M&P Monday: Week 25

50,343 rounds
2 stoppages, 0 malfunctions, 2 parts breakages

Bullet #50,000 recovered from M&P Torture Test

On Friday 10-October 2008, Smith & Wesson‘s Senior Vice President Leland Nichols fired round #50,000 at the Smith & Wesson Academy (pictured left). If Leland looks like he knows what he’s doing behind a pistol, that’s because he does. Unlike just about any other executive in the firearms industry, Leland Nichols is a shooter. He’s a regular at the monthly IDPA matches held at the S&W Shooting Sports Center. In fact, the first thing Leland did when I met him that morning was show me his personal M&P which he’s been shooting in competition for a while now. He’s got over 10,000 rounds through it so far.

Pictured at right (L to R): Todd Louis Green, Joe Bergeron, Leland Nichols, and Julie Golob after the 50,000th shot was taken.

An awful lot of people made the Torture Test possible, and we have to take a moment to thank some of them. First and foremost, in addition to Mr. Nichols we received tremendous support from many people at Smith. Joe Bergeron (Pistol Product Manager), Ernest Langdon (Dir. of Military Sales), and Julie Golob (Consumer Program Manager & Champion Shooter) were instrumental throughout the past six months, and without them this project would not have started and certainly would never have finished with such a bang (excuse the pun).

Dozens of people helped us achieve that 50,000 number in such a short period of time. Whether it was technical support, moral support, or trigger finger support we found no shortage of industry professionals and enthusiastic shooters.

In particular, thanks go out to Travis Noteboom at Crimson Trace Corporation, Scott Warren at Warren Tactical, and Kevin Tapia of Insight Tech-Gear for supporting this project with various product evaluation samples. Also our thanks to Bill Rogers, Claude Werner, and the rest of the staff of Rogers Shooting School for hosting us for a week of intense training (which you can read about here).

As mentioned last week, the gang from the NRA Range helped put the last 1,329 rounds through the test gun so it would be ready for the historic #50,000 in time for the big day. Each of them signed my log book to commemorate everyone’s hard work making the final shot possible.

More than twenty other shooters helped us reach that fifty thousand rounds over the past six months, and pistol-training.com wants to thank each and every one of  you for your role in this project.

So, what were the final stats?

172 days
79 range sessions (plus 3 photos shoots)
265 hours on the range
11 cleanings

That works out to an average of 291 rounds per day, 633 rounds per shooting session, and 189 rounds per hour. Or look at it this way:

You would have to fire a shot more than once every five minutes every single day during that 172 days to reach 50,000 rounds!

And what exactly does 50,000 rounds look like? Well, we couldn’t take a picture of it all at once, and there was no practical way to collect every piece of brass. So we did the next best thing and collected a tab from each box of ammo fired through the gun. Here’s a picture of the test gun sitting atop the pile of one thousand box top tabs.

So, what comes next? Well, the astute readers will notice that the the reported number of rounds at the beginning of today’s report is higher than 50,000. This weekend, I attended a private “party” on the range with Ken Hackathorn, Rob Haught, Joe Seuk of SKD Tactical, and another close friend. The M&P test gun was also in attendance and was used for a variety of exciting drills that you simply can’t do under most circumstances:

While waiting for it to get dark for some low-light work in the shoot house, we held a little competition that involved shooting from a moving vehicle. That’s me (pictured left) and the M&P9. I’m proud to report that my teammate and I won that particular competition.

What comes next? Well, this has been an unusually long post for an M&P Monday and while we have some very big news to announce after the trip up to S&W last week, we’ll leave that part of the story for tomorrow.

Oh yeah, and remind me to tell you about the tour of the Smith & Wesson factory I took, along with the rare opportunity to bring my camera along and take photos of the whole operation … 

Train hard & stay safe! ToddG

Previous entries:

• Week One
• Week Two
• Week Three
• Week Four
• Week Five
• Week Six & Week Six Accuracy Report
• Week Seven
• Week Eight
• Week Nine
• Week Ten
• Week Eleven
• Week Twelve
• Week Thirteen
• Week Fourteen
• Week Fifteen
• Week Sixteen
• Week Seventeen
• Week Eighteen
• Week Nineteen
• Week Twenty
• Week Twenty-One
• Week Twenty-Two
• Week Twenty-Three
• Week Twenty-Four