Whipped Cream Difficulties

Smith and Wesson has a new series on their YouTube channel: “Tales From the Vault”, with Jerry Miculek.

The first episode dropped Tuesday, and it covers the Smith and Wesson Model 76. You may remember the Model 76 from various movies, such as…

As we like to say around here, “If the future was bad, CHeston was there.”

There was a gentleman at one of the S&WCA symposiums some years ago who had a display of Model 76s. As I recall, at the time, you could get a transferable one for about $8K. I checked GunBroker, and it looks like they are going for $18K to $20K now.

My brother sent me an interesting note yesterday: the revived Marlin (a division of Ruger) introduced a new lever gun in their Trapper series. Short barrel, compact, probably quick handling…and chambered in best mil.

I have not seen any lever guns chambered in 10mm until now, but it does kind of make sense. (There may have been some custom or semi-custom low production 10mm lever guns that I don’t know about.) Heck, I don’t even feel like I have a use case for a pistol-caliber carbine, and I find the 10mm Trapper an interesting proposition. I bet this would be a great gun for hog hunting.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to post photos of my old 1911 with the Battleship Texas grips.

I do think they look nice. Of course, I kept the grips that came with the gun, in case I ever want to restore it back to the original config. The gunsmith did have to do some hand fitting on these grips, so I’m not sure they’d go on any other gun.

Preview of coming attractions. As my regular readers know, I am a bore. Either a small bore or a big bore, depending. In this case, I am a small bore.

But: I am also PC.

Over at RevolverGuy.Com, Mike Wood has a nice piece up about the demise of the print editions of Guns and American Handgunner (previously), which includes reviews of several FMG Publications books. Some of those I’ve written about here. There’s also an appearance in the comments by Editor Roy Huntington, who explains the economics: “With the loss of print advertising, it was simply not sustainable to keep the presses rolling.”

RevolverGuy also has an after-action review of Revolver Fest 2025. I wanted to mention that because I thought this, from the comments, was interesting:

We had one gun (out of 7) go down (frozen action) at the Diamondback booth, and one gun that occasionally had a light strike that couldn’t be traced back to ammo. I heard from a number of shooters who experienced problems with multiple guns at S&W (sights, barrel clocking, frozen action, etc). The best place to shoot S&Ws was actually over at the Lipsey’s booth, where the guns were reportedly doing well. Maybe Lipsey’s did some inspections, cleaning and maintenance on the samples they brought?

So was this:

Smith & Wesson didn’t show up with anything all that interesting. I shot a 3-inch, Performance Center Carry Comp Model 19, which was neat, but a variation on an old theme. Smith also brought out their .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum 1854 rifles. I somewhat regret not shooting them, but I did handle them and they looked sharp. Frankly, Smith seemed a tad tone-deaf to the nature of the event; also on their table was a Bodyguard 2.0, a Shield X, and an AR. I get it: get your products in front of customers any way you can, but also, read the room, Smith!

As your resident unabashed Smith and Wesson fanboy: guys, do better, please.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2025 at 12:11 pm and is filed under 1911, Guns, Media, Ruger, Smith and Wesson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.