I took my sister shooting on Friday with the intention of shooting my new Marlin 925 and sighting in my Ruger Mark III Hunter (I replaced the fiber optic sights with normal usable sights).

I also decided to bring out my TTC which hasn't seen a lot of use since I bought it despite having quite a bit of ammo stocked up.

Firstly, I'd like to talk about the ammo. I was shooting Romanian surplus and Bulgarian surplus. The Romanian stuff comes in these 72 round packs that manage to break open pretty easily spilling your ammo all over the bottom of your ammo storage container.

The Bulgarian stuff comes in packs of 40 on 8 round stripper clips. However, the stripper clips don't do much other than hold 8 rounds (which conveniently is how many the TTC loads). I suspect the stripper clips were designed with another weapon in mind.

The Romanian ammo is pretty consistent. It came in a sealed tin (which if you don't have the proper tool is a pain in the ass to open) so all of the ammo came out looking more or less new. I believe this ammo is from the 80's.

The Bulgarian ammo came in packs, but no sealed container. The Bulgarian ammo also appears to have some sort of lacquer seal (black) around the primer. I believe this ammo to be from the 50's.

I fired close to 200 rounds out of the TTC with it being split about 50/50 as to Romanian and Bulgarian ammo. The Romanian ammo nearly always went off on the first trigger pull. The Bulgarian ammo definitely had a lot of stiff primers however which OFTEN required 2 or more trigger pulls to go off. However, all of the ammo did fire. Still, it kind of wrecks your groove to have to cock the pistol every time it fails to fire.

Despite firing, there were definitely small (fractions of a second) delays in when the trigger was pulled and when the Bulgarian ammo would go off and the power behind each shot was as different as shooting 38 special and .357 magnum from the same gun from round to round.

Now onto the gun itself.

The TTC is a pretty crude gun. The metal work is poor at best with lots of tooling marks. The sights are lousy (think Springfield Armory GI 1911) and the grip angle is awkward. The grip angle wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the loose bakelite grip on the right side of my gun. I think it is inherent in the design if the grip isn't made to perfectly fit the frame.

The magazines look the same but they don't quite fit into the pistol the same. One will not go into the gun easily unless the slide is already locked back.

The trigger is lousy in every aspect. The trigger pull is just awful. It is hands down the worst out of any guns I own (including my Mosin Nagant rifle), and the sharp corners of the trigger act like a serrated knife when you fire the gun.

Racking the slide was near impossible when I first bought the gun unless the hammer was already cocked. I filed down a burr in the metal and now the slide is easily racked.

The safety on the gun isn't much to talk about. It was added after the fact so that the gun could be imported. It doesn't always work and sometimes the trigger won't move backwards even with the safety disengaged. There is also no firing pin or hammer safety so if you drop this gun with a round chambered, it will most likely go off.

Accuracy? I wouldn't call it a target gun. I've heard the term "military accuracy" used before. I believe they basically meant that if the gun can consistently hit a man sized target, it is good enough. This gun certainly fits that definition. But at 7 yards, I was having a hard time predicting where the shots were going to land. I'm not the best shooter, but I have MUCH tighter groupings with my 92FS or S&W 686 (shooting 158 grain .357 magnum) at 15 yards. In fact, I don't even think you could call shooting the tokarev "grouping". I think the ammo played into this a bit, along with the lousy...well everything.

The barrel on mine is a little rough as well. You have to clean these things pretty quickly after shooting them due to the corrosive surplus ammo.

All in all, I didn't have very much fun shooting this gun. The recoil and ergonomics of the pistol left my trigger finger cut up and blistered (after only 200 rounds). The one REALLY good thing about shooting the TTC though was that EVERY other gun I shot afterward felt REALLY REALLY good including my S&W Walther PPK/S (which managed to go 14 rounds without jamming!!).

My final verdict, if you are going to spend 200+$ on a gun and ammo, this shouldn't be it. I know the 7.62x25 is an impressive round (assuming they are all loaded the same), but the platform itself sucks. Bear in mind, this is only my experience with the Romanian TTC. Every other Soviet bloc country had their own version and the CZ52 also shoots 7.62x25. However, the only experience I had with a CZ52 was a stuck roller (yeah, those crazy Czechs use a roller system for the slide!) so the gun was unable to be fired.

-Zach