LAR Grizzly: A 1911 on .45 Winchester Magnum Steroids

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I mean McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company taking a look at some of the guns they're going to be selling in their upcoming September of 2017 premier auction and today we're taking a look at a massively oversized pistol this is an lar grizzly these were this is basically an oversized and scaled up 1911 pistol chambered for the.45 winchester magnum cartridge you might ask why well that's a good question and the answer to that question is well they only made 15,000 of them over the course of about 15 years these went into production in 1983 they ceased production in 1998 you can actually basically still get parts for them which is impressive but their two main mark well okay there are three main markets for a gun like that grizzly here number one is handgun hunting if you want to be able to take serious game with a very powerful cartridge but you want handgun well usually the answer is a revolver but there are a small number of Magnum caliber automatics like the Grizzly that shoot that roll quite well number two is competition primarily metallic silhouette competition this is often also done with large bore revolvers but again guns like the Grizzly are suitable for it and the reason that something like this is appropriate for that type of competition is metallic silhouette involves knocking down steel silhouette targets there are actually standardized silhouettes of four different animals at between 50 and 200 yards so to be able to knock down a steel target effectively and reliably at 200 yards requires a pretty potent cartridge if you're shooting a pistol you want something that even if you get like an edge hit will still knock the target over cleanly so that you don't have to you know so your shot doesn't count as a miss and you don't have to take another one and of course the third market are people who just want a ridiculously oversized pistol where the Grizzly clearly suits that as well now this design was initially put by a guy named Perry Arnett and my understanding is his initial prototype was a colt 1911 that had a rather too of them that were chopped and spliced together to make a bigger cart a bigger gun for a bigger cartridge the three the the 45 Winchester Magnum cartridge has a 30 millimeter long case that's 50% again as long as the 45 acp it is dimensionally on the outside basically just a lengthened 45 acp however internally it's really it's not based on the same case because the case walls are substantially thicker the standard maximum pressure for 45 Auto is 18,000 psi for 45 Winchester Magnum it's 40,000 psi so more than twice the pressure and you get a substantial improvement in cartridge ballistics as well the 45 Otto would fire a 230 grain bullet at 850 feet per second 45 Win Mag and numbers vary a lot of Winchester Magnum cartridges are hand loaded and people have their own recipes that they like to follow but a pretty typical loading would be 230 grains at 1,450 feet per second so almost double the velocity of 45 Auto you're talking over 800 foot-pounds of energy which is a lot coming out of a pistol for the non-american folks that would be a 15 gram bullet fired at 450 meters per second so again a lot of energy coming out of a pistol no this is a standard actually it's a very nice Colt 1911 and for a size comparison there's the Grizzly it is substantially larger the most notable place is the length of the grip because it has to accommodate the larger cartridge but slide is longer the barrel is a little bit longer everything's just beefed up in general to handle this much more powerful cartridge standard barrel length the slide on here is a five and a half inch slide and a five and a half inch barrel was kind of the standard you could also get a six and a half inch barrel that just extended out in front of the slide and then grizzly or LA are actually manufactured 8 and 10 inch long slide conversions or models as well there's a comparison of the two magazines obviously 45 Winchester Magnum is a massively huge cartridge in fact interestingly you can see that as well here this is a 45 Win Mag magazine for the grizzly this is a 45 ACP magazine for the grizzly you can see they have a pretty hefty spacer in the back of the magazine body just to make it fit the much shorter 45 ACP it's hugeness aside the Grizzly is mechanically identical to a 1911 just scaled up in fact in a clever design choice a lot of the small parts in the Grizzly are actually completely interchangeable with the standard 1911 things like the magazine release parts and the grip safety and a bunch of the fire control parts in the back the trigger is of course different because it has to be longer and then obviously the slide the extractor the ejector those parts are different but a lot of the little small stuff is just straight off-the-shelf 1911 which makes a lot of sense for manufacture and it's also very helpful for people who own these guns today when the company is well when they're not really producing the guns anymore couple things we can point out here the serial number is an A prefix which means it's a mark 1 gun they made a total of about 15,000 Grizzlies between 1983 and 1998 the substantial majority of them are mark 1 guns like this one mark 1 indicated that it was a blued finish there was also a mark 2 which was parkerized and a little bit cheaper a mark 1 when they came out was gonna cost you something like six hundred and seventy five dollars and if he wanted a fancy stainless gun or a fancy shiny finish conversion kits extra parts you could easily drop $1,000 on a grizzly in the 1980s which was quite a lot of money the other two common marks that you will see around are the mark 4 and mark 5 and those are guns that were offered specifically in 44 Magnum and 50 action Express calibers the mark 1 was designed for 45 Winchester Magnum and then fairly quickly became offered as a multi caliber pistol with the various conversion kits so right off the bat it was offered also in 357 Magnum and 45 ACP they then also would release later on 10 millimeter automatic conversion a nine millimeter winchester magnum conversion I believe there was also a wildcat of three 357 slash 45 gwm and that was basically 45 Win Mag neck down to 357 here's an example of one of the conversion kits this is the 10 millimeter kit which actually comes with this pistol take a look in here this is going to include a barrel bushing and a barrel obviously you need the barrel and then the outside diameter of the barrel is going to be a little different so you get a barrel bushing you have a magazine for ten millimeter there we go and you'll notice a couple changes to this magazine it has a spacer in the back because 10 millimeter is a much shorter cartridge and then it also has a little crimp up here on the feed lips because the 10 millimeter is also a narrower cartridge than the various 45 calibers then down in here you're also going to get an ejector and extractor and a recoil spring which are all set up for 10 millimeters so a pretty good comprehensive conversion kit there did I mention that these are really huge pistols because they're really huge pistols the grip is mainly the grip length this thing is just so long that it can be honestly a little difficult to get a solid grip on however as long as you can handle and deal with that the Grizzly was a remarkably nice pistol this was in many ways better than some of the other Magnum automatics on the market at the time because it was based on a very well proven system the 1911 and these were produced as high-end pistols not just expensive magnums but really good pistols in general so they were quite accurate out of the they're really quite smooth to operate although you have to deal with a 27 pound mainspring they have a reputation for being quite reliable that triggers on them right out of the box are really quite nice and it's a very light trigger really quite crisp you get ambidextrous safety out of the box it's you know this wasn't they didn't cheap out on these they actually did these quite well and that's part of the reason they are popular and I think it's part of the reason that they are if I had my choice of Magnum automatics while something like a wild ii is a mechanically interesting and neat gun if I actually wanted to shoot something like this the grizzly would probably be my go-to choice my understanding is that these went out of production in 1998 out of a potential fear over lawsuits around that time there was kind of a trend in the u.s. of people attempting to sue handgun companies handgun manufacturers over crimes committed with handguns no one ever did that with the grisly but lar apparently stopped production out of fear of that and when they decided okay this this trend isn't really something we have to worry about it's not going to affect us they went to put the gun back into production and their insurance company had tripled their liability rates because they're making handguns and at that point it just wasn't worth it to them to put this thing back into production and so they didn't I believe they're actually still in business making parts although it seems that they're not making magazines because magazines for these things are quite expensive and a bit scarce to find of course you they're a bunch of different calibers and magazines depending on what cartridge the gun is chambered in they trying to find a magazine for anyway this particular one kind of cool is actually set up for three different cartridges as you see it right now it's in 45 Win Mag and then if being sold here at Rock Island it's also coming with a 10 millimeter conversion kit and a 45 ACP conversion kit and a couple of mags for each cartridge so pretty cool you get a nice complete kit if you'd be interested in have not yet of course it is coming up for sale here in the second weekend of September I believe if you take a look at the description text below you'll find a link to rock island's catalog page on this whole this lar grizzly package you can take a look at their pictures and description and see all of the contents of everything that's coming with the gun and if you decide you want it you can place a bid over the phone or through the website or live here at the auction in person thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 659,837

Rating: 4.9669728 out of 5

Keywords: LAR Grizzly, grizzly, grizzly mk1, Perry Arnett, Handgun hunting, 10mm Auto, Winchester Magnum, Winchester Magnum cartridge, on .45 winchester magnum steroids, Forgotten Weapons, 1911, magnum automatics, lar, good trigger pull, good adjustable sights, huge gun, powerful gun, easy swapping, Government Model, conversion kits, history, development, silhouette, target shooting, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, 9mm winmag, 45acp, 45wm, automag, wildey, amt, desert eagle

Id: vDqmi4ID8SI

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/balseat]

Is it big 1911 time again?