“The Answer” Reloaded
I shot from my Tucker Gunleather “The Answer” holster at practice last Monday, after wearing it around the house for a couple of weeks. It’s comfortable, fast, and I forgot it was there. It being my first IWB holster, I don’t have much to compare it by, but the experience has been very positive. I’d buy one again.
There was, however, one thing that kind of bugged me. As the night wore on, and my pants drooped a little more, the gun felt like it a bit on the loose side. I noticed this in particular when I was doing things like turning and shooting from behind cover. The gun didn’t fall out, but I found I was less confident in my movement. Maybe it’s a double-edged benefit of the design: it allows the pistol to shift slightly as you move around without binding while retaining it in place due to the pressure of the leather pad against the gun against the kydex retaining shell. This means its comfortable and quiet, but it isn’t as aggressive a hold as you’d get from a full kydex holster shell.
And one thing you definitely can’t do with “The Answer” is hold it upside down with the gun in it…it’ll fall right out. I just modified mine to add more positive retention.
The original holster (ordered from Pistol-Gear) has kydex on only one side of the trigger guard. In the image you can see how there are two plastic tubes that are adjustable (to a point, before they bore through the back of the leather). There’s a detent in the kydex as you’d expect, which provides the “grab” on the front of the trigger guard to keep the gun in place.
It’s not as grabby as full kydex holsters, because of its one-sided construction, but it works pretty well. Your body presses against the gun, which forces the trigger guard to touch the kydex. Plus, the leather is providing friction, so the gun is pretty well in place.
My modified holster adds a piece of plastic from my Uncle Mike’s Kydex OWB holster, which I had retired because it scratches up the takedown level of my XD. Here’s what the salvaged plastic looks like in place. You can see how it now grips just the front of the XD’s trigger guard.
As an additional bonus, the rubber spacers from the Uncle Mike’s holster are shorter by just the right amount to replace the original ones without deforming “The Answer’s” geometry. And the retention screws are threaded exactly the same, but are shorter, so they work better. The only difference is that they’re not allen wrench heads, but use a regular phillips head screw. The contrast in screws actually looks pretty cool in my opinion. So now, as with the Uncle Mike’s R.I.P. holster, I can adjust the retention from very loose to very tight.
Here’s what the piece of plastic looks like, before installation. I used a dremel tool to carve it out of the Uncle Mike’s. You can see that new holes had to be drilled, and I rounded off the edges so they wouldn’t scuff up the leather. Yes, I’m not very good at using power tools. The trickiest part was to figure out the alignment so the two grippy detentes were lined up correctly.
Here’s what it looks like installed.
Now I have the adjustable snappier retention of the Uncle Mike’s and the comfort of “The Answer”. Due to where the plastic is installed, the leather is still free to mold itself in whatever way it wants in exactly the same way it could before. I can hold the holster upside down, and the gun doesn’t fall out. One-handed reholstering hasn’t been affected, and there hasn’t been a problem with the new plastic getting in the way of the gun (I ramped the edges anyway just to be sure).
One thing I might have done is shorten the piece of plastic toward the muzzle end of the gun so its rigidity wouldn’t prevent the leather from moving in that direction. I haven’t noticed a problem yet. Another improvement might be to sand the leather-facing side flatter, as it “dips” a bit and deforms the leather slightly. The Uncle Mike’s holster design though is still pretty flat in this area, so it’s not too bad. In retrospect, any reasonably thick, flat piece of plastic would have done; it probably wasn’t necessary to cut up the Uncle Mike’s holster, though I wasn’t planning on using it on any guns ever again due to its construction flaw.
I’m pretty pleased with this modification so far. Will see how it works out in practice.
UPDATE October 23, 2005:
I noticed a bump in traffic from the fine people at GlockTalk discussing this very page. Howdy! I’ve been using the modded holster for about a year without any problems, but I don’t carry on a daily basis. The retention isn’t exactly “clicky” like it is with a full-shell design; your body is still providing the majority of the retention by pressing the gun against the shell, so it’s a little muffled. I haven’t noticed any difference in performance.
The biggest advantage? When you’re going to the bathroom and have to urinate standing up, you don’t have to worry about your gun falling out onto the bathroom floor or into the toilet or worse. I carry mine at around 5 o’clock with an extreme cant for better concealability, so having that extra retention helps keep your hands free so you can “stay on target”.
I have chosen to adjust the retention on mine so it’s just grabby enough to hold the gun when upside down, but not much more than that. I did this in the past because the retention screws that came with my Answer were a little too long…if I adjusted the retention tighter, the screws would start poking up through the leather! The Uncle Mike’s screws were shorter so I can aggressively tighten, so I’m using those instead. If they are just .5 to 1 mill shorter, that would work.