More on Blue Guns

[rednichols]

Recently received some of Ring's blue guns, and of course they are excellent and beautifully detailed.

All my experience is with real guns, and with aluminium castings, so I did notice a difference from them in the plastic blue guns, that relates to making holsters.

Clearly, for the intended purpose of training, the trigger guards of some if not all pistols have been beefed up, likely to keep the guards from breaking during, for example, gun take-away training. The below pic shows the added material marked out in silver paint:

blues (2).jpg

The amount of material added is substantial from a holster-maker's standpoint: if these blue guns are being used for hand moulding / boning (likely wouldn't live long through press-moulding, even aluminium ones can break during this), any deep moulding into the trigger guard will be different from that done using aluminium castings, which are slavishly made to have the same trigger guard dimensions as the real thing. We don't use the real thing in press moulding because they'll crush.

I'm not saying it's either a good, or a bad thing; but will say that this combination -- a blue gun and hand boning -- might make a material difference in the gripping of the pistol by the holster, if the holster relies on hand boning to retain the pistol; such as a strapless shoulder holster (classic Seventrees shown):

seventrees (10).jpg

Or even this contemporary Galco belt holster, though gravity is certainly on our side here:

galco.jpeg

Hope that helps.

[DefensiveCarry.com]

[ccw9mm]

Nice info. For those of us looking into a holster, in future, it might well be worth asking about the boning and the mold used, to ensure it'll replicate the actual gun's shape. It would be a drag to pay for a holster only to find it didn't have a good grip on the gun.

Thanks!

[luke213]

Hey Red I take and dremel or file out the trigger guards on the ones I use to match the proper dimensions on that area, usually it's easier with the softer materials than cleaning up the aluminum guns. That said the softer material of the blueguns is good and bad, the bad is that they wear much quicker just in use than metal dummy guns will so eventually the abrasion just from inserting them in and out of leather while using them will wear down sharp corners created a melt effect kind of like a gunsmith would do for you on a carry gun. That said the material has a good deal of flex, if you grab ahold of the trigger guard on one of those dummies you can hand flex them to a fair degree. So in my experience with pressing, depends on the pressure/foam/rubber your using in your process but some of the harder core press types might destroy a bluegun but it's pretty unlikely they take pressure pretty well so long as it's straight on. If the shape of the gun was different and the pressure wasn't even side to side though I think you could have allot more issues.

Either way I'd clean up the trigger guard area, I think the other reason for this other than strength is that the way the mold is created you end up with the trigger area being plastic covered, so they manually mill that area out from what I can tell(along with the base of the mag). I've found if I work from the edge of the trigger guard towards the center of the frame I can create a V of sorts which allows the edge of the trigger guard to be on spec, while still adding a bit of material strength to the edge of the guard area(if that makes sense:)

Take care!

Luke