I need to disseminate this further.
We lament that gun design is kinda stagnant with relatively little to make you stand up and take notice... but when novel designs come out they don't stick around. Folks don't buy enough of them (whitney wolverine, SNAZZY), or there is some inherent flaw that can't be overcome (a pepperbox, mossberg? really?), or the inertia of a conservative (small c, mateba) customer base weighs against the new and 'improved.'
Pah. I climb up on this soapbox too much.
But! There are an Imperial buttload of ODD guns on that the site Weerd has now pointed me to. So hours and hours of TBolt entertainment to sift through. I feel like I did when I found Hickok45 on youtube.
I bought a Mateba Unica 6. I bought it before I ever really collected Smiths.
ReplyDeleteIt was underwhelming. I had it for a couple years before selling it.
Like many Revolutionary! New! Ideas! it sacrificed a bunch of stuff for a few advantages.
You got a low bore axis and self cocking. You also got bulk, mechanical complexity, the inability to use the self-cocking feature with .38 ammo without changing recoil springs, fragility, and a host of other problems.
The marketplace didn't shun the Unica 6 because the marketplace is conservative, it shunned it because it's a crappy alternative to a vanilla 686.
What I find interesting is how many rabid fans of the (Mateba/HK P7/Desert Eagle/Steyr GB/whatever) have never owned or even fired one.