Sig P238 range report (pics!)
This past week I finally bought myself a Sig P238 and shot it yesterday. I like the size of it and love the feel. When the Ruger LCP came out, I almost bought it, but really didn’t want to get away from the 1911 platform since I’ve sold almost any non-1911’s and am trying to standardize. The P238 seemed like a perfect fit for when I don’t want to carry my Kimber.
Sig P238 next to my compact Kimber Pro Tac 1911:
Even though the pistol was small, it had a fairly good feel in my hands. It felt almost the same grip-wise as my full size. The only problem I had is that I have an extended thumb safety on my Kimber and I like to ride it with my thumb so that habitually when I’m shooting I’m guaranteed to never forget to switch it off. With the Sig, the thumb safety is small, but I get the same grip feel as my Kimber if I ride the Sig’s thumb safety + slide release. Obviously the problem with doing that is that the slide doesn’t lock back on the last shot (more on that later).
I liked shooting the gun. It wasn’t uncomfortable to shoot recoil-wise and it shot well to point of aim. I shot at 7 yards (21 feet) and within that range it was very accurate. At 15 yards (45 feet) I was still within the 7 ring with all my shots, but I didn’t shoot it all that accurately at longer ranges. Forgot to take a pic of the longer range target.
Groups at 21 feet. 12 shots (PMC brass cased) on left target, 24 shots (CCI Blaser) on right target.
Overall I had 2 major failures out of the 110 rounds I fired. I had very low expectations with the cheap aluminum cased CCI Blaser, but it was actually more consistent than the PMC. With the PMC I found that with the very last round in the magazine the ejected brass would get caught in the ejection port. Out of 8 magazines I fired of the PMC, it happened about half the time. One note on this, it probably wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t ride the slide release with my thumb. I believe that the slide was just reciprocating faster than it normally would since there were no rounds in the magazine to strip.
Not super serious failures to eject:
The two issues that I really didn’t like were 1 failure to fire and 1 failure to feed on a round that wasn’t the last in the magazine. The failure to eject is pretty self explanatory, it didn’t quite eject the spent brass right and didn’t successfully feed the subsequent round.
Serious failure to eject:
The failure to fire was odd. I put in a fresh magazine, dropped the slide, aimed and pulled the trigger. No bang, and at first I thought that maybe I had dropped the slide before I put in the magazine or something. I pulled the slide back and was surprised to see a live round pop out. Looking at the primer, it showed a very slight firing pin mark. My guess is that the gun was not fully in battery and the hammer completed pushing the slide closed and then didn’t have sufficient energy to set off the primer. I put that round back in the mag, chambered it and it fired without a problem on the second strike.
Failure to fire:
One thing that ended up making the gun a little uncomfortable to shoot was the grip. At the very bottom of the grip panels, there’s a cutout to give space for a pin. That cutout dug in to my hand and eventually got uncomfortable. It bruised my hand a little bit by the end of the day.
Hand:
Overall I’d give the gun pretty high marks. It’s very small, easily concealed in a pocket, holster, purse, murse or whatever. It’s plenty accurate for a sub compact handgun and with good quality defensive .380 it might be loud enough to scare whoever you’re shooting at. Yes, it’s not a .45, but it’s better than nothing when the .45 is too big to carry.
I still need to find a good holster for it. I plan to get the crossbreed IWB holster and some kind of pocket holster. There are a lot of pocket holsters and I’d like to find a good one so I don’t shoot my balls off.
Shawn
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