considering Ruger American 9mm

I'm 3000 rounds in on a 5000-round endurance run with a full-sized 9mm American.

Just as a late FYI in this thread:

Decently accurate, not exceptional. Did slightly outshoot a new M&P 2.0 at 25 yards.

Wide frame. Some report bruising & blood draws from the upper rear corner hitting the base of the thumb "knuckle" under recoil.
I have not drawn blood there & there's no skin abrasion, but that area IS sore, especially after 1500 rounds fired yesterday.

Wide slide. I'd ordered a set of FOs from Hi-Vis, the slide's too wide for my gunsmith's "universal" sight pusher to fit & install the sights.
I'm not going to risk damage by whacking the factory sights myself.

The pistol was Breakfree'd once before the initial firing, has been running without a hitch (other than me shortstroking the trigger reset three times when I was going for speed) ever since.
Bone dry for at least a couple thousand rounds after the Breakfree burned off.
Denis

Now 5000 rounds through the pistol.
No lube since the initial Breakfree.
No cleaning.
No malfunctions, misfeeds, ejection problems.
All through one mag.

My hand has educated itself to the point where the thumb issue isn't even noticeable.
I just make more of an effort to align the pistol straighter in that hand.

I'm more impressed with this pistol than any of Ruger's previous centerfire autos.
This one's fully combat-capable.
Denis

Glad to hear it! Sounds like we have a winner here. I would like to see Ruger come out with some differently shaped backstraps for it though.

In the "After" accuracy session, using the same 6 different loads used in the "Before" accuracy testing, 4 of those shot tighter at 25 yards off the bench.

I did finally get one lone malfunction during that "After" session, a misfeed with a single Telos 92-grain all-copper HP. Huge cavity, sharp edge around it, very light recoil impulse, ejection about 8 inches straight up, reduced slide return velocity.

Can't entirely blame the pistol for that.
Denis

I wouldn't blame the pistol for that, given how much that ammo deviates from the norm.

Precisely.
5500 rounds all-in, one misfeed with a non-standard load in a dry & fairly dirty pistol.
Denis

I bought one and took it to the range. I put 550 rounds through it, 350 Blazer Brass 124gr, 100 HST 124gr +P, and 100 Wolf Polyperformance 115gr.

Other than a few brass (technically steel) to the face with the Wolf, no issues at all. It's accurate and soft-shooting.

I did have the thumb knuckle issue that others mentioned though. I took some sandpaper wrapped around a pen to the rear area of the frame and now it doesn't hit me there. It didn't take much at all to make it feel 100x better.

I wonder just how much you could take off that part of the grip without damaging it?

FergusonTO35 said:

I wonder just how much you could take off that part of the grip without damaging it?

Click to expand...

I sanded down the back left of my RAC after getting the thumb-knuckle rubbing. No issues since, and it didn't take very much material removal to make it MUCH more comfortable to shoot.

I figured that doing a trigger-guard slimming on my Glocks never hurt them, so why not?

Yup. I removed the stoopid finger bumps on my Glocks and now they feel much better.