I went to the range Tuesday morning even though the temperature was going to be in the 90’s with the heat index reaching 103-111. I figured I could at least check my new Dan Wesson Vigil CCO for function if not accuracy, which is exactly what I wound up doing. At my age, heat is not your friend.

I set up an 8” steel plate and a few targets at 12 yards. I figured I would fire 100 rounds at the plate to loosen the DW up. The problem was that, with the heat and my age, I was worn out after 100 rounds and couldn't really do any conclusive accuracy tests. I do know that, for me, it shoots low at 12 yards. There were no malfunctions that I could attribute to the gun, but I did have one very peculiar magazine issue. I had four 7-round magazines and two 8-rounders. Two of the 7- rounders were the DW ones that came with the gun and two were Wilson Combats that I’ve had for years. The two 8-rounders are so old that I don’t know or if I ever knew who made them. All functioned flawlessly for the first two sets(a set being one firing of all full magazines or 44 rounds). On the third set, with one of the Wilson Combat magazines, the first round fired and the second—click!-nothing. Upon checking the gun, I noticed the magazine was not fully seated. Thinking this was human error, I re-seated the magazine and racked the slide and the magazine unseated itself. I tried this a few more times with the magazine and chamber empty with the same result. Every time the slide went into lockup, the magazine unseated and dropped about 1/2”. Needless to say this magazine is out of the rotation until I figure out why it is doing this.

Other than the magazine problem, there were no malfunctions in all 172 rounds I fired today. 150 were Winchester white box ball target and 22 were some old Federal Hydra-Shoks that I do not use since I switched to Federal HSTs. Next range trip, I will start with accuracy testing and post the results here.

Garry