Last September, Archon Firearms started shipping their new Archon B pistol to the customers. Generally, Archon B had favorable reviews, but two youtube bloggers, Honest Outlaw and Military Arms Channel had significant problems with light primer strikes. Fortunately, the company quickly took care of a problem in both cases and for now, no other issues have been reported.

At the Shot Shot 2019 I had an opportinity to take a closer look at the pistol, shoot it, disassemble and compare to some of the other compact pistols.

TFB already published an article about the origins and controversial history of this pistol: The Real Story Behind Russian Origins of Strike One STRYK B/ Archon Type B Pistol so we are not gonna talk about it today.

My first encounter with Archon B was on the range during the media day. Before shooting, I spent a couple of minutes looking at the company’s representatives who facilitated shooting in the bay.

A look at company’s representatives, their behaviour and attitude can tell you a lot about the weapon. Sometimes they are overly vigilant, hesitant to give you a lot of ammo and never take their eyes off the weapons. I’ve been in their shoes more than once. You constantly stare at the weapon, waiting for a stoppage, carefully looking at ejection pattern to pull the weapon off the line before it malfunctions.

But in this case, you could tell that company’s representatives were 100% confident in their weapon reliability. They were attentive, answered all the questions, but just by the look in their eyes you could tell that pistol performed very well.

I shot a few magazines (actually, all the magazines they had, when you give me free ammo I just can’t stop) and the weapon functioned very well. Fortunately, Salient Arms Glock 19 was in the same bay, so once I emptied all Archon B magazines it was time to compare it to a Glock.

To my surprise, my beloved Glock 19 actually had slightly sharper recoil compared to Archon B. Maybe it was lower bore axis or slightly heavier weight of Archon B, but the difference was noticable.

Later I disassembled the pistol while I was in the booth of Archon Firearms. Despite a pretty unusual internal design with “speedlock system” and special locking piece, field stripping was easy.

Disassembled Archon B pistol.

One little problem though – if you install the recoil spring backwards, you can still assemble the pistol, but you would not be able to rack the slide. Probably not a big deal for a US civilian market, but for some international customers the fact that you can incorrectly assemble the pistol is actually a dealbreaker.

In conclusion, Archon B seems to be a pretty solid alternative to many custom Glocks that are so popular on the market right now. Good grip texture, nice trigger, less muzzle flip, big slide release in the right spot – it has everything most custom Glocks have, and with MSRP of $849.95 it will actually be cheaper compared to many custom offerings.

Archon B comes in a gunbag with 4 spare magazines.