Range Performance
As is my usual practice, I didn’t clean or oil the Compact throughout the test. The gun consumed 490 rounds of factory ammo, 150 of which was the lipstick-like Federal Syntech ball. The rest was defensive ammo provided by Black Hills, including 115-grain jacketed hollow point (JHP), 125-grain HoneyBadger and 124-grain +P JHP, the load I generally keep in my 9mm pistols. Accuracy was as expected from a ’75: Excellent. I was able to put five in a ragged hole at 7 yards, and while my best 25-yard group standing unsupported was 2½” I shaved about an inch off that when I sat down and rested my hands.
Even in spite of the shortened sight radius, the gun still shot at distance: while I wasn’t able to hit a 10″ steel lollipop at 100 yards every shot, I did manage a string of six hits in a row, unsupported. Obviously, I had to bear down on the front sight to make hits at that range; perhaps the only time I really struggled with the shorter sight radius.
I also wished the trigger had been a bit more crisp, but that short, smooth roll is simply the nature of this beast. I also wished the grip tang at the rear of the frame was a little more upswept, as my Omega pistol is, but I have a file and you should expect to hear about my exploits with it in a later edition of this magazine.
There were no malfunctions of any kind until the last couple of magazines, and these occurred with HoneyBadger. There was one stovepipe, a failure to feed and two failures to lock the slide back. All these malfunctions can result from shortened slide travel, which can be caused by an inadequate recoil impulse. This leads me to believe either the gun was sprung for harder kicking ammo, which is common for guns intended for defensive use, or the lack of lubrication and general dirtiness had added enough friction to slow down slide travel.
I generally stick with traditional hollow point ammo, but the HoneyBadger design does have ballistic advantages that have been known since the Charlie Kelsey-designed Devel bullet was tested by the FBI some years ago. I’ve shot quite a bit of HoneyBadger in a couple of calibers with nary a problem in other guns, but anytime you consider ammo with different characteristics than the gun was designed around, make sure you test enough to know it will work in your gun. In this case, I’m agnostic about whether it was the ammo or the oil: The best practice would be to clean and oil the pistol and see if it happened again.
What I actually intend to do is clean and oil it and load it with those +P 124s I like so much because this pistol is staying with me. There’s a reason I wanted a holster for it.
For more info: CZ-USA.com, Black-Hills.com, FederalPremium.com, MiltSparks.com.
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