While 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.
I 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?
Early 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.
After messing around with night vision a bit, I discovered that the amount of light you let in makes a huge difference in your ability to see detail at varying distances in different light conditions. There are a couple ways of dealing with this:
Flip-up lens cap systems, such as the Phokus Hoplite or the improved Butler Creek setups (sometimes involving 3D printed components)
Irises
My RNVG came with a flip-up system with a 3D printed “shutter”. It works well enough, but is not up to hard use. It’s also the wrong color, which offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I knew in my heart that I wanted an iris system. The problem with irises is that the go-to Matbock Tarsier Eclipses are hugely expensive – as in $250 each. While I’m not afraid of spending money when it’s called for, $500 for a couple irises seemed a bridge too far, especially when there had been some complaints that they were so tight that adjustment frequently adjusted focus. If I were using these in a duty context, sure, I’d buy the Matbock solution and then expense it to my unit.
However, with the power of the internet, I discovered there was a far cheaper way of approaching this problem. Here’s the recipe I used:
If you’re in a hurry, you can get the same irises off Amazon for 50% more, but if you use my recipe, it’s ~$50 for each tube. Besides the much more acceptable cost, one thing I really liked about this solution was how I had more finely-grained control over light, and how the sacrificial lens was screwed in (vs sandwiched in my previous setup). The amount of force needed to turn the diaphragm was also just right, and did not affect focus. They also look super cool, and if they get damaged, it’s a LOT less money that I’m out. I was quite impressed with the amount of thread engagement that each piece of this solution also had – the iris and lens are not going to be coming off by accident.
During a reddit thread discussion, I took the time to measure the trigger pull weights of various BUL pistols in my collection, which I felt like I should repost on the blog. All measurements were taken with a Wheeler trigger pull gauge, and they were repeatable across multiple pulls:
M-5 Commander (45 Auto, gen1, full compensator): 2.6lbs
BUL Storm: SA: 4.5lbs; DA: > 8lbs
BUL Storm Compact: – SA: 4lbs; DA: > 8lbs
Cherokee (gen1): SA: 4.5lbs; DA: > 8lbs
Cherokee Compact (gen2): SA: 6.1lbs; DA: > 8lbs
BUL Impact (9mm): SA: 4.5lbs; DA: > 8lbs
As you can see, the SAS II guns are uniformly pretty good. The M-5s vary a lot more due to what I assume is tinkering by their former owners and/or worn in parts. For what it’s worth, my personal favorite trigger is in the Ultra-X (short, light, smooth) followed by the TAC 5. The Bullesteros has a fantastic trigger that is way too light – I need more practice with it.
The Tanfoglio-derived pistols (Impact, Cherokee, Storm) have uniformly average triggers, with the Cherokee gen2 having an oddly bad single-action pull. I almost wrote that they all had bad triggers, but years of shooting the P320 X5 Legion, SAS II, and even tuned up revolvers have made me forget these pull weights are roughly on par with a factory CZ-75. The trigger pulls tended to be smooth, so they didn’t feel awful, but they were certainly heavier than I was used to.
The reality is that a (single action) trigger pull weight under 4lbs is fine for competition use, albeit I prefer something in the 2.5lb-3lb range when practical.
While I recently spent a lot of time and money upgrading my multi-gun competition rifle to a high standard, I didn’t forget about my competition PCC. Whenever I go out and shoot Steel Challenge, I like to do the “two guns” thing and shoot both a PCC and a pistol. I figure most of my investment is time, and I may as well shoot as much as possible while I’m at the match.
The experience with my competition PCC hasn’t been smooth. In fact, I’d probably say it has been the most finicky ARs I’ve ever built. I spent a lot of time just getting my basic functionality working, and then I later had a very unfortunate catastrophic failure when a bullet got stuck in the rifling during manual extraction. But I persevered through those problems, and wound up with a reliable, accurate PCC. Now I’m on the next step: increasing performance.
When Taccom announced their Delayed Blowback Recoil System (DBRS) a couple years ago, I was intrigued, and to be honest, a little skeptical. Using magnets to delay bolt movement sounded hard to believe. But I saw some positive reviews of it, and decided to give it a try, in conjunction with Taccom’s Extreme Short Stroke Bolt (ESSB).
Since I have a ton of large pistol primers, I decided I’d supplement my 9mm expenditure by loading some 45 Automatic (aka, 45 ACP). My load recipe is a boring old 230gr coated bullet on top of 5.3gr of Unique with max OAL.
I have a couple guns in 45 Auto, but neither of them is something I’d want to use for a daily driver due to relative rarity (especially my KSN GAL). I splurged a bit, and picked up an EAA Girsan MC1911S, which has a factory optics cut and accessory rail. It’s really quite fetching!
Holster compatibility is problematic, but there are options out there. The trigger pull is nothing to write home about, but not worse than any other cheap 1911. The accessory rail seems to be in spec. The magazine well was tight – maybe a bit too tight, as a couple of random 1911 magazines wouldn’t fit in it. It fired my handloads with 100% reliability, which is not nothing, though.
It came with a factory optic. Said factory optic is a “Derry”, and it is obvious garbage. It sells on Alibaba for $35 in bulk. While I am sure that margins on reflex sights are not horrible for most manufacturers, I’ve got a lot of qualms about the reliability of something that’s retailing for $35 – and other reviews of this pistol seemed to indicate that failures happened quickly. It uses a Docter footprint, which is not really a terrible footprint, but none of the cool guy sights use it anymore. Suffice it to say, I did not bother with this optic at all.
Enter C&H Precision Weapon Systems (CHPWS). Utilizing some shared contacts, I was able to contract CHPWS to develop a better red dot plate with the Holosun HS507K footprint. It was not cheap, and it took a while, but the results were gorgeous, and the HS507K is just the right width for my pistol – a bit of overhang on the sides, but far less than an RMR. It also exudes a sort of quality that the factory sight didn’t even come close to replicating.
The radius matches the slide perfectly. You can see the usual CNC milling angles, which I consider acceptable for this sort of purpose.
When I took my new gun out to the range, I was impressed. The optic was rock solid on the slide, and the gun kept on running with 100% reliability. While I had to fight the trigger a bit to keep my shots in the same hole, when I did my part, the accuracy at 10yds was excellent.
You can get an optics-equipped Girsan MC1911S for about $600 off Gunbroker. My optics plate was a $200 custom job, but keep in mind that normal plates from CHPWS start from $70 on up – so paying a fair bit more for something that literally didn’t exist and probably doesn’t have much of a market doesn’t seem terribly unfair to me – and perhaps it’ll be slightly cheaper for you since the design work is done now. With the 507K, I’m about a thousand bucks in, total.
I’m looking forward to using this gun at a class or two, and for messing around at the range. I suppose I could even run it in IDPA Carry Optics if I felt like being an iconoclast. A trigger job would probably make it a much more comfortable shooter, so that’s an upgrade I’ll be looking into when funds allow.
There’s a touch of overhang because a 1911’s slide is 0.9″, and the 507K’s width is 0.98″. But .04″ off the side isn’t much.
ETA (2/6/2022): the GLS wide holster with a shim works well enough for this gun, especially if you tweak the set screw. The Nighthawk Drop-In Trigger System also works just fine, no safety fitting required. It dropped the trigger pull to about 3.5lbs, which was a rather dramatic improvement.
I’ll keep this one short but sweet. My readers may recall my review of the NiteScout A3, and some various caveats I had about it. Believe it or not, I still rather enjoy the rifle in its SBR form, and have been trying to figure out how to give it a modern handguard. The handguard that came on the A3 could charitably be described as heavy and obsolete.
When I was looking at pictures online of various MP5 handguards, I was struck by the realization that they looked rather similar to the A3 handguards in how they attached. Rolling the dice, I bought a PTR-9 aluminum handguard to see if I could fit it.
Shockingly, it screwed straight into the retainer. But this left me with a problem: the tube that protects the screw connecting the front sight to the receiver was too long, and so was the screw.
Enter my 3D printer! A bit of OpenSCAD coding and a couple of test runs netted me a tube that fit just right. After a quick run to Home Depot for the correct screw (1/4-20 coarse, 3″ long), I had my handguard adapter all ready to go
The original part was aluminum, so the plastic replacement is not necessarily as robust. But there’s really no weight bearing component to this, and all of the pressure is directed into compressing the layers. Even a tube with somewhat small infill is more than enough to do this job.
I am genuinely stunned that NiteScout didn’t just outfit these guns with MP5 and MP5K handguards right out the gate. It would not surprise me at all if you could put on a MP5K handguard with either no tube or a very short one. But, in any event, I managed to fix this problem on my own. Next stop: Magpul SL grip and safety…
I ran the gun hard last night at SASP practice, and the 3D printed part seemed to hold up just fine. No problems with heat damage were observed. The gun itself isn’t really a Steel Challenge champ (that long, heavy trigger!), but it is super reliable, which is not nothing.
ETA (9/6/2021): The Magpul HK94 safety works quite well with the gun. The SL grip… not so much. Even after shaving down the back of it to be flush with the receiver, the gun still refused to fire when I dropped the hammer. I assume there is some sort of tolerance issue with how the hammer is positioned with regards to the bolt, but have not had time to track it down.
I signed up for the Steve Fisher shotgun class in June, so I felt like this was an opportune time to make a couple changes with my shotguns. Realistically, I’m only going to bring my standard 870, with Stoeger M3K as a backup (unless I somehow acquire a Beretta 1301 in the meantime), but the fun thing about common platforms is that an upgrade in one gun can sometimes also turn into an upgrade in another gun.
I recently built out a multi-gun AR on a pre-ban lower in an effort to create a rifle that would be more suited to shooting multi-gun competitions. I find that the full top-to-bottom of the parts selection process isn’t always discussed thoroughly, so that got me thinking that I should lay all of that out.
After the break are the elements of my “high-speed” AR, with some explanation of why I chose them.
The Hebrew Hammer 