Korth PRS Automatic Pistol: German Quality (And Price!)

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm in column and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming April of 2018 premier auction today we have a court PRS spelled course but if you're going to use the proper German pronunciation it would be court or something vaguely like that at any rate this is a gun that's relatively well known mostly for its cost Court is basically a little boutique firearms manufacturer in Germany they've been around since the 1950s primarily manufacturing really really good really really expensive revolvers and in 2015 they introduced a semi-automatic pistol to their product line they sell this in three different barrel lengths four five and six inch this is the four inch version and what they have done here is made a hybrid of a 1911 and the classic German system a roller locked gun so this is actually a roller delayed blowback 45 Auto pistol it's probably pretty cool so let's take a look at the mechanics let's begin by pointing out that the lower is basically in 1911 and a lot of if not all standard 1911 parts for the frame actually fit and are interchangeable although none of them are going to be as well made as the ones that court makes so things like grip safeties mainspring housing x' the spring itself the fire control parts the trigger these are all standard 1911 pattern parts the magazine is a court branded magazine and the manual says to only use their mags I'm pretty sure that this is just a stock 1911 magazine however I'm also pretty sure that if you actually try to shoot this with some ratty GI surplus magazine they the Teutonic gods of German nough swill strike you down with a lightning bolt from the sky just to point out I'm going to try and point out some of the just the little indicators of the quality of this gun as we go through and an interesting one is the release I'm holding the gun perfectly flat and if I just hit the mag release it literally spits the magazine completely out of the gun that's not normal that requires some really exact fit and finish but that's just a gimmick let's get on to the serious things it is marked with often fabric court Germany this one is let's see we have a serial number there CIP is proofing European Union proofing and it is also proofed on the bottom of the frame there and it has that court logo on the left side of the slide and lastly it is in 45 Auto Court did go the extra mile on their magazines and they actually have the witness holes numbered and then they've got their logo on the magazine as well this assembly requires pulling the slide back until the slide stop lever lines up with these cutouts in the frame and then we can push the slide stop out I'm going to poke it through with something plastic the fit is basically perfect then slide goes forward and comes off the front of the gun we can then take the barrel assembly pull it forward and out recoil spring barrel and then we have a breech block in here that we can also take out this is how they recommend taking it down for field stripping I'm going to go one step further and take the breech block out because that's where all the interesting bits are there's a cross pin right here you can only push it out from one side so there is the breech block pin and then let's push the breech block forward this is one of those pieces in fact they're a bunch of these in this gun where it looks tight when I'm taking this apart on camera and it is tight but it's not tight because we just pressed it in and made it fit it is tight because this is the exact fit that we wanted for this part so there's the whole thing field-stripped now let's take a look at how this breeches system works so the whole point of doing this instead of using the Browning system is to improve accuracy by having a fixed barrel that's you will always have better accuracy for an equal cost gun or an equal quality gun if it has a fixed barrel as opposed to a barrel that moves and that's that's pretty basic reasoning right there so if you have a fixed barrel you need to you have a limited number of options for how to make the gun work recoil is out because recoil requires the barrel to move you could have a gas-operated gun although gas operation is generally clunky to put into pistols and you generally only see it on very large pistols things like the willly or the desert eagle and that leaves you with delayed blowback well or a simple blowback but simple blowback in a 45 means you get a high point delayed blowback becomes the probably the best mechanism so then you have to pick a form of delaying mechanism and court being Germans went for roller delayed so the way this works is that we have rollers in each side of the bolt head right there so one on the left one on the right those are going to lock into two recesses on the breech so the trunnion here is fixed to the barrel this is going to slide in here to right there and then those rollers are going to be pushed out into those two recesses and that holds the bolt head closed so this is the configuration when it's actually locked in battery the bolt head and the rear half of the bolt are flushed together the rollers are protruding out the side of the bolt head and you can't push them in while maintaining contact between these two parts two part as long as this lever is down these two parts can't quite come all the way together and that means the firing pin can't protrude far enough to actually hit a primer in order to fire this lever has to be lifted up which then allows it to clear that little detent then the firing pin can go far enough to actually fire the thing I've got the what does that in the gun is this angled surface right here so when the slide is chambering a new cartridge this is going to come in like this the bolt head right here hits that ramp that's going to force the lever up and that allows the bolt to close and lock that is a safety mechanism that prevents the gun from ever firing if it's not fully in battery what the rollers engaged fact you can see the rollers sticking out right there now when it fires you have a lot of rearward pressure of the cartridge pushing on the bolt head here that force is going to be transmitted into these rollers pushing on this locking wedge and because of the angle on the wedge right there the force pushing back on the bolt is divided into two vectors some of the force is going to go outwards into the side of the slide and some of it is going to go rearward that rearward force is going to open the slide open the breech and cycle the whole thing but because some of that energy has been redirected outwards into the side of the slide the breech opens at a slower rate than if it didn't have this roller mechanism a slow enough rate that it is safe and by the time the cartridge is being pulled out of the chamber the pressure is low enough that it cycles safely this is the basically the exact same system that you have in the HK line of rifles the mp5 the g3 and all of all of the other guns in that family this is not the same as what's in the CC 52 pistol I'll leave that to a separate video but the cz 52 is actually a fully locked breech where this is delayed blowback the result of all this is a nice functional semi-automatic pistol with a pleasant recoil impulse that is also very accurate because of its fixed barrel and chambered for a relatively powerful cartridge in the 45 ACP a couple other little details I want to point out in most guns this recoil spring would be just a plain wound recoil spring but not for court so if I put it on the barrel this is the correct direction and I know that because back here we have a nice fit over the barrel if I flip it around and put it on backwards this has a little bit more wobble because they actually wound the spring conical II so it fits snug over the barrel at the back end and then it expands for where it has to go sit in the front of the slide so that you have a little bit of play when you put the barrel in the slide if you've ever put the taking the slide off of a plain blowback fixed barrel pistol like a Makarov you've almost certainly run into little issues of trying to align the barrel and the spring in the end of the slide and court put in the extra the extra care and the extra effort to make the spring conical so that that's not an issue I'll be honest I don't know exactly what the process is that results in that rainbow pattern some sort of oil quenching maybe but it's in a couple of places and it's really pretty it's kind of a shame it's not on the outside of the gun where you can see it all of the tolerancing on this pistol is fantastic everything slides exactly where it should be with exactly the right amount of play to give you the proper fit you'll notice it's pretty snug sliding that into position and I'll tell you what that means it just does not move and there is a remarkable amount of effort and skill and quality that has to go into doing that got the firing pin here as well that ought to go in the firing pin is its travel is limited by this waist in it which sits in this pin hole and this pin prevents the firing pin from going too far in or backing out of the gun even little elements like this pin are just very finally finished sting this isn't a normal pin it doesn't you know slide in tap it in or it's a little loose blue loose or a little tight no it is exactly the right size I'm gonna put my own claim to the test here and first try putting in the barrel boom that's that conical spring another little subtle element here that you don't really notice unless you're taking the gun apart the 1911 normally has rails just on the back half in order to improve the consistency of the fit court added rails to their barrel in the front of their slide rail sections right there which fit in grooves that they have cut right here in the front end of the frame so that slides on right there and back like that reassembly all I have to do is slide this all the way back and replace the slide stop pin the one thing that kind of bugs me about this is they have the same sort of detent here that the 1911 does which is going to it's just gonna encourage the idiot mark on slides so I am going to kind of do this as a three handed affair and use a plastic pen cap to push in that detent so the slide fit is exactly what you would expect on a gun with this sort of reputation it definitely lives up to that the trigger pull is very short and crisp maybe too short for a combat style of pistol to light but it is nice to shoot I think there's a really strong tendency for people to take a pistol like this and really want to denigrate it for being pointless and there is a legitimate question of what does this gun do that other things don't is it going to be a carry gun almost certainly not is it a military gun no is it a competition well you know if you look at the sights no it has sights that are not even remotely close to what you would want for serious marksmanship competition this is really by all standards of luxury product it is something you get because it is really nice and no matter how much you want to people may want to lash out at folks who do that who spend money on luxury frivolous at the same time you cannot deny the actual quality of the machining that went into this there is a tremendous amount of skill and workmanship that's required to create this and my initial impressions was something like this are always a little bit skeptical it's like well okay how much of this is convincing people to spend a lot of money and how much of it is actual substance because there are plenty of luxury products out there that are all hype and all brand and ultimately just not all that special this is not one of them the machining the mechanics the production quality in this is absolutely up to the hype and in fact in some ways the cost on these doesn't really even start to come close to the actual quality of the product you can't really make get this across on camera because so much of it is tactile how does the gun actually feel and you can come up with cliches like well it feels like butter or it breaks like glass this is a magnificently high quality pistol it it lives up to all of those cliches as kind of tired of worn out as they are the gun itself is magnificent the question is is it the gun for you is it something that you can justify purchasing and that's why court is a small boutique gun maker it's because this is not a mass-market thing it's not for everybody and that's fine it doesn't have to be but there are people for whom the money is not as important as the pride of ownership for something like this and so for those people there are guns like the court ers if that sounds like it might be you of course this one is coming up for sale here take a look at the description text below you'll find a link to rock island's catalog for this gun where you can see their pictures and description and they'll blink if you like to place a pin on it online through their website or alternatively you can come here here Rock Island Illinois and participate in the auction live thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 931,879

Rating: 4.9547658 out of 5

Keywords: korth, prs, revolve, r semiauto, 1911, best pistol, best handgun, ultimate, roller lock, roller delay, hk, h&k, hecklet, koch, german, germany, expensive, pricey, valuable, 45acp, 45, pistol, handgun, worlds best, precision, machined, boutique, cusotm, recoil, fixed barrel, accurate, most accurate, history, development, how it works, mccollum, forgotten weapons, inrangetv, inrange, kasarda, price, cost, luxury, status symbol, waffenfabrik, gun

Id: 02ZdYUPtp7g

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018