Recoil magazine broke the story three days ago, on the new Hudson H9, but it wasn’t until yesterday that the full details came out about the new automatic pistol.
At first glance, the new Hudson H9 looks like a 9mm 1911 with a more robust dust cover – one that lies almost flush with the bottom of the trigger guard. However, the trigger and lack of swinging, locking links suggests there’s more to it than that.
Despite its futuristic appearance, the Hudson H9 is built on a steel frame, and feeds from 15-round, stagger-column metal magazines. It’s an interesting choice in this era of polymer-framed firearms. But even that isn’t enough to make the weapon newsworthy, but the location of its recoil spring is.
That oversized dustcover area actually houses the short recoil spring for the H9. I can assume this is for two reasons.
Image may be NSFW.
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First, by not housing the recoil spring and guide ride with the barrel, the slide itself can be shorter, which should result in a lower bore axis. The benefit of which is to reduce the amount of leverage or mechanical advantage the firearm’s recoil has over the shooter’s wrist. – Think of it like using a short prybar instead of a long one, it takes tremendously more effort to pry open something if you choke up on the prybar.
The second reason is likely to lower the height of the recoil impulse to better align with the shooter’s arm/wrist – though this is not terribly different from the aforementioned reason.
Both of these are very valid improvements to the standard, short-recoil, locked breech automatic handgun design, but what will be interesting to see is whether or not shooters buy the improvements or not.
Stay tuned for more information and hopefully some trigger time on the H9 from SHOT Show 2017 Range Day.
