Posts Tagged ‘Zip 22’

How Not To Make A Pistol

Saturday, December 21st, 2024

Been a while since we did some gun geeking, so here’s Ian McCollum doing a Forgotten Weapons video on all the ways you can screw up while trying to make a new pistol.

  • “If you design an answer to a question that nobody is asking, well, not a lot of people are going to pay you for it.” His first example: The Zip 22. “It’s a piece of junk.”
  • Another way to screw up: Have a good design, but manufacture it poorly. “An excellent example would be the South African Mamba.” Designed by competitive shooters, they had problems with the heat treating. “Even if people like the concept, the gun has to work effectively.”
  • Or you can have a good design with quality control issues. “The Caracal C slides had a tendency to break in the middle and launch back at their shooters faces.”

  • Or you can produce a really good pistol, and then announce that you’ve got a better version coming out soon. “Hudson H9, another darling of Shot Show, highly anticipated. [It’s] a really nice pistol, it did everything it was supposed to, [but] was a little more expensive than a lot of people would have liked when it came out.” Then they announced they were just about ready to come out with a lighter aluminum-framed model. “And all of a sudden everybody who had been considering spending $1,200 on a Hudson H9 decided “‘Ah, I’m just going to wait for the aluminum framed version.’ Their cash flow dried up and the company went bankrupt.”

    • There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip…

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    Posted in Guns, video | 19 Comments »

    Worst Gun Ever?

    Thursday, July 2nd, 2020

    Heading toward Fourth of July weekend, I was looking through YouTube for more things that go boom when I came across this video of a gun infamous for not going boom. Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the nightmare-fueled horror that is the Zip 22:

    It’s bad enough that it’s butt-ugly, cheaply made and anti-ergonomic, but is also infamous for malfunctioning. “Worst gun ever” has to be a target-rich environment, but the Zip 22 seems like a real strong contender. (I suppose the World War II Japanese Nambu Type 94 Shiki Kenju 8mm pistol, which could be fired accidentally by touching the sear, is actually worse from a safety viewpoint.)

    But the detail that made write this post was the fact that the manufacturer offered an optional backward Picatinny rail for the top so you could mount this gun on the rail of a real gun. It’s like all those “Chainsaw bayonet attachment” memes come to life.

    How unreliable is it? Ian McCollum was surprised he was actually able to fire off an entire magazine before it malfunctioned.

    Here’s a guy shooting a Zip 22, who experiences a host of malfunctions (failure to eject, double-feed, etc.) in the course of firing off six magazines.

    And the ejection port is so close to your finger that sometimes you get hot brass jammed up against your digits, as in this NSFW video:

    Don’t think I’ll be buying one of these anytime soon…

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    Posted in Guns, video | 2 Comments »