CZ pistols are underated for the most part. They build a pretty good selection ... put together well and seem to be trouble free for the most part.
Any auto pistol may need some break in period or a little tweak to make it stone cold reliable. I wont carry a new auto untill it passes two tests...500 rounds total... and the last 50 have to be without a hickup.
Most of the problems I've ever seen in anyones auto are magazine related, a gun that dry of oil or just needs a little tweak on the feed ramp
From another era? Maybe, but the "other era" argument doesnt hold water. Just how may companies produce and sell clones of the 1911 Colt today...after about 100 years that "other era" pistol is probably more popular than ever.
CZ engineering is rooted in military spec. Pistols like that are designed to be shot by kids in the mud, under stress and without time to pull a perfect cleaning job at the kitchen table daily.
Try one...you may just like it.
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Range report as found on the web
Peter M. EickMay 8th, 2004, 12:23 PM
Today we fired from round 2424 to 3192 in the gun for 768 rounds fired. Not bad for the day but I admit I am paying the price for it now. My arm is a bit sore this morning. The rounds fired were all reloads. Most were 230 grn Rem FMJ’s with 4.9 grns of bullseye, CCI300 primers and Starline brass. This chrono’s for 796 fps with a standard deviation of 14 on a 20 shot string out of my 35P chrono. Here is a picture of the 97B in the results of the days shooting.
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/eickpm/cz_bag.jpg The shooting results for the day are not the best out of the gun as conditions were working against the results. I did not measure the distance but I believe we were shooting at 10 yards today. My normal 15 yard range was being used by a bunch of shooters so I chose the first available reasonable target.
Here are 3 representative targets. I did not really cherry pick these out, they were just a few grabbed from the stack. Each target represents 50 rounds fired, so 5 mag changes, 10 rounds each. These were all shot relatively quickly, certainly not double taps, but not classical bullseye still shooting on the other hand.
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/eickpm/cz_targets.jpghttp://pages.sbcglobal.net/eickpm/cz_t1.jpghttp://pages.sbcglobal.net/eickpm/cz_t3.jpg As you can see from these targets, there is a bit of dispersion. Don’t blame that on the gun. It was me and the wind. Normally this gun would shoot about half this size group or maybe even a third the size, but I have not been shooting a lot lately so it is my fault.
Status report:
Jams, failures problems? None of course. The 97b is extremely reliable. My records do not have a single jam in this gun since the first box of ammo and that one incident was due to a high primer. This is an exceptionally reliable gun. Mine does not care about FMJ’s vs. JHP’s IF you keep them less then 1.272 COL. The leade appears to be very short on the barrel and if you go too long the rounds will not feed well into the barrel and will not allow the action to close.
Accuracy? Reasonable. Nothing to write home about, but what I expected for a roughly $550 gun. It can do better, but I did not today.
Trigger pull.
Single action 4 lbs 10.2 onz.
Double action 8 lbs 3.1 onz.
Single action has a lot of take up but breaks cleanly. The double action is smooth and long and breaks very predictably.
Action:
Slide racks very smoothly. The inside rails seems to make the gun seem very slick and smooth. Even with no recoil buffer, near full power loads do not jerk the gun off target and it seems to shoot quickly well.
Overall impression
The 97b is a good reliable gun. It is nicely made, reliable, reasonably accurate. It is very easy to clean and take down. The sights are good and give a nice sharp target view. I don’t like it that much though. It tosses brass fairly randomly, is big and heavy and I just don’t have a need for a big 45 service type auto. I guess if I were to be needing a gun for use at work, this would be perfect, but as a private citizen with a ccw permit, it just doesn’t fit. It is a very good gun though and why can’t every manufacturer match the quality of the bluing and polish job CZ put on this one.
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