I get some better lighting. Slide release sticks out plenty far enough to take down sans tools/punch. SS guide rod & looks like Wolff CZ/EAA recoil springs will work just fine. Shot of the sights & sear cage. The FPB lifter finger isn't a separate spring loaded piece like the 75B, it's all one piece. In the last pic, you can see the shiny spot where the ammo was hitting the feed ramp when loading.
Which brings us to shooting, I put 79 rounds down range immediately after picking her up from my dealer. Every round is pictured on the targets, and most of them were chronygraphed as well. After all the finicky fighting the 40B has been giving me with my 180 reloads, this thing was a refreshing change of pace. For you golfers, it was like switching from a set of Ben Hogan blades to a set of Callaway cavity backs.
So back to the shooting, except for the one 25 yd. group, it was all from 7 yds. And again except for the 25 yd. group, all groups are 10 rounds. Testing included Remington 230 gr. ball, Fiocchi 230 gr. ball, two loads of Berry's 185 gr HBRN, and one load of Berry's 230 gr. DSRN. The cool part about shooting over a chronygraph is that when there's an outlying shot, you can occasionally also find an corresponding outlier in the velocity data; where it seemed I could get away with blaming an outlying shot that had the same sight picture as everything else when the hammer dropped, I did, and you'll see the velocity of that specific shot next to the hole. In each target is noted the High velocity, Low velocity, Average velocity, Extreme Spread, and Standard Deviation.
Ok, let's get this started. Straight out of the box, here are the first 10 rounds to go down the pipe - Remington 230 gr. ball:
Sights are off, cool thing is that it has LPA sights on it and it comes with the little LPA sight screw driver. 5 clicks to the left, and on with some Fiocchi 230 gr. ball:
One dropped low with a slow one. 5 more clicks left, and some 185 gr. HBRN over 4.9 grains of Clays, seated at 1.25":
Now, we're getting somewhere. Next up is 7.5 grains of Hodgdons Longshot, which was supposed to be a hotter load for this...it wasn't. Average velocity was 663 fps with a 108 fps spread. I don't think the powder was getting fully burnt before the breach opened and about 4 of the shots spit orange sand back into my face (always wear your safety glasses people!!!). It's really hard to concentrate when you question whether your face is going to get sand blasted when you pull the trigger. I'll be pulling the remaining 40 of these and going back with the Clays for now...nonetheless:
Finally got the rear sight to come down a couple clicks (it was pretty tight) and finished the target off with a complete 10 shot string straight, no breaks with the Remington ball again. There were 1.5-2 seconds between each shot:
That was the end of the first 60 rounds and target 1:
