WE-Tech Luger: Hans, Are We The...?

Well, now. My G36C does not fit in my photo booth but pistols sure do. So you guys are going to get one of my patented long winded treatises shitposts, but this time airsoft flavored.

The myth; the legend. That iconic silhouette. The reason to this very day some 9x19mm ammo has "9mm Luger" stamped on the base. For when you need a handy shortcut to show the audience that your guy is the movie's villain. If you need vays of makingk zhem talk.

For all of these and more, accept no substitute or imitation other than the Luger P08. Okay, okay. This one clearly is an imitation because it's a friggin' airsoft gun. But you know what I mean.

So welcome, ladies and gents, to what I propose to you is the worst choice for a skirmish sidearm in the world.

How's that for a hook?

The WE-Tech Luger is a clone of the original Maruzen Luger design, and it's got everything: Low capacity for both ammo and gas, poor reliability, miserable accuracy and range thanks to having no hop-up whatsoever, and a finicky and comically overwrought mechanical design that is if nothing else exactly as absurd as the real gun it replicates.

But damn if it doesn't look cool.

Yes, it faithfully reproduces the Luger's rather bonkers toggle locking action, complete with the top mounted ejection port. As a gas blowback gun it goes through the entire mechanical song-and-dance every time you pull the trigger sans actually ejecting a spent case, with the bolt carrier folding in half and flipping up out of the top of the gun. And that's glorious.

Obviously I have a long standing and deep seated predilection for amassing gizmoes with contrived and off the wall mechanical actions. The Luger's screwball action made me immensely covetous of it probably since about the age my hands would be big enough to hold one, and I finally wound up with this, the WE-Tech version. And even though it's objectively crap, I still have it and I'm keeping it forever. Because it's neat, gods damn it, that's why.

Everyone pegs the Luger as that quintessential gun of World War II, inevitably being held by one of the baddies, but its first production actually dates back to 1898 and it was used by several militaries, not just Ze Germans. Its short recoil toggle locked breech action has a lineage that can be traced back to the Maxim machine gun, of all things, via a detour through the Borchardt C-93 in the last decade of the 1800's. This was before Browning's tilting barrel short recoil system took over the world, and thus presumably before anyone knew better. Perhaps it's fitting that nowadays the Luger is inevitably positioned as kind of the yin to the 1911's yang. This is surely because people watched too many war movies.

The Luger's action really has to be seen to be believed. Here's a slowmo of what it looks like when it cycles:

This is yet another tendril of the Great Attractor — One of those natural filters which immediately sorts all men into two groups. To witness this will instantly determine if you want one, or if you simply (and possibly rightly, all of this notwithstanding) identify that it's just silly. The latter can stop reading now, and need not apply.

Indeed, the Luger is very, very silly. Many of its inherent aspects also conspire to make it a choice that is, let's just say, suboptimal for use on the airsoft battlefield. Everyone will tell you that you probably ought to just get a Glock or a Hi-Capa or an M92 or a Galaxy and be done with it. And they're probably right.

For a start, while the Luger's magazines may be rakishly slanted and very stylish, they only hold fifteen BBs. Which is to be fair nearly double what its real steel inspiration holds, because the 9mm Luger only held eight. They are at least easy to load thanks to a sliding button on the follower you can use to pull it down, which again mimics the real steel. Real Luger magazines don't load from the bottom via a hole in the front, though.

But because they're so thin and their interior volume is so small, the magazines don't hold much gas and will struggle to allow you to reliably ditch all 15 of those shots.

I clocked mine at 275.3 FPS with a 0.2 gram BB on the first shot with a fresh fill of gas just now, but it tails off into the low 200s by the end of the magazine. (That's 0.7 joules, by the way.) It's also smoothbore, obviously, and it hasn't got any hop-up at all. So you're throwing nothing but curveballs, and you're not throwing them very hard. At the furthest end of its range, you get group sizes measured in yards. Once your opponents realize this you're likely to be done in quite quickly, because they can not only shoot further than you but they can also actually hit you once their BBs get there. You may be able to amuse yourself using the Luger for indoors CQB instead, but I think you'll run into its handling problems and ammunition capacity shortfall pretty quickly. But hey, maybe you'll get lucky and the other guys will all show up using revolvers. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are kings.

As far as handling goes, the Luger is a 19th century gun and it shows. It does indeed have a last round hold-open on the breech which you will rarely see before yours runs out of gas unless it is meticulously maintained and lubricated, and preferably if you're judicious with how rapidly you diddle the trigger. But unlike a modern gun — and I'm including arms as old as the 1911 as "modern," here — there is no external bolt release. You have to drop your magazine and grab the knobs on the bolt manually to rack it back shut. And when the breech is locked open the damn thing is about 1-1/4" taller than usual which means it probably won't go back into its holster very well even if you do have one for it. Putting it away when it's empty is complicated enough when you're just target shooting. On the battlefield, all of this fiddling around with it when it's empty is more likely just to get you shot.

It's just as well that it's so inaccurate because its irons provide a truly historically authentic sight picture. The rear notch is incredibly tiny and the front blade is veritably needle pointed. Forget about using the sights in low light or against moving targets. In fact, it's probably best if you forget about using the sights at all.

These shortcomings are built right in. They've really got nothing to do with whether or not WE-Tech messed this up, it's just how Lugers work.

But meanwhile, the Maruzen design this is based on is also positively Triassic and lacks a couple of key amenities we take for granted these days. One of them is that it lacks the flip-up mechanism on the internal pintle that strikes the gas valve on the magazine, which unless you've tinkered with yours heavily you may not even realize your gas gun has. The upshot of this is that you can't insert a magazine unless the gun is cocked. The other upshot of this is, of course, that since the Luger lacks a decocker you can't store your gun uncocked with the magazine in it. You also can't manually lock the breech open if you want to except by inserting an empty mag, or groping around inside it to find the internal hold-open lever with the tip of your finger through the ejection port while you hold the action open with your other hand.

While we're at it, we may as well talk about how the Luger's trigger works. Because it's nuts.

We'll have to start with the safety, which is this toggle on the left hand side of the gun. This locks the trigger by physically and visibly sliding an angled piece of metal into the trigger linkage path. When it's on it says "Gesichert," secured.

Flicking it up unblocks the works.

That's right. The hawk eyed among you have already noticed (or already knew, because you are airsoft/firearm nerds) that the Luger has an external trigger linkage. Modern arms have the decency to tuck this away inside the frame someplace, where it's safe from both damage and being unexpectedly poked by foreign objects... Or foreign adversaries.

The Luger's trigger path is absolutely ludicrous. It comprises six separate moving components with no less than four individual pivot points, and that's before you even get to the sear.

It's amazing, then, that the trigger somehow manages not to be terrible. It has a few millimeters of takeup slack but otherwise has a very short actual pull and a crisp break that is utterly wasted on a lousy airsoft gun.

That iconic half-moon trigger pivots on its own pin, which flips a little toggle that's built into the side plate you have to take off when you field strip the gun:

The toggle in here is what translates the motion from the trigger in the frame to the upper receiver, via not one but two separate pivoting linkages.

The latter of which has a little arm on it which hangs down and transmits the force back into the lower receiver, flipping yet another linkage which hooks up to the sear and drops the hammer. This is batshit. I recorded video evidence so I can prove to you that I am not making this up.

And yes, while it's not terribly likely it is absolutely possible to set the thing off without touching the trigger if something pokes the end of the rearward trigger linkage, just below the cocking knob on the left hand side of the gun. Sig Sauer eat your heart out; Georg Luger invented the uncommanded discharge first, and he's got you beat by a hundred years.

It shouldn't surprise anyone who's been paying attention to airsoft pistols that the WE Luger field strips pretty much just like the real thing. It starts with swinging out this takedown lever forward of the trigger on the left side.

That lets you take off the trigger linkage plate, but as usual this is full of caveats and gotchas. Just like putting in the magazine, you can only disassemble the Luger if it's cocked.

The upper receiver (you can't really call it a "slide") comes off the front at this juncture, with a slight hitch at the end of its travel. You have to poke the trigger linkage in the upper to swing its little catch out of the way so it'll clear the rails.

Ostensibly you'd think the Luger's slideless design ought to obviate the need to mill rails into the frame, but since the entire kit and caboodle recoils a short distance with every shot they still have to be there.

Just like the upper receiver, the lower frame is hideously complicated. The square finger sticking up in the center right is the linkage that ultimately trips the sear.

All of this kind of adds up in one direction. Never mind the WE Luger's dire performance, low range, or its crappy accuracy or even dinky magazines. Here's the thing: It's an unreliable piece of shit.

It's a lovable unreliable piece of shit, sure. But it's still like owning an old British sports car. It looks very nice and it has a lot of charm, but it's still not exactly brilliant even when it is working. Which it probably isn't. And don't count on it doing so without you tinkering with it all the time.

I only use my Luger to plink around now and again in the back yard. I've only ever skirmished with it, like, maybe twice. And even then only as a jape. Look at me with my monocle and my commandant's hat. Curse you, Sherman, you've foiled me yet again! Et cetera.

But I've already had to replace its sear twice.

This is not a job for the faint of heart, but rather instead should probably be tackled by a seasoned aerosmith. It requires basically taking every bit of the lower receiver apart and it's all full of little springs and tiny pins to get lost, and getting the mainspring back in is a son of a bitch. When yours needs this you'll know it, because it'll run away full auto until it's out of gas. You don't even have to touch the trigger. Without a working sear you can't even close the breech closed on a loaded magazine without the bastard taking off on you. For added fun and excitement it'll just spring this on you one day, at random and totally out of the blue. You'd better hope you had the fucker outside at the time and not, say, anywhere near your computer monitor.

And trust me, that day will come. You'll get your turn, because they all do this sooner or later. The sear is just cast potmetal but it rubs against parts that are actual steel. The end result is entirely predictable.

Apparently back in the real world, the Germans experimented with trying to make a submachine gun out of the Luger's action and determined that its rate of fire was too fast to be practicable. Brother, let me tell you all about that.

Even so, I like my little Luger. Even though it's wimpy and it can't hit the broad side of a barn, and it doesn't shoot very far, and every so often it blows up in my face.

It's shiny. It's hipster. It's always a conversation starter, and it's just undeniable.

Just don't buy one as your first gun.