Did you see my review of the GL4 Pro and go “yes, but only if it could perform Lasik surgery, too?” Well, RovyVon has you covered now.
The GL4 Pro XL is out for $500 right now. The GL4 Pro FP is out in May for $800. I won’t comment on the legality of these solutions, but will note that the GL4 Pro is more than adequate for most pistol range tasks, especially at night or indoors.
I’ve been off the night shooting circuit for a couple months due to work and family priorities, but I have finally been able to get back out and shooting recently – and I still love it!
I have been somewhat vocal in my questioning the utility of IR lasers and illuminators on handguns with reflex sights, but readily admit that they are quite a lot of fun to use. Further, if your reflex sight does down or comes loose, the lasers do provide a backup aiming method. Thus, even though I don’t necessarily think they’re a must-have, I’d still recommend them for anyone doing a lot of night vision shooting.
However, giving up your white light is not a great solution, either – so the preference would be a device that could combine both VIS and IR needs into one package. Surefire has this in the form of the XVL2-IRC, which is $1200. RovyVon, an EDC flashlight manufacturer, has come out with a close (but not exact) copy for $300 called the GL4 Pro. I’ve finally had time to test it, and I’d love to tell you what I think.
Continue reading RovyVon GL4 Pro ReviewWhile the blog has certainly branched out in terms of what it covers, I remain very interested in Israeli guns. One of the interesting parts of covering this subject area is discovering when things you didn’t think existed… actually exist.
In this case, the gun in question is the BUL Cherokee “Mini” Gen 1, which I acquired off a very popular auction site. You’ll recall from previous discussion that there are actually multiple generations of the Cherokee, with the first generation being a fairly straightforward licensed copy of the Tanfoglio Force polymer pistol. What sets apart the Cherokee Mini from the Cherokee and Cherokee Compact is the use of a compact (but not subcompact!) frame.
Read on for some more details.
Continue reading BUL Cherokee Mini Gen 1 ReviewI like to experiment with oddball concepts, and while I freely admit that many (most?) don’t work out, I always learn something along the way.
My latest acquisition is a Meprolight Foresight optic. For those of you with short memories, this is a digital reflex sight that came out a few years ago. You configure it with an app, there’s a compass and level in it, there used to be a shot counter, etc. Unfortunately, it oozes unrealized potential because they never got around to adding features like custom reticles, configurable BDC, and so forth.
Anyways, one cool feature of the Foresight is essentially that it stores multiple zero configurations in the app that can be uploaded to your sight. This has obvious application for .300 BLK where supers and subs can have somewhat different zeroes. Being able to adjust zero for my chosen ammo with a few clicks seems nice. How can I leverage this on my night-fighting .300BLK gun? Will it work with NV?
Continue reading Meprolight Foresight and NV useAlright, this year was maybe a little better than last year, but not quite perfect. Let’s review…
Continue reading 2023 in Review, and Plans for 2024A thing I struggle with is the balance between cost and training. 22lr is really good for some things. Gun handling, transitions practice, ready-ups, long-range-at-short-range, etc. I spend a large part of my year shooting 22lr with the kids on a regular basis. A hundred rounds of 22lr is a bit over five bucks (at current prices). A hundred rounds of 223 is more like $25 (if I reload it).
I shoot a fair bit of outlaw falling steel, and a gun with a reliable high-cap magazine would be terrifically useful for that. Given that I have an M4-22 Elite, being able to use my mags with it would also be great. Enter the Tippmann M4-22 RCR.
Continue reading Tippmann M4-22 RCR ReviewYou’ve seen me doing a lot of night vision related posts lately, mostly because that’s a shooting trend I’ve been deeply investing in. I still shoot competition as much as I can, but getting out to night vision shoots is a big priority for me now, too.
In my personal opinion, if you’re shooting with night vision, you need an “active” option for aiming. Passive is great, and I practice it often, but if you need to shoot on a cloudy night with no ambient IR to fall back on, you’re going to need to generate your own IR to see what you’re aiming at.
One budget option that has recently come to market is the SMSLaser XK68-IR. This is a ~$160 MFAL that provides visible laser, IR laser, and IR illuminator capabilities. I mounted it up on my AR-9 (running Maxim Defense Roller-Delayed Buffer) to see how it would work out.
Continue reading SMSLaser XK68-IR ReviewEarly on in my gun-owning journey, I bought a Saiga 12 and converted it to a 13″ barrel SBS. It’s a slick gun, albeit I think it’s been since eclipsed by some other contenders (especially the VEPR 12 and RIA VR80). I still enjoy shooting it as the opportunity presents.
Ever since I got into the night vision game, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of a night vision-oriented shotgun. I don’t think the Saiga 12 the BEST choice (rock-and-lock in the dark is rough with shotgun magazines), but I think it’s respectable, and it’s what I’ve got. However, in order to get my Saiga 12 SBS into a night vision ready mode, some upgrades were in order.
First, it had an old-style Chaos tri-rail. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I felt that moving to MLOK would give me a lighter gun to compensate for the stuff I was about to bolt on to it. I went with the KS-12 TRSS handguard, which wasn’t overly expensive and fit my SBS tightly (always a good thing when you’re about to mount a laser).
Next, the optic needed an upgrade for passive aiming use, with better light transmission characteristics and night vision brightness modes. I had an AEMS Core (green) optic on a PCC I wasn’t using much, so I bought a low mount for it and put the AEMS on the Midwest Industries side rail sight mount. This gets it nice and high, but not so high as to be obnoxious when not using night vision. The AEMS is widely regarded to be the next best thing to an Eotech E/XPS3 for night vision use.
Then… lights and lasers. I wanted to retain the shotgun’s white light ability, thus the solutions needed to be able to go in the visible and IR spectrums.
For the laser, I decided to go with the Holosun LS221G I had previously bought for my .300BLK SBR (and replaced with a Somogear PEQ-15). While it’s not optimal, I decided to mount it on the right side of the handguard. I didn’t have a top rail, and for reasons you’ll read about later, I didn’t want to put it on the bottom rail. One funny note about the LS221G is that the turrets are all labeled for side mounting.
For the light, I decided to go with a classic: the Surefire KM2-C “Vampire” head on a Surefire body with a Surefire UE tailcap, mounted offset from the bottom of the handguard. This would give me good IR and white light flood, which is all I really need out of a shotgun.
Finally, for the switch, I used a leftover Unity TAPS Sync V4 switch, which gave me the choice of light+laser or just laser. Since both the laser unit and the light could be individually configured as white light or IR, this gave me a lot of flexibility in how I could configure the whole system – and would eliminate the possibility of negligent white light discharges. Very handy!
This setup worked really well. However, when I put my Salvo 12 on the gun, the suppressor blocked the KM2-C. The Salvo-12 is a rather oblong suppressor and has a lot of mass below the barrel – fine on a tube-fed shotgun, inconvenient on a mag-fed shotgun. This got me thinking: how could I build this gun so that I could further offset the light?
The solution I wound up with was to utilize a knockoff fusion hub with an offset rail mounted to the top of it, on the right hand side of the handguard. I then mounted the LS221G to the rail on the hub, and the light straight to the offset portion of the hub (up and towards the centerline).
This pushes the light out of the way of the laser unit and the suppressor, while not blocking the field of view for the optic. It looks weird, but it works great. The suppressor does cause some shadow in the light beam, but it seems pretty usable in general. Unfortunately, since I don’t always run a suppressor on this gun, I was reluctant to mount the light further forward using a wing.
I ran the shotgun at action shooting practice, and there was no discernable zero shift. That’s a testament to the LS221G, but it’s worth noting that I was also shooting slightly-spicy birdshot, not hard-kicking 3″ 000 buckshot. The recoil is pretty anemic with the suppressor on; you can run this gun pretty fast if you want to.
I’ve also run it at night. And it’s a ton of fun. Reloads suck in the dark, but just shooting it until it runs dry and transitioning to pistol is great. The IR setup works really well for what I need (which is shotgun distances).
Obviously, this is a for-funsies gun for the most part. Yes, I could press it into home defense use, and I’m sure it would excel, but it’s mostly there as an oddball gun to run at night shoots to see how a shotgun can break stage setups. I may send it out to Dissident Arms at some point for a VEPR magazine conversion to aid in reloads.
I have been spending a LOT of time doing dry-fire using ACE for the past few months. ACE is essentially a shooting simulator application plus 2011 shell for your Quest 2. There is no recoil simulation, but it occupies an interesting spot between dry-fire and live-fire due to the feedback you receive during the course of fire.
The hardware shell is extremely good. I wouldn’t call it perfect, but it feels and mostly behaves like a real gun. There is software tuning that alleviates common issues (mostly for reloads for me), and while the trigger is not quite as nice as a real one, it’s certainly good enough for dry-fire usage. All of the controls of a real 2011 are present, and it fits in real 2011 holsters. I use an Alpha-X holster with the BUL SAS II insert, and it fits quite nicely.
The software is similarly excellent. It is easily the best competitive shooting simulator I’ve had the opportunity to try (and I’ve tried a few), and the overall experience is very realistic. Where the ACE experience really exceeds static dry-fire is in how you get realistic feedback. You will not see your bullet holes on paper targets that aren’t in your face. Steel doesn’t fall if you hit it in the wrong spot. Moving targets move at the rates you see in real life. Basically, ACE avoids the pitfalls of laser trainers and gives you accountability that is sometimes lacking in classic dry-fire.
The limitations are really from the Quest 2’s hardware: the brightness floor and ceiling is not enough for an ideal red dot presentation (no HDR or Dolby Vision, basically), and the refresh rate is not as fast as your brain can process (but it’s reasonably close). This is early access software, so I expect that we’ll see some workarounds as time goes on, but the fact remains that VR is not going to perfectly simulate real life, and none of this is a deal-breaker. In a way, the dot visibility issues actually encourage you to NOT get overly focused on the red dot and to trust/build your index.
The stages are a mash-up of USPSA classifiers, Steel Challenge stages, and some outlaw designs. I like the variety, which also includes a long-burn steel stage, some carnival props, and even moving targets. There’s also a static target range and a 360 degree drone shooting challenge. I sympathize with the developers’ conundrum in that while I would personally prefer classifiers and stages that I’d see at matches, I can see how more mainstream users would be looking for something else. The room scale stages are a special treat, and I cleared out my basement just to be able to shoot them with real movement.
ACE isn’t cheap ($200 as of this writing), but I don’t really regard it as overly expensive as training tools go. Gaim is at least twice as much. I saw substantial improvements in real-life shooting performance from using ACE, and the weekly updates it receives only make it more useful. I feel like the shooting community has become a bit too cynical about new training tools, and if there was ever one to take a look at, ACE is it. I highly recommend it if getting out to the range for regular live-fire action shooting practice isn’t an option, and classic dry-fire has gotten a bit stale.
A buddy of mine was selling a certificate for a Masada Slim. I had passed on the original IWI Masada because I didn’t want to deal with the proprietary magazines. The Slim, on the other hand, uses standard CZ-75 / Tanfoglio small frame magazines, which is much more appealing to me as a shooter – and the Israeli connection obviously puts it in collector territory. I bought the certificate from him, and got it from IWI. Here are some thoughts after shooting it a bit:
If this became the mainline Masada platform, it’d be a smart move by IWI. Jericho mag compatibility is a big deal, and the rest of the gun (excepting the sights and take-down) is pretty solid. I wouldn’t rush out and tell people to buy this instead of a P365X, but it holds its own, especially with an optic so you don’t need the horrible iron sights. (I wound up using a cheap Primary Arms sight.)
As an interesting aside, it almost fits the IDPA BUG box. If you were willing to chop the grip and use the 13rd Tanfo mags, you might be able to pull it off. Unfortunately, without spare grip modules on the market, this is too much of a one-way trip to risk it.
The Hebrew Hammer 