![]() (Fun fact, the ambi safety also makes it easy to flick off with either thumb while dual wielding. I’m not the biggest fan, but I did find it easier to manipulate than the Beretta due to the Smith’s aforementioned smaller proportions. Looking down the gun, the magazine safety is on the left and the firing pin safety is on the right.Īnother downside, depending on your preferences, is the slide mounted safety/decocker combo. I say halfway because the rear sight retains both the magazine disconnect safety and the firing pin block the latter I would advise leaving in. Thankfully it’s easily removable on the user’s part by pushing out the rear sight halfway (to the right) and taking out the plunger and spring. As mentioned earlier, something I would consider to be one of the few downsides of this pistol is the magazine safety. Onto features, I’ll start with negatives. Another nice benefit of the stainless parts is that carbon is easier to spot during clean up. Top half comes off, remove guide rod and recoil spring, barrel slides out, and Bob’s your uncle. The take-down is simple Browning style: Slide comes back a hair, line up the take-down notch to the slide stop, and push it out. Aftermarket springs can of course be sourced through Wolff. Smith doesn’t sell these parts directly, but I had no trouble locating factory new replacements on Numrich and Midway by searching “S&W 5906”. But these 2 components usually total about $5-10, and along with a thorough cleaning (and a couple new mags) goes a long way to making these trade ins feel tuned up and ready for action. The commonly heard mantra on police trade ins is that they’re carried a lot and shot a little. Mine before… …and after.īefore shooting, the first thing I did after removing the magazine safety (more on that in a bit) was replace the recoil and mainspring. The benefit to stainless is that you can wail on it with brass or steel and not worry about a pretty blue finish getting messed up. It cleaned up nice and easy with some oil, a brass brush, and a bit of elbow grease. Mine was a newer example with MIM parts, and thankfully came with less gunk than my comrade’s did. His example was an earlier model with forged parts, but it also had some nasty corrosion under the grip panels that required quite a bit of effort to remedy. A friend of mine took the plunge a couple weeks before I did, and his initial response was less than reassuring. My personal S&W 5906 was an unspecified LE trade in, nabbed from Gunprime for a reasonable $330. The adjustable sights are less likely to be seen on trade-in examples due in part to higher cost, but principally due to being less “holster friendly” than the low profile Novak style. Sights on these are also very distinctive with the two major types being Novak style snag free type and the very sexy adjustable rear sight with protective wings. While its near universally accepted that one shouldn’t go through the trouble of replacing the MIM parts with forged, a well polished and broken-in forged variant would be the one I’d look for, if practicable. This could lead to a rougher trigger pull. Some argue that the forged parts, while inherently more durable, tend not to be finished as cleanly as the MIM parts would be. Pages of S&W forum posts have been dedicated to debating the merits of forged vs MIM parts. MIM sears are always paired with a MIM hammer, but in case you ever need to replace one and need to differentiate from a forged part, a MIM sear will actually have “Use only M hammer” molded into it. It can be tough to tell the difference between the latter two, but the MIM variants have a few dead giveaways: The lightening cuts on the hammer, and a line on the trigger where the mold halves were fused together. ![]() VariationsĪpproximately midway through production, the fire control parts (hammer, trigger, sear) went from a forged stainless finish to forged blued, and then briefly to MIM with a blackened finish. I can’t think of many guns that have stayed this consistently low a price for that amount of time. What’s significant, is that after doing a bit of topical research in checking forum posts from the early 2000’s to now, $350 has essentially remained the price you can pick one of these up for. When these used police guns started to show up on the market, they were as cheap as $250, but usually capped out around $350 at the highest. These guns were prolific among both large departments like the NYPD and LAPD, as well as smaller sheriff’s departments across the country. A descendant of the also under-appreciated 59 and 459, the four digit 5900 series, was Smith’s full size 9mm platform for their metal framed third generation guns. Manufactured in Springfield, MA from ’89-’99, the S&W 5906 is a quintessential example of American firearm design which perfectly reflected the period in that it was introduced. ![]()
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