Sunday Smith #67: PC Model 4006 Shorty .40 Mk3S, 1996

 Just titling this post was difficult. You'll see this gun referred to by a bunch of different names, with "Shorty Forty" or "Shorty .40" being the most common. Hardly ever is it acknowledged as a Model 4006 variant, which is what Smith calls it on the label on the side of the case.

Unlike the compact double stack 9mm pistols, which got normalized as the Second Generation Model 469 and the Third Generation 6904 and 6906, Smith & Wesson never did catalog a "mainstream" compact .40 S&W double-stack in the Third Gen. The TSW ("Tactical Smith & Wesson") variant of the Model 4013 had a nine-round double-stack magazine, but your regular 4013 was just a slightly bigger-bored sibling to the 9mm Model 3913 single-stack.

The lore behind the Shorty .40 goes something like this...

South African IPSC shooter and pistolsmith Paul Liebenberg had come to this side of the pond to work at Pachmayr, back when they were still a premier custom pistol house, before hanging out his own shingle at Pistol Dynamics in the late '80s. Liebenberg was something of an evangelist for the "Centimeter" wildcat cartridge and wound up getting tapped to do a proof-of-concept conversion on a couple of Model 5906's.

That led Smith to hire him to help stand up their new Performance Center department. At the time, Smith engineers were balking at the idea of a subcompact .40, due to high chamber pressures and unforgiving slide velocities. As the lore goes, Liebenberg showed up at a meeting with the prototype of what became the Shorty Forty, plopping it on the table and announcing "There's the impossible."

The initial pistol sold so well in its limited run at Lew Horton that similar batches were made in two subsequent years; five hundred guns each in 1992, 1993, and 1995.

1995 saw the introduction of the two-tone Melonited Mark 3 variant (there must have been a Mark II, but info is sketchy), with an accompanying all-stainless Mark 3S coming along in 1996. 

The slide contours of the Mk3 differ from the earlier guns and are somewhat reminiscent of those found on some PC945 variants as well as the later M&P series pistols. They feature ambi safeties, Novak sights, checkered frontstraps, and have hand-fitted barrel bushings and tuned actions. The double-action trigger on the pictured example is nicer than any semi-auto DA trigger I've owned other than my Langdon Beretta.

Production total for the Mk3S was 612 pistols and the catalog price was $1,024.95. The pictured example came with the factory box and, while showing too much wear to excite a real collector, is still in very nice cosmetic condition. It was acquired for $450 in 2020.

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