One of the best reasons to travel to Montana last week (besides the jaw-dropping beauty of the Flathead Valley) was the chance to finally get my hands the new Schmeisser SLP-9. The German engineered wundergun that was teased at this year’s SHOT Show now has more aggressive slide serrations, ships with two 17-round steel magazines, three backstraps and a cleaning kit.
Despite a heavier-than-expected trigger pull, the gun shot fast and accurately. With its short re-set, follow-up shots came quickly. Lefties will appreciate its fully ambidextrous mag releases.
One of the gun’s best features to a lot of people will be the selling price. MSRP will be about $499 with a street price likely in the $450 range. That’s a lot of Teutonic pistol for your samolian.
Schmeisser was also showing off a few of their new all-German made ARs:
I’ll leave the evaluation of these to Tyler and Nick, as we hope to get a model or two to review soon. From a casual rifle shooter’s perspective, the guns are beautifully built, shot wonderfully and accurately and featured particularly impressive triggers. I don’t have exact pricing on any of these models yet, but suffice it to say they probably won’t be budget guns.
That review is going to devolve into Nick and I getting drunk and shouting SCHMEISSER!!!! at each other at the ranch.
OK. THATS funny.
Or you could send the AR over here to Oregon, and I’ll stretch it out to a thousand yards or so.
I’ll yell schmeisser every time I hit the 18″ gong.
“That review is going to devolve into Nick and I getting drunk and shouting SCHMEISSER!!!! at each other at the ranch.”
At the very least, lots of shouts of “Ja!”, “Wunderbar!”, and more than a few well-deserved “Dummkopf!”s, especially when Nick wrecks the buggy again and punches a few holes in your AR-500 plate…
(What are friends for?)
SHIVAKAMINI SOMAKANDARKRAM!!!
100% German made AR. That means 3 times the fiddly bits in a normal AR.
No kidding. I used to work for a company that was German owned. They insisted on buying German manufacturing equipment. Germans do things differently is all I can say. I think their engineers get bonuses for taking simple straightforward design concepts and making them into the strangest, hard to follow, baffling, pain in the ass to work on equipment possible.
I’ve had 2 VW wabbits (a ’79 auto and an ’80 4 speed) inflicted on me, along with a ’74 Thing. The Thing and the ’80 Wabbit were actually okay but the ’79 auto was atrocious and all three stranded me with great regularity and expense.
German engineering is indeed….different. Not necessarily bad (I hear Porsches are considered among the best engineered cars in the world, as they should be for the price), just the way it is. But all too often backasswards just for the sake of it. One example was the radiator fan shroud in the wabbits. It had an electric motor with a cooling fan mounted to it with three screws – no problem. Well, except that said three screws were facing backwards, which meant that in order to remove the motor, you had to remove the shroud, and in order to remove the shroud you had to remove the radiator. Fahrvergnugen, indeed. (When I put everything back in I mounted the motor with the screws facing outwards like God intended and used loctite.)
But I’m curious about the Schmeisser name – has it been extant as a brand name all along or owned by some parent corporation or other? Anyone know?
Tom
Near as I can tell, Schmeisser is a relatively new company who just adopted the name of a historically significant weapon designer as a marketing strategy, kind of like Henry Repeating Arms did.
I saw a TV show on BMW’s headquarters operation in Germany. They have their own full time music composer who’s job it is to compose all the noises and tones that the car makes inside. Like when you have a door open, or some function happens. This guy sits around in a sound studio with a keyboard and computer composing noises for the cars to make, to capture a certain mood or whatever for each tone associated with an event or function. Apparently those cars have a shitload of different sounds they can make. The germans aren’t content with mere beeps.
With any portion of German engineering you have to have a higher intellect than an average American. Navy Seals and even Marines use Schmeisser firearms pretty often. The most advanced performance firearms are never simple in their design or structure, nor are the components easily assembled. German engineered firearms in my eyes are definitely a top of the line option.
I don’t agree. The old saw was that if Americans could do it with 20 parts, the Germans could do it with 16 and the Italians could do it with 32.
Are we going to call it a Glalther or a Wock?
What kind of stock is that in the 1st pic of the AR? I’m really digging it.
Schmeisser makes every part of that gun other than the optic. No idea if it’s available separately yet. Or if it will be. Will try to find out.
The expectation is that the US distributor will be selling Schmeisser AR parts at some point, but there’s no time frame on that yet.
CAA SRS
Check out Luth-AR stocks. They are similar.
“3 backstraps”? Does not appear to have changeable backstraps.
Canik has the affordable end of the decent service pistol already locked up.
A Schmeisser? Really?
Good luck finding holsters that aren’t custom Kydex with the custom price.
John
Shot the Caniks, too. Write up coming.
Won’t buy Turkish stuff. Chunks of their profit go to “zakat” which is muslim for charity to ISIS, Assad, etc.
Plus Turks spend their tax money trying to send arms to Hamas in Gaza, and exporting rapugees to Europe and now here.
German is not Turkish, trust me.
if it was America wouldn’t let them distribute their products throughout the U.S.
I’ve heard similar statements about my Steyr M9-A1, yet I had no problem finding a CCW holster for it for around $30.
I discovered my Steyr M9 fits almost perfectly into my XD-45 holsters. Might be useful for someone else out there.
is that a Steyr M9-A1 in 9mm fitting into a XD 45 in 9mm? I’ve been looking for a retention holster for my Steyr for ages…
I got an Alien Gear IWB holster for my S40-A1 and it fits perfectly despite being designed for the C9-A1.
Yawn.
Wake me when someone’s Next Big Thing isn’t another double-stack-polymer-frame-striker-fired shooting appliance. Everydamnthing is starting to look like a Glock. Glocks are great and all, but they’re like…I don’t know…Toyota Camrys. Everyone seems to be selling Camrys now. It’s getting tedious.
(A bit like the modern automotive industry.)
“Everydamnthing is starting to look like a Glock.”
If it’s your job to lug a pistol around all day, in extreme temps and terrain, I can see why polymer becomes an appreciated material over *steel*…
“Everyone seems to be selling Camrys now.”
There’s reasons for that. Fuel economy regs, occupant safety regs, pedestrian safety regs, customer taste – When you have to design within a rather tightly proscribed box – you get a whole lotta drawings that are alot alike.
Guns are different parameters, but still designed (mass market stuff like this anyway) within a tight box as well – cost of materials, cost of assembly, size, weight, you name it, it all has to “compete”. So, it’s not surprising that it looks all pretty much the same from 15ish feet away.
Y’all make perfectly valid points, and I don’t disagree. And, I don’t think the industry is doing anything wrong, either. They’re just responding naturally to market forces in order to continue making money.
It’s just that we’re reaching a point where the vast majority of defensive-handgun options currently available are: (a) the Camrys – Glock-ish duty pistols (or shrunken Glock-ish duty pistols) that manufacturers can sell at cost to governmental buyers in order to help drive more civilian sales, (b) 1911 / Mustang clones (the more I think about it, there may be more options here than in category (a)), (c) novel designs that are runny shite (I’m looking at you, R51), or (d) novel designs that are unobtanium.
I’d really love to see someone come out with an all-new DA/SA, non-polymer semi-auto pistol intended for civilians that most civilians would have a chance of being able to afford. Or a modernized take on a Hi-Power (if they can do it with a 1911, then why not a BHP?). Or a new revolver action (though, the Chiappa Rhino certainly falls in that category).
All of which I realize is unreasonable – it’s just not cost-effective to tool up for those sorts of things unless you are fine with producing unobtanium.
On the plus side, when those sorts of things DO get released (like Kimber’s new revolver, for example), it makes it all the more exciting to see new (potential) diamonds in a sea of plastic.
Everyone wants quality, but no one wants to admit that the Federal Reserve has devalued your currency to a point where it’s rapidly becoming worthless. It isn’t until you try to buy something that isn’t food, that is physical and tangible, that you see just how far devalued the USD has become.
When I was a kid, you could buy a new car for $3K. A new Ford Mustang in 1965 cost less than that – I seem to recall it was less than $2500. When I bought a diesel pickup 15 years ago, it cost me $37K. Today, I can’t replace that pickup for less than $45K – and I get an automatic transmission forced upon me. As a result, I’m going to be driving that 15 year old F-350 for a long, long time.
Gun buyers need to get out of this mindset that $500 should get them a new, quality handgun. It won’t. There’s %10 federal excise tax built into the price of every handgun, for starters. Then there has to be some margin in there for the distributor, and some more for the dealer. Call that 20% overall. There’s the costs of materials, machining and labor to actually make the unit, and the manufacture doesn’t want to do all this as a charity exercise.
Pretty quickly, you see that there’s not much room in the price of a $500 handgun to pay for anyone who gives a rat’s rear end about quality, fit, finish, etc. You’re going to get the lowest possible COGS and methods of production – and today, that means squirting black cheez-whiz into a mold.
Several months ago, I tossed out a figure that it was impossible to make a quality shotgun for less than $1K. People howled. I stand by that assertion – because I tear apart guns all day, most every day, I see what goes on inside guns. Today’s cheap shotguns literally cut my hands up when I disassemble them because the gunmakers can’t be bothered to deburr the interior parts – a mark of complete amateurism in the world of machining and metalworking. This is done so you can buy a shotgun for $500.
Want quality in a gun? You’re going to have to pay for someone to give a damn.
Outside of a cool looking corporate logo, what possible advantage is there to having a large ventilated magwell?
Is it required for you to yell “I’m gonna Schmeiss you up!” upon drawing?
Because it should be.
What a nice looking weapon
If only we could do away with the finger grooves…
Are you sure the pistol is “German engineered”? Because it looks identical to the “Balkan engineered” Tara TM-9.
http://www.tara-perfection.com/tm-9/
I believe we covered this back in January. Who actually owns Tara is a bit murky and frankly I forgot seeing the Tara – so many polymer guns these days, I’m not able to keep track of all of them – or even pick half of them out without nomenclature emblazoned brightly down the side.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/01/joe-grine/can-schmeisser-gmbh-build-a-better-glock-than-glock/
If anyone has gotten to the bottom of this re-badge/custom manufacture, I’d love to read about it.
Oh, look – yet another plastic “perfection”.
Gee….another AR15. How original…..yawn.
Schmeisser? Sounds to close to Budweiser for me to want to buy one. Now, Glock on the other hand just rolls off the tongue, like it’s a Rolling Glock.
Schmeißer?
Those guns are tossers.
Literally.
If it were branded “Schmeiffel”, I’d have to buy an AR on principle alone. Handsome pistol, but agreed about the lack of styling differentiation between, well, every damn full size polymer pistol in the past decade.
As a gun dealer, I won’t be carrying these pistols for economic reasons. My cost with shipping is about $420 so if all I can sell it for is $450 I will lose money on it by the time I pay the several taxes and costs involved. It’s too bad because it looks like a nice gun. The Canik people mentioned is ever worse. Dealer cost is from $315 to $330 and I have seen them retailing for even less than dealer cost, so somebody got a volume deal so good they can undercut the dealer cost everyone else has to pay.
It’s a pretty handsome pistol, very Glockish in appearance though. If the truth is telling, it should be a beast like most German made firearms. The second strike capability was started by Taurus back around 2007 with the 24/7 series pistols so it isn’t German but Brazilian in origin.
Originally made in Montenegro by Tara…rebranded…and STILL unavailable in the USA as of 9/24/2017
How do I get my hands on one?
Any LEO packages or discounts or dealers?
Still no pistol to be found in the USA. WarWorks was going to import them. Decided not to.So no date for availability.
Comments are closed.