Of course, Desert Eagles just aren't one-handed kind of guns, and the safety is easy to function with the support-hand thumb. Hey, if you want to shoot the world's most powerful semiautomatic handgun, suck it up and accept that fact that it takes a big grip to house a magazine for big cartridges.Īlso, the safety is a big, heavy, rotating lever affair that I find difficult to activate or deactivate when shooting one-handed. For one, the grip is larger than is comfortable for most folks. It's a rather impressive bit of engineering and manufacturing.Įrgonomically, Desert Eagle pistols take some getting used to. Proponents of fixed barrels, which are also used on the well-known Beretta M9 currently issued to many of our troops, argue that the lack of barrel movement logically leads to greater accuracy.Ī marvel of complex CNC machining, the barrel sports a 1913-type optic rail with nine cross slots and a little more than 4.5 inches of mounting surface a dovetailed front sight drift adjustable for windage and of course the gas block/gas port and the intricate machining of the locking lug recess and feed ramp at the breech. How? The barrel's integral gas block dovetails around the front end of the slide, and a rotating lever located in the frame just above the front of the trigger guard locks the rear of the barrel solidly into place in a mortise inside the frame. Without delving too deeply into the debate, I'll just point out that the Desert Eagle does have a fixed barrel, meaning that the barrel attaches to the frame of the handgun rather than floating in the slide. When the slide closes, the rear of the barrel pushes the plunger back into the slide face, allowing the bolt to rotate into battery.įixed barrels have always been touted to have, arguably, advantages in the accuracy department. A spring-loaded plunger locks the bolt in place when out of battery to prevent it from rotating out of alignment with the lug recesses in the barrel breech. The bolt face is rather complex, but in essence it is a three-lug design. 50 AE cartridge safely because it's a stronger design than that of the more common tilting-barrel lockup. What it does for the Desert Eagle is enable the handgun to handle the pressures of the mammoth-dropping. Rotating bolts with proper locking lugs are used in a few semiauto pistol designs, so the concept is not particularly unusual. Dual mainsprings on twin guide rods return the slide forward from the rear of its stroke - the bolt picking up and chambering a fresh round, the locking lugs rotating into battery as the breech closes. 50 AE is the biggest dog on the semiauto porch - so big it broke the chain on the author's steel gong at 145 yards.Ī hefty, 1.65-inch wide extractor draws the empty cartridge case from the chamber, and a spring-loaded plunger-type ejector heaves it clear. Unlike most semiauto pistols, which harness recoil to function the slide, the Desert Eagle bleeds off a small amount of gas through a port at the bottom of the barrel and harnesses it to drive the action. Here's a closer look at each of these unique characteristics. The barrel itself is of fixed design, and it's a complex, machined arrangement with an optic rail on top and gas port and piston housing below. It has a rotating bolt that locks into the breech of the barrel when it goes into battery. It's gas operated rather than recoil operated.

The Desert Eagle is foundationally different than most semiauto pistols - in myriad ways. So when offered the chance to review the reintroduced version with a 10-inch barrel, curiosity got the best of me, and I jumped at the chance. It has the distinction of being almost a legitimate bear stopper - and I mean charge stopper, not just killer. It's got the good looks of a military Humvee: big, rawboned and very capable. While that's all true, it's also the most powerful semiauto handgun in the world, at least that I'm aware of. 50 AE ammo is expensive - if you can find it. Shooting one rapid-fire is impossible, no matter what Hollywood portrays. 50 AE Desert Eagle semiauto handgun has always been 'Why?' It's too heavy to carry comfortably, it's too big to even pretend to conceal it, and it's much too powerful for the average shooter to fire comfortably.

Being rather a practical sort, my reaction to the big.

Desert eagle 50 ae