1911Tuner
5th December 2005, 14:50
Maestro! May I have a drum roll please...
After all these months of servin' turbocoffee, teardowns, cleanings and measurements...the
Nork Report is ready. Most of the results are good...but not all. Rather than waste bandwidth with small details, I'll cut to the chase. I wanted a hundred pistols, but it just didn't work out.
Out of 88 Norincos...all 5-inch guns save two... 7 had unacceptable barrel fit. The problems were usually due to insufficient vertical lug engagement and only a few of the good ones had more than one lug bearing horizontally. None showed horizontal engagement on the strongest lug...the first one. Of the bad ones, only two didn't show serious lug deformation, and likely only because the guns hadn't been used very much. The ones showing deformed lugs also had excessive static headspace, varying from .925 inch to .947 inch on the extreme end. This was directly attributable to the lug setback. Oddly, horizontal lug engagement was on the #2 lug in all except three examples. Those were on #3.
On average, the #2 lug location in the slide was cut a little too far rearward...most within spec, but right on the peg...and contributed heavily to the #2 barrel lug bearing all the load. Most barrels showed a large gap between the face of the #1 lug and its mating lug abutment
in the slide...a few as much as .015 inch...but most were in the neighborhood of .005-.008 inch gauged.
Barrel lug locations varied a lot, with the #2 lug averaging the worst out of spec condition.
The #2 lug locations...slide and barrel...were the main cause of the #2 lug taking the brunt.
All had more headspace than falls within my comfort zone, averaging .915 inch...or just .005 inch shy of ordnance reject. In fairness, even though headspace was rather loose, the range of variation was closely held to the average. The excess seemed to be pretty evenly divided
between lug specs and chamber depth. The former tends to be dangerous, while the latter is more of a nuisance which leads mainly to erratic ingition and/or degraded accuracy.
All barrels showed excessive end-play, averaging .012 inch, also closely held to average...
which causes the barrel and slide lug abutments to slap-seat on firing...which accelerates
lug deformation due to the lugs having a running start at one another before engaging.
Slap-seating tends to occur earlier with insufficient vertical and/or unequal horizontal engagement. The deeper they engage, the longer it's delayed. Likewise, one lug in the horizontal plane accelerates it. More than one delays it. Most of the pistols examined didn;'t show signs of slap-seated lugs despite hard use reported by many owners. Some, however,
gave early indications of the problem with much less use, even with good vertical depth.
This tends to make me believe that the steel under the chrome plating was softer than it should have been, because other similar examples showed no warning signs.
Only one gun had a linkdown timing/clearance problem that was due to the barrel riding the link at the drop point. The gun hadn't seen much use, and the #2 lug corner was only lightly flanged. I did a quick adjustment and ulflyer reports no further damage.
The trigger actions varied widely among the unsmithed examples, ranging from quite good to pretty bad. Most fell somewhere in between, with pulls from 6 to 7 pounds with either a good bit of creep and grit to breaking cleanly and smoothly. Only one was judged to be unserviceable to the point of horrible. This one cleaned up nicely with a new sear and about 45 minutes worth of attention. The result was 5.5 pounds clean with just a hint of "rollout."
The first 50 or so pistols that I looked at had me convinced that the steel throughout the guns was correctly heat-treated and met or exceeded print specs, but as things progressed, I began noticing evidence of variance as to the quality of the steel and heat-treatment... mostly with the sear and disconnect...but a couple of the hammers seemed to be soft as well. Slides also appeared to vary a little, but none were so soft as to make them unserviceable. Frames appeared to be pretty uniform in this respect.
Seven guns that I saw,(and three others that I've been trying to diagnose via E-mail) had vertical dimension issues and tolerance stacking that wouldn't allow full lug engagement vertically.
This ranged from mislocation of the slidestop pin hole to rail height to slide way location,
making it necesary to use a hard-fit barrel and rail swaging to obtain acceptable barrel fit.
These are the ones previously mentioned that had deformed lugs and excessive headspace.
One of these guns is the notorious hard-chromed "PimpNork" that I bought with full knowledge of the issue.
Rough machining was evident in all guns examined, but varied from gun to gun, some worse than others...some not too bad at all. Finish machining at the rear of the grip frame was lacking in most guns, and a few would slice the web of any hand that fired the guns.
Vertical and horizontal slide to frame fit also varied, with some guns nicely fitted and fairly tight for a service-grade pistol...others were pretty sloppy, though none presented any functional problems due to the fit. All owners reported that the guns functioned reliably with very few problems that were mostly due to magazine-induced malfunctions. Only a small percentage presented these problems with a OEM Norinco-supplied magazines, and new springs were generally all that was needed to correct those. Several OEM magazines failed to drop free
from the magwells. The causes ranged from the trigger bow making contact to the mag body width being out of spec. All except one gun allowed free drop with a correctly dimensioned magazine, even with the trigger bows were a little too narrow.
One OEM trigger pad had loosened from the bow. One hammer had a broken hook, with no functional problems...discovered during the teardown. One had broken the tip off the extended ejector in a hard-use gun with no loss of function. One broken hammer strut was observed in a hard-use gun that belongs to a friend. Several loose link pins were noted. A few hammer strut pins would slip out with only light pressure...no loss of function. Extractor quality varied some, with a few that required retensioning and other s that held up to hard use without changing at all. Two stretched links due to vertical impact surface to rear lower lug issues. One broken link and one sheared lower lug has been reported in two different guns, but not personally seen. One broken slidestop lug after hard use. A dozen or so worn disconnects that were approaching the point of causing functional problems, but hadn't yet gotten there. Two had caused followdown and one had caused failure to fire...neither of which were worn badly, and simply out of spec or had a tolerance stack issue with the sear feet. Although this may seem like too many problems ,note that many of these were found within the same gun. It seemed that if the gun had problems, it had several going on at the same time.
One gun in particular was a basket case, but the pistol had been punished hard for several years, so I had to take that into account. The guy bought it for 150 bucks and figured why not beat on it. He rarely even cleaned and oiled the gun. The lugs were so badly deformed that he had busted a few cases just forward of the web due to the headspace. He stopped using it at that point. Luckily the slide was tough enough that it was undamaged, and I repaired it for him shortly after he brought it in for the examination. The gun is now back in service...still being used hard, but with a little better maintenence.
So...in the final analysis, the Norincos are very tough and durable on average...moreso than
most, and they're generally very reliable and surprisingly accurate to have the barrel fit that they do...but many do have a few issues that need attention before the guns are really top-notch
service pistols. Look for the warning signs before buying and understand that you may get one that needs some work. Most problems are easy to correct...but some are more involved.
A few are majorly involved. A litle attention to detail works wonders, and the biggest majority of these guns are perfectly seriveable as they come if the desire is for a functional, service-grade pistol that will be at home on the range or on a backpacking trip or as a CCW/defensive tool. Even most of the ones with issues seem to be functionally reliable, though they may not remain so with hard use.
Thanks to all the proud Nork owners who brought the guns in...many of whom traveled several hours and many miles to get here. Without them, this report couldn't have been possible.
Special thanks goes to 19112XS and to ulflyer, who seem to have a knack for ferreting out more Norincos than a champion Bluetick can tree raccoons on a summer night.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled flame war.
After all these months of servin' turbocoffee, teardowns, cleanings and measurements...the
Nork Report is ready. Most of the results are good...but not all. Rather than waste bandwidth with small details, I'll cut to the chase. I wanted a hundred pistols, but it just didn't work out.
Out of 88 Norincos...all 5-inch guns save two... 7 had unacceptable barrel fit. The problems were usually due to insufficient vertical lug engagement and only a few of the good ones had more than one lug bearing horizontally. None showed horizontal engagement on the strongest lug...the first one. Of the bad ones, only two didn't show serious lug deformation, and likely only because the guns hadn't been used very much. The ones showing deformed lugs also had excessive static headspace, varying from .925 inch to .947 inch on the extreme end. This was directly attributable to the lug setback. Oddly, horizontal lug engagement was on the #2 lug in all except three examples. Those were on #3.
On average, the #2 lug location in the slide was cut a little too far rearward...most within spec, but right on the peg...and contributed heavily to the #2 barrel lug bearing all the load. Most barrels showed a large gap between the face of the #1 lug and its mating lug abutment
in the slide...a few as much as .015 inch...but most were in the neighborhood of .005-.008 inch gauged.
Barrel lug locations varied a lot, with the #2 lug averaging the worst out of spec condition.
The #2 lug locations...slide and barrel...were the main cause of the #2 lug taking the brunt.
All had more headspace than falls within my comfort zone, averaging .915 inch...or just .005 inch shy of ordnance reject. In fairness, even though headspace was rather loose, the range of variation was closely held to the average. The excess seemed to be pretty evenly divided
between lug specs and chamber depth. The former tends to be dangerous, while the latter is more of a nuisance which leads mainly to erratic ingition and/or degraded accuracy.
All barrels showed excessive end-play, averaging .012 inch, also closely held to average...
which causes the barrel and slide lug abutments to slap-seat on firing...which accelerates
lug deformation due to the lugs having a running start at one another before engaging.
Slap-seating tends to occur earlier with insufficient vertical and/or unequal horizontal engagement. The deeper they engage, the longer it's delayed. Likewise, one lug in the horizontal plane accelerates it. More than one delays it. Most of the pistols examined didn;'t show signs of slap-seated lugs despite hard use reported by many owners. Some, however,
gave early indications of the problem with much less use, even with good vertical depth.
This tends to make me believe that the steel under the chrome plating was softer than it should have been, because other similar examples showed no warning signs.
Only one gun had a linkdown timing/clearance problem that was due to the barrel riding the link at the drop point. The gun hadn't seen much use, and the #2 lug corner was only lightly flanged. I did a quick adjustment and ulflyer reports no further damage.
The trigger actions varied widely among the unsmithed examples, ranging from quite good to pretty bad. Most fell somewhere in between, with pulls from 6 to 7 pounds with either a good bit of creep and grit to breaking cleanly and smoothly. Only one was judged to be unserviceable to the point of horrible. This one cleaned up nicely with a new sear and about 45 minutes worth of attention. The result was 5.5 pounds clean with just a hint of "rollout."
The first 50 or so pistols that I looked at had me convinced that the steel throughout the guns was correctly heat-treated and met or exceeded print specs, but as things progressed, I began noticing evidence of variance as to the quality of the steel and heat-treatment... mostly with the sear and disconnect...but a couple of the hammers seemed to be soft as well. Slides also appeared to vary a little, but none were so soft as to make them unserviceable. Frames appeared to be pretty uniform in this respect.
Seven guns that I saw,(and three others that I've been trying to diagnose via E-mail) had vertical dimension issues and tolerance stacking that wouldn't allow full lug engagement vertically.
This ranged from mislocation of the slidestop pin hole to rail height to slide way location,
making it necesary to use a hard-fit barrel and rail swaging to obtain acceptable barrel fit.
These are the ones previously mentioned that had deformed lugs and excessive headspace.
One of these guns is the notorious hard-chromed "PimpNork" that I bought with full knowledge of the issue.
Rough machining was evident in all guns examined, but varied from gun to gun, some worse than others...some not too bad at all. Finish machining at the rear of the grip frame was lacking in most guns, and a few would slice the web of any hand that fired the guns.
Vertical and horizontal slide to frame fit also varied, with some guns nicely fitted and fairly tight for a service-grade pistol...others were pretty sloppy, though none presented any functional problems due to the fit. All owners reported that the guns functioned reliably with very few problems that were mostly due to magazine-induced malfunctions. Only a small percentage presented these problems with a OEM Norinco-supplied magazines, and new springs were generally all that was needed to correct those. Several OEM magazines failed to drop free
from the magwells. The causes ranged from the trigger bow making contact to the mag body width being out of spec. All except one gun allowed free drop with a correctly dimensioned magazine, even with the trigger bows were a little too narrow.
One OEM trigger pad had loosened from the bow. One hammer had a broken hook, with no functional problems...discovered during the teardown. One had broken the tip off the extended ejector in a hard-use gun with no loss of function. One broken hammer strut was observed in a hard-use gun that belongs to a friend. Several loose link pins were noted. A few hammer strut pins would slip out with only light pressure...no loss of function. Extractor quality varied some, with a few that required retensioning and other s that held up to hard use without changing at all. Two stretched links due to vertical impact surface to rear lower lug issues. One broken link and one sheared lower lug has been reported in two different guns, but not personally seen. One broken slidestop lug after hard use. A dozen or so worn disconnects that were approaching the point of causing functional problems, but hadn't yet gotten there. Two had caused followdown and one had caused failure to fire...neither of which were worn badly, and simply out of spec or had a tolerance stack issue with the sear feet. Although this may seem like too many problems ,note that many of these were found within the same gun. It seemed that if the gun had problems, it had several going on at the same time.
One gun in particular was a basket case, but the pistol had been punished hard for several years, so I had to take that into account. The guy bought it for 150 bucks and figured why not beat on it. He rarely even cleaned and oiled the gun. The lugs were so badly deformed that he had busted a few cases just forward of the web due to the headspace. He stopped using it at that point. Luckily the slide was tough enough that it was undamaged, and I repaired it for him shortly after he brought it in for the examination. The gun is now back in service...still being used hard, but with a little better maintenence.
So...in the final analysis, the Norincos are very tough and durable on average...moreso than
most, and they're generally very reliable and surprisingly accurate to have the barrel fit that they do...but many do have a few issues that need attention before the guns are really top-notch
service pistols. Look for the warning signs before buying and understand that you may get one that needs some work. Most problems are easy to correct...but some are more involved.
A few are majorly involved. A litle attention to detail works wonders, and the biggest majority of these guns are perfectly seriveable as they come if the desire is for a functional, service-grade pistol that will be at home on the range or on a backpacking trip or as a CCW/defensive tool. Even most of the ones with issues seem to be functionally reliable, though they may not remain so with hard use.
Thanks to all the proud Nork owners who brought the guns in...many of whom traveled several hours and many miles to get here. Without them, this report couldn't have been possible.
Special thanks goes to 19112XS and to ulflyer, who seem to have a knack for ferreting out more Norincos than a champion Bluetick can tree raccoons on a summer night.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled flame war.