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My inital impression on picking up this gun was "Damnit!!! I just wasted $400!" It look and feels clunky, and theres just no way around that. But, on further inspection, its got alot of neat features beyond the 30 round magazine (which is still really cool!). For instance, the saftey is both a trigger dissconnect and a firing pin block, its got one of the easiest takedowns of a semi-auto Ive ever seen, and the chamber is fluted.
That arm at the back of the slide is the firing pin block, and the shroud is a piece of plastic that is also the rear sight. Its held on by two allen screws, one of which holds the firing pin in.
Heres a top down view of the gun. It feeds like a doublestack rifle, and has two feed ramps too. You can see the hammer in the back, which is huge. You cant tell with the mag in, but if you release the hammer with the gun dissasembled, it will rotate 270 deg (instead of the 90 it would to strike the firing pin), and be down in the magwell...trust me, its a bitch to get out if that happens. Its also single action (i.e. theres no takeup and the trigger is friggin light), so this has happend to me more than once.
The coolest thing about this gun is still the 30 round mags. The way that they stack the rounds is, again, unique as far as Ive seen.
starting the third round, notice that the first round is moving to one side
That rail in the center of the mag seperates the round as you feed them, alternating which side rounds go to. In a way its like having two single stack mags right next to each other. In a word, its brillant.
For size comparison, heres the Grendel with my 5" 1911
Like I said, its bulky to the point of awkward (think a grip as fat as a Beretta, but longer). The most annoying thing Ive found is that the abidexterous saftey is easy to bump up so that it engages the firing pin block. Since you cant restrike it, you gotta manually cycle the slide. I found that by holding the saftey down with my thumb, I dont have that problem. Its actually more comfortable to hold this way.
Disassembly is accomplished by unscrewing the cap on the end of the slide and taking out the recoil spring. Then the lower shroud comes off, and the slide is taken off. Done. No fancy buttons or pins to push in.
All in all, its a fun little gun. Its really too bad what happened to it with the ban. I mean, who doesnt want a 30 round pistol that shoots .22WMR? Its alot of firepower in a (relatively) small package!!
Ill try and do a range report later with shooting pics. I took it shooting with grayfox today, and he can attest that its as accurate as you can want, and that the recoil is almost nothing, about the same as a 22lr. I had one stovepipe, but other than that, no malfunctions at all (not counting the 4-5 times I bumped the saftey on...).
Man, I hope that Garand sells soon, my credit card is bleeding...
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