Bought a hatful of nickeled .45 brass the other day, and as I was resizing them, I found 3 .45 GAPs mixed in with the rest. Please, refresh my ancient memory bank: what was the .45 GAP supposed to do that the .45 ACP couldn't do? Was it engineered for one of those new plastic pistols?
Regards, and thanks.
Fit into the magazines/grips of slightly smaller guns than a 1911. .45ACP ballistics at .45ACP+P pressures.
All true, but I prefer to think of it as proof that sometimes perfection ain't perfect.
The intent was to produce a Glock .45 with a smaller frame and while it did reduce the frame size a little it was, IMO, not enough to matter.
Snake is right about the pressure. It was right up there.
I agree with both Snake and, separately, Charlie (with whom I agreed on this concept in the past). Back in another thread from February of this year, I said this regarding the .45Gap:
"…As to the .45GAP, I really had high hopes for the entire concept. But at the risk of being removed from the same list that Charlie mentioned for other reasons (or perhaps "added" to another one), it just seemed mishandled from the beginning. I swear that the original prototypes that I played with were nothing more than 17's with different innards. For all kinds of reasons (the gun, the holsters, the ammo pouches, and more), that would have been the way to go. However, by the time things got introduced formally that was not the way the guns appeared.
And the original ammo itself sorta caused a problem for I sat in a presentation by the factory who made it and was told along with everybody else in the room that it couldn't really reproduce the performance levels that most people would want or expect. That was not only a disappointment but it made us all wonder why one would even bother to consider, let alone develop it. Then a competitor comes out with a safe-to-fire version of the round that
does offer that performance we were all hoping for. Unfortunately, by then most people believed the first guys and either had given up on any potential value to the cartridge or had become distrustful of the new stuff; causing all kinds of harm to the idea actually getting across to the consumer or taking hold in the marketplace.
And that was too bad for if you could have put this diameter
bullet into a sufficiently powered
cartridge and then put that
round into a frame that from front-to-back was shorter than that required to take the standard .45acp, it could have really (and legitimately) made valuable inroads into the territory staked out by the .40S&W. Oh well…"
Hope my ramblings are of value in refreshing your memory about what has unfortunately become something of another "also ran" in a long list of cartridges that were certainly interesting and did fill (dare I say it) a "gap" in the overall scheme of things but that never caught on or achieved most of its initial goal(s). Makes you kind of more appreciative of things like the .40S&W, which a number of us thought might be misunderstood when we were working on it and the initial guns to support it.
