Nothing that you don't.
This is a straight Model 10, a "no dash" model. Those were produced between 1957 and 1961. From the looks of the internals of the cylinder and barrel, this one was carried a lot and shot very little.
I am going to get a Tyler t-grip adapter for it and that's all. Or a BK grip.
Then I plan to take it to a PPC match and have some fun going up against the 1911 fanboys.
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Looks like mine, which belonged to a retired police officer who sold it to my father when my father decided he needed a handgun to defend his shop (his shop was on the border between the black and white parts of town and this was during the desegregation troubles in the South). It is a pleasant-shooting and fairly accurate weapon and as close to point and click reliability as you'll find. He never did need it to defend his shop, but he did almost get shot by two police officers once because of the gun. So it goes.
BTW, the 1911 fanboys won't be as accurate as you, but they'll correctly point out that their hand cannon puts bigger holes in the target than yours ;).
You'll like that T-grip! It makes a world of difference.
A really fine weapon. I owned an original, standard Model 10 for many of years. The original owner was an aging deputy sheriff back in my old home town. It was the first new weapon he ever owned. My son has it now, and it is still in original condition.
Yeah, but in a match, speed and accuracy rule-- you have to get pretty close to a dividing line on the target for that .094" difference in bullet diameter to matter any. I'm reasonably quick with a revolver and I don't have to worry about jams or magazine issues. No safeties to manipulate, no worries about "limp-wristing", just align the sights and have at it.
Oh sure, but the 1911 fanboys will point out that the purpose of a match is practice in case you have to use it in real life, and if you have to use it in real life the .45 ACP puts a much bigger hole in the bad guy than a .38 Special. After all, the 1911 was designed to stop crazed warriors high as a kite on PCP that the .38 Special wouldn't stop, so that makes it better, right?
At which point you then get to point out that hey, you have to actually hit the bad guy before the size of the hole counts, and you'll have already put two holes in the bad guy by the time they remember to rack a round into the chamber and flip the thumb safety :).
Not to mention that the .38+P Special has a bit more "oomph" to it than the old .38 Long Colt and modern bullets are a bit more effective than the old lead round nose slugs. And I've seen a couple of shooters accidentally bump the magazine catches and dump their magazines when they didn't want to.
Bottom line for me is if shit goes sideways in the middle of the night, I want simple. Simple is a revolver. Really nice is a revolver with Crimson Trace grips. Maybe give up one round and go with an L-frame .44 Special.
That was the first pistol I'd ever fired, a zillion years ago on a police range. Left a healthy respect for the .38 special too. That one is prettier than the one I tried back when.
Eck!
Given that the magazine catch is right there by the thumb safety on a 1911, yeah, easy enough to do, and of course a 1911 won't fire if the magazine ain't in regardless of whether it's cocked and has a round in teh chamber.
Word of advice -- I wouldn't use +P in a weapon of that era. They weren't designed to handle the chamber pressure, and while it's likely that it *would* handle the pressure because it is after all a full frame revolver made of real metal rather than pot metal, the fact that it was neither designed nor tested at those pressures would make me decidedly nervous about doing so. It'd be like me trying to fire the equivalent of +P shotgun shells out of my 1958 Sears 20 gauge that came down to me from my grandfather. Uhm, no.
1911s will shoot without a magazine. The Browning Hi-Powers did.
SAAMI downrated the .38 Special cartridge in the `70s, out of concern over the strength of the very early guns. A 1960s .38 Special load was roughly equivalent to today's +P. The consensus among the S&W community is that all of the Model 10s are safe for use with +P, but not so with the earlier M&Ps (pre-Model 10s).
Not that most shooters use +P (or load to that level) on a routine basis. There is no real reason to go above .38 performance on a target range.
[..]if shit goes sideways in the middle of the night, I want simple. Simple is a revolver.
Oh yes. That's why I went back to 'em. I got tired of malfunction drills, and had to cut practice time in half anyway. Since I don't carry a gun for a living, revolvers win decisively as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to go all bass-ackwards, building a lifestyle around my hardware. Also--and at some risk of sounding like a Pollyanna--violent confrontations are surprisingly low-probability events, and the ones that require more than 6 rounds to resolve aren't going to be handled by anything short of an air strike. (Or a SWAT team.)
The Model 10 is the definitive revolver as far as I'm concerned; S&W got everything right that time. And hey, if it was good enough for Ed McGivern ...
According to the person I talked to who shot one extensively forty years ago, a M1911A1 won't. No magazine, no shooty. Apparently the military was concerned that idiot recruits would remove the magazine and believe this meant the pistol was unloaded, and then they'd pull the trigger to decock it and get an unpleasant surprise.
Of course we *are* talking about forty year old memories, so he may be full of it :). Besides, modern 1911-pattern guns may have a raft of "modern" safety features needed to make them compliant with bizarro-world nanny state laws created by people who don't know how accidental discharges happen in real life (unlike the military, which tracks that kinda thing to a fare-thee-well), so who knows what they'll do?
In any event, my first recommendation for self-defense in cases where you can't access a shotgun is *always* a revolver. I'm a big fan of point-and-click simplicity. It's something I emphasize to my design teams as an engineer, and it's something I want in my weapon if I have to use it within moments (because that's all you'd have if you had to use it -- moments). I do say that if you've chosen .38 because you can't handle the additional weight and kick of a .357, and you plan to load it with +P rounds for self defense purposes, you should at least fire a few at the range so you won't be surprised by the blast and kick. While even the most powerful +P rounds for the .38 aren't as powerful as a "normal" .357 round, it still is a bigger pop than the pleasant pop of a normal .38 round, something I had no problem with as a 70 pound 10 year old nevermind as an adult.
I'll stand on this: The M1911A1 did not have a magazine disconnect.
Okay, your experience is slightly more recent than his (he was a nuclear technician on the Big E BTW) so I'll accept that.
I had a S&W 38 special revolver. It bit my hand every time I fired it. I bought a Pachmayr grip. It solved that problem.
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