My First Handgun

A Yugo M57 Tokarev from Wideners. It's an awesome feeling having a handgun delivered right to your door.

Fresh from the box and looking like Swamp Thing:



All cleaned up:









Haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'm hoping maybe this weekend. It seems to function well so far with snap caps, so hopefully it'll be just fine. Grabbed a two tins of Polish FMJ (~2500 rounds) and five extra mags (plus the two it came with), for a total cost of about $550. Not a bad deal. Also got a set of Marschal grips on the way, I'm hoping they'll be a little slimmer than the blocky things it came with.

First handgun period, or the first on your C&R

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First handgun period. I know these aren't exactly high up on the list of recommended first handguns, but my decision was equal parts "collecting" and wanting something thats inexpensive, reliable, cheap to feed, and fun to shoot.

Thanks for the warning, but as an owner of a Mosin Nagant I'm quite familiar with the weird looks you get when you start pouring water down the bore at the range. As far as I know, there is no surplus 7.62x25 that isn't corrosive and I'll primarily be shooting surplus. Is the Wolf stuff corrosive also?

Thanks, I'll probably get some Wolf soon.

Range Report!

I learned a few things before I even got to the range. Number one is to at least write down the address of a new place, even if you think you know where it is. I spent an hour driving around trying to find a range I've seen in passing at least half a dozen times. Number two is to check to make sure the range will let you bring loaded mags inside. I had seven mags all ready to go, and then I got to the front door and read the sign stating "No Loaded Firearms or Magazines Beyond This Point". So I went back to my car and unloaded them all, just to reload them a few minutes later on the firing line.

The staff was real nice, I told the guy I'd never shot a handgun before and he showed me how to hold it and a few stances. Went through the first mag without any issues. Mag #2 fired the first round and then ejected itself. I have no idea how that happened. Popped it back in, fired another round, and then the next round got stuck angled a little downwards and wouldn't feed. I tried other mags and had similar malfunctions, I couldn't get through a single one.

I sat down and took the gun apart, thinking maybe I had missed some cosmoline in the mag release or something. It looked okay, so I re-oiled it and put it back together. I reloaded the one mag that worked and it did okay. I noticed it was one of the two that came with the gun, so I found the other one and gave it a go. They both functioned fine, but others were still ejecting or failing to feed. One did a little better than the others, so I used it a few times and it seemed to improve the more I used it. I set about breaking in the other ones, and by the time I ran out of ammo, five of my seven magazines were functioning. I'll have to test them out some more to ensure they're reliable, but it's looking good. I'm hopeful about the other two, but I ran out of ammo before I got to them.

Altogether, I went through 350 rounds; for most of that I was kinda stressed and just trying to get things to work so I wasn't focused on my technique and my shots were all over the place. Once I figured out it was the mags and not the gun, and that I could break them in, I relaxed a bit and tried to shoot better.

This was at 20 ft. with surplus ammo (all of which worked just fine):

I'm in Beaufort and the closest range is $20/hour and about 45 minutes away, this place is a little further (unless you get lost, then it's a lot further) but a good deal cheaper if I'm going to be there a while. The range in Summerville looks nice, but my truck will eat up the savings in gas money. Thanks though, I'll check that one out if I'm in the area sometime.

I had some issues with aftermarket mags I bought for my M57 too, they would fall out of the gun when I fired it. The problem was the notch in the mags, I had to enlarge mine a bit and open them up on their front edges, they function 100% now.

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I've already contacted the maker of the magazines and he said it was a bad batch, with the problem you mentioned. He said they usually improve once broken in, and if not I could file down the top of the notch a tiny bit and that should fix the problem. Or I can just send them back. I'll try to break them in some more before trying to modify anything myself. I'm hesitant to polish the feed ramp because it works fine with the original mags, and I don't want to mess something up if it's just a magazine problem. I'll keep it in mind though, in case I keep having issues.