Nagant Pistol Help

[A K Church]

And you will appreciate your Pistola Tokarev a lot more.

[JerseyJohn]

And you will appreciate your Pistola Tokarev a lot more.

That's next, haha. My only pistols now are a .22 revolver and a RIA .45. In Jersey you need to apply for a separate pistol permit for each pistol you want to buy. The paperwork takes 6-8 weeks at my local police station and are only good for 90 days from date of issue, meaning you can't just apply for a dozen permits and hold onto them until a deal comes along. You can buy as many rifles and shotguns as you want if you hold a firearms purchaser ID card, but they run a NICS check for them.

I've checked Gunbroker, the price on them seems to have shot up just like everything else. There are a few examples in the $100-150 range, but they still have awhile left on the auctions. The "buy now" ones are usually over $200, which after shipping, about $25, and the NICS check at my local gunstore, I think still $25, is getting me out of the "cheap interesting gun" range. Aimsurplus had them for $99 three weeks ago, with all the accessories. They also have spam cans of ammo for it, over 1K rounds for $300. Since my brother wants one too, I'd like to wait until I find someone with several in stock so I might be able to save a couple bucks on shipping the pistols and split a spam can of ammo.

[Iron Wyvern]

I ended up with two. a 1915 and a 1944. Both went away.

The plus points as I see them:

They have seen a lot of turbulent history.

They are in interesting piece mechanically in that they do a lot with a few low stressed parts.

Most relevantly for most people, they don't usually cost much.

The consensus of folks who shoot them is they are not prone to breakage.

The minus points:

Trigger pulls are a plumb booger in both modes. The hammer movement is powering the whole forward movement of the cylinder and standing breech.

The grip is lousy. Close to Broomhandle lousy.

The sights are lousy. On neither of mine were they regulated close to the commercial Fiocchi ammo. Picture a Gewehr 98 front sight on a revolver with a Single Action Army rear sight. Apparently they were designed to not break, instead of designed to actually hit things.

Ammo is scarce and frighteningly expensive when you find it. Now and then dribbles of Soviet stuff have shown up, but generally it's Fiocchi-I think I paid over $35 a box for it in the '90s. Commercial auxiliary cylinders don't provide the gas seal, and the .32ACP or .32SWL bullets often have diameter issues with Nagant barrels.

Gunsmiths would rather not work on these, and most never have.

Loading/unloading is glacially slow. No, slower than that. Considering it replaced a truly great breakopen S&W revolver, or good copies of same, this is impossible for me to wrap my head around.

They don't break much apparently, but some parts, especially grips, are scarce...or were last I looked for them.

What he said...

[jack]

I have one, there is some crap ammo out there for them, shooting them isn't as enjoyable as one would hope for. Mine is pretty much used as a conversation piece, in that aspect it's perfect. I love looking at it and marvel at the mechanics of the contraption but that's all I do with it. As far as I know Cabelas still has some.

[Wynfrith]

The one neat thing is that they are the only revolver that can work with a supressor. I had not seen that mentioned so thought I would throw it out there . . .