Shooting & Handling For fast targeting in any lighting condition, Sig equips the P226 ASE with SIGLITE tritium night sights. All in all, the ASE lived up to the reputation for accuracy that the Sig P226 has built since its introduction in 1983. That’s target pistol accuracy in many sport shooting competitions.
All of the three-shot groups were distinctly under an inch, with an average of 0.7 inches. All of these five-shot groups were below that, and the average of all three was 1.93 inches-twice as good as that standard. The windage issue would be easy to correct with a sight-adjustment tool.įor perspective, acceptable service pistol accuracy for a gun like this is generally considered to be keeping five shots in 4 inches at 25 yards. As is typical for a 9mm, the slower 147-grain rounds centered about 2.5 inches higher than the point of aim, and in this case some 1.5 inches left. The 124 grain V-Crown JHPs were good for elevation too, and closer to center, with three of the five shots hitting the 2-inch bullseye and the others a tad to the left of that. The 147-grain FMJs created a 2.2-inch five-shot group, with the best three clustering into 0.65 inches.Īs for shooting to the point of aim, the 115-grain FMJs were close for elevation, but the five-shot group was about 2 inches left at 25 yards, with none quite hitting the 2-inch aiming dot of the Birchwood Casey Shoot-N-C target. The 124-grain V-Crown JHPs came in second place with a five-shot group measuring 1.9 inches, but three of those rounds created the tightest cluster of the day at 0.55 inches. The best five-shot group with the 115-grain Sig FMJs measured 1.7 inches, with the best three rounds grouping into 0.9 inches.
RELATED STORY: Modular Handgun System – SIG Wins Army Contract for Service Pistol.For a third test load, I chose 147-grain Remington FMJs. Of course, with this being a Sig Sauer pistol, it only seemed fitting to test it with Sig ammunition: 115-grain FMJs and 124-grain V-Crown JHPs. To test the P226 ASE’s accuracy, I fired five-shot groups at 25 yards using a two-handed hold and a Caldwell Matrix rest placed on a concrete bench. The gun worked with the American-made 15-round magazines it came with as well as older MEC-GARs and extended 20-round magazines, including the old style popularized by the British SAS and the current iteration. It was 100-percent reliable, but this isn’t much of a surprise, as the P226 is one of the most thoroughly vetted 9mms out there, right alongside Glocks and Beretta in terms of exemplary feeding and cycling reliability. The test gun digested hundreds of rounds of factory ammo-round-nose and truncated cone FMJs, wide-mouth hollow points-and never missed a beat. Hammer Time To test its reliability, the author ran the P226 ASE with three different loads, and it performed flawlessly with each of them. But, both trigger pulls were very smooth, and the SRT lived up to its name with a short reset in SA mode. The DA pull was rather heavy-over the 12-pound top end of the Lyman device-and, by educated guess, more like 14 pounds. Out of the box, the SA trigger pull on my test P226 ASE weighed 5.41 pounds on average according to my Lyman digital trigger pull gauge from Brownells. The result is an attractive P226 that can stand up well to the elements while being easier to carry. Another noteworthy difference: The ASE’s grip panels are a tad fancier with Sig medallions inset into each side. How does it achieve this? The slide is stainless steel, but the frame is made of aluminum with a stainless PVD finish. While the two guns look very similar, the Stainless Elite variant weighs 42.2 ounces unloaded due to its all-stainless-steel construction, and the ASE weighs only 34 ounces. While this gun is quite breathtaking, I got my hands on an even better variant that is currently only a TALO distributor exclusive-the P226 Alloy Stainless Elite, or ASE. Voila: You’ve got the P226 Elite Stainless, one of Sig’s premium double-action/single-action (DA/SA) pistols today. Picture the iconic, double-stack Sig Sauer P226 9mm pistol of 1983, developed for U.S military trials of the period-where the P226 essentially tied the Beretta 92 in testing but lost the bid-updated with a Picatinny dust-cover rail, tritium night sights, a checkered frontstrap, an extended beavertail grip tang, fancy wooden grip panels, Sig Sauer’s Short Reset Trigger (SRT) and a stainless steel finish. Sig Sauer offers a number of P226s, and the author ranks the Nitron (left), ASE (middle) and Legion (right) as the “good, better and best” of the bunch.