Hi everyone, I recently acquired a reasonably clean Model 59, manufactured in 1976 according to both the serial number range and what S&W customer service told me. No box, one magazine, but it appears to be all-original and in good shape - some marks on the frame, some bluing worn off the the hammer and the right-hand side of the decocker/safety but the slide is in great shape.

So, I took it to the range today and put 100 rounds of Fiocchi 115gr. FMJ through it. The good news - the, shall we say, austere sights and big grip were not problems for me, and I shot it easily as well as any handgun I own. Great trigger in both single and double-action modes, and the reset is incredible. Very easy to shoot fast. Now, the bad news - I had a failure to feed every other magazine or so. Always the same type - cartridge slightly nose-up on the feed ramp, easily cleared by dropping the magazine and opening the action, and always in the middle of a string of fire. Extraction, ejection, and return to battery (other than the occasional malfunction described above) were all positive and predictable.

I had given the pistol only a cursory cleaning before shooting it, and based on their appearance I'm assuming the recoil and magazine springs are the originals, or at least very old. I'm hoping that a thorough cleaning and eventual replacement of those springs will result in better reliability. Any chance it was the ammo? The Fiocchi I used has a somewhat pointier bullet than a lot of ball 9x19 that I've seen, and the 59 has a pretty steep and narrow feed ramp.

One other thing. The magazine appears to be native to the pistol, is blued and has a "lazy ampersand" S&W logo and "9MM" on the baseplate, but no "A". The follower is peculiar - it's black and seems to be plastic, not aluminum, but doesn't have "legs", but rather two cylindrical protrusions on the underside. Most notably, it easily accepts 15 rounds, not the 14 I was expecting. Were there factory 15-rounders or is this a sign of a weak spring?

Anyhow, thanks for reading all this. I'm going to try and iron these issues out, as it's a fantastic shooter, and looks like a million bucks, as well as being a fairly historically-significant firearm. The finish and roll marks on the slide are just gorgeous. I'm sure there's some old-school Smith & Wesson collectors/shooters here laughing at my rhapsodizing over the bluing on my pitiful Bangor Punta 9mm but to me it's pretty sharp.