Friday, December 22, 2017

Stress check...

A complaint I'd heard regarding the original SureFire XC1 was that it didn't hold up to much shooting, which is not the sort of thing you want to hear about a light that's attached to a, you know, gun.

In addition to having better switches and having 50% more lumens, the new XC1B is supposed to have corrected the fragility issues of the original. I could think of no better way to check it out than by clamping it to the accessory rail of my Glock 32 and shooting the snot out of the thing.

The .357SIG in the compact Glock 32 not only exposes the light to ferocious muzzle blast, but also to the battering of recoil in a gun with enough slide velocity that it took the starch out of a 20# CrSi recoil spring from ISMI in only 1,700 rounds. (I've seen lighter ISMI CrSi recoil springs in soft-shooting race guns go to five figure round counts without seriously affecting function.)

Lucky Gunner was kind enough to sponsor the ammunition for the test and sent some Remington UMC 125gr FMJ. This is the stuff that, when tested through this gun last year, chrono'ed at an average of 1,355fps for a ten-round string. That's a lot of sauce for a compact auto pistol.

I'd already run a box of Gold Dot 125gr through the gun, and yesterday I grabbed the 32, the first hundred rounds of the Remington, and a QP-T target and headed to Indy Arms Co.


As I was getting ready to head out to the range, some women came in with a Groupon for a deal on range time and firearms rental. They were telling the clerk that they hadn't shot before, and so I rushed the range session so as to be mostly done by the time they got out there. .357SIG is pretty loud from this gun and I didn't want to make things any harder than they needed to be for the newbs.

The gun ran fine, the light functioned properly during and after shooting, and didn't loosen on the rail at all. If you have grownup-sized hands and shoot with a thumbs-forward grip, you may inadvertently activate the light while shooting, BTW.

So that's a hundred and fifty rounds on this light. More to come, thanks to Lucky Gunner.
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