HK45 Endurance Test: Week Fourteen

(this week’s report comes from TCinVA after he spent all day Saturday running the pistol during Speed Kills)

When  Todd offered to give me the HK45 test gun for the duration of the “Speed Kills” class held over the weekend, my first thought was “Free ammo!”. My second thought was “…but it means shooting a polymer .45.” I actually pondered it a bit because in all honesty I didn’t really like shooting non-1911 .45’s all that much. The 1911’s all steel construction and crisp 4-5 pound straight-travel trigger make it an extremely forgiving handgun to shoot with accuracy and some pretty impressive speed. In a class with Larry Vickers some time ago someone asked him why the 1911 was used for so long in his former unit despite the herculean task of maintaining such a finicky beast with their round count. His answer was simple and concise: “Because it’s the easiest centerfire handgun to shoot accurately under stress.”  While I have nothing approaching the experience and background of Mr. Vickers, I had come to the same conclusion which prompted me to sink a lot of money into 1911’s as carry guns. After having my pistol skillset rebooted under the excellent instruction Mr. Vickers provided, I finally embraced the wonders of polymer guns and bought myself a bunch of M&P’s, including a couple in .45.

I’ve done a class or two with the .45 M&P and I got along with it fairly well, but the extra recoil compared to my 1911 and M&P’s in 9mm was a bit offputting. I was also significantly slower with the polymer .45’s. Add to that the extra expense of .45 ACP ammo and it’s just not something I wanted to spend a lot of time shooting. Free ammo, however, is my kryptonite, and so I agreed to run the HK45 test gun to see how I liked it.

My key concerns initially were the recoil of the weapon and the trigger characteristics. I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on my grip in the last year or so, refining and tweaking to produce a grip that will let me best manage the recoil of a handgun…but I had gotten a bit lazy with it. With a 9mm you can get away with a sub-standard grip because the gun doesn’t move all that much. With a .45 if your grip isn’t just right you’ll get separation of the hands during recoil, which will slow subsequent shots considerably. I played with my grip some before the class, and did some live-fire experimentation during the opening Dot Torture drill. I didn’t shoot my best possible score during Dot Torture because I was primarily using the drill to work on my grip…but I did manage to figure some important things out during those 50 rounds. I rotated my left wrist forward a bit more than normal, I pulled the left hand backward into my right hand with more pressure, and I gripped the mag well like I was trying to crush it. For some reason I also found that curling my thumb down seemed to add a bit of oomph to the grip over my usual thumb pointed-at-the-target practice. By the last segment of Dot Torture the gun was moving predictably under recoil and the front sight was dropping right back on target after each shot. When we moved on to the press-out drills, I wasn’t timing my splits, but subjectively they felt every bit as fast as what I could manage with my M&P 9 on a good day. Using my best guestimation, the cadence on some of my speed strings may have been off .05 – .1 of a second. The grip improvements are definitely keepers.

Since I had a decent amount of time on the P30 test gun, I didn’t feel too much trepidation about the trigger characteristics. Right off the bat I noticed that the reset on the HK45’s LEM trigger system was considerably shorter than it was on the P30. Way cool. The trigger break, on the other hand, was not as smooth as the P30’s trigger break, which made it a bit easier to anticipate the shot. Between the attempt to really battle recoil and the slight hitch in the trigger just before the actual break, I developed a bit of an anticipation problem that frankly wouldn’t have been noticeable on a standard target, but the majority of shooting during “Speed Kills” is done on tiny targets. For the majority of the class, the 3×5 card is the big target, which is not terribly forgiving if you try to smash the trigger to the rear so you can begin fighting the recoil of the pistol. I frequently forgot to apply that bit of learning during the day.

When I remembered to do my part on the trigger the pistol was scary accurate. During the weak hand only segment of Dot Torture I fired 5 shots into 2 holes inside the 2” circle. Three shots into the string I looked at the target and I saw one hole. I panicked a bit and looked all over the target for the other two shots and I couldn’t find them. “Holy crap…am I completely missing the paper? At this distance? Am I really sucking that bad today?” I set up my aim again and then deliberately aimed a tad lower, and the fourth round went exactly where I was aiming. I fired the fifth shot at the original point of aim and I actually saw the paper move slightly right around the first hole. I managed to hit the lower third of the first hole, enlarging it slightly. When I managed to work the trigger and the sights consistently, the HK45 obediently spit bullets very close to one another.

I found the ergonomics of the HK45 to be generally quite nice. The grip was certainly somewhat bigger than what I was used to, but it wasn’t a hindrance. I only had one failure to lock back on empty due to my grip deactivating the slide lock the entire day…a problem I have with a number of different pistols due to my, as Todd puts it, “freakishly high grip.” The only real annoyance on the pistol was difficulty reaching the magazine release with my strong hand thumb. Fairly early on I figured out that it was simply more efficient for me to use my trigger finger to drop the magazine. This also had the benefit of not compromising my strong hand grip at all.

I fired 565 rounds of Federal 230 grain aluminum cased Blazer ammo through the pistol during the course of the day and the pistol digested every round without issue. According to Todd the weapon hadn’t been cleaned in about 8,000 rounds, which explains why it was slinging crud all over me. It apparently hadn’t been lubricated in some time either, as it was bone dry and actually squeaking when I cycled the slide. This created a distinct high pitched chirp every time the weapon cycled. Despite all of that, the gun ran smoothly leaving no impression of bogging down or hiccupping in the slightest.

By the end of the day I was pondering what in my collection I was going to sell off to buy one of these things. An old fashioned 1911 guy reduced to lusting over a plastic, double action only .45 handgun. Somewhere in the afterlife John Moses Browning felt a disturbance in the force. I liked the gun…a lot. Better, in fact, than my M&P .45. All things considered, the HK45 is probably as good as it gets in a polymer framed .45 handgun. The work Ken Hackathorn and Larry Vickers put into this gun shows in the way it handles and the way it shoots. It’s a vast improvement over the USP in .45 which handled like a cinderblock. If you’re a recovering 1911-a-holic and you are looking for a capable .45 that doesn’t have all the maintenance issues of the 1911, this might just be your ticket.

Train hard & stay safe! ToddG

Previous HK45 Endurance Test posts at pistol-training.com:

• Week Thirteen
• Week Twelve
• Week Ten
• Week Nine
• Week Eight
• Week Seven
• Week Six
• Week Five
• Week Four
• Week Three
• Week Two
• Week One
• Announcement