Nighthawk Custom’s collaboration with the German makers of the astounding Korth revolver series has helped serve to rewrite expectations on what a revolver can — or might — be. Essentially full-custom guns, Korth combines famous Teutonic technological marvel with the eye-appeal of Nighthawk Custom’s design ideas. The result, a collaboration of engineering excellence and artistic flair setting the Korth family apart from — essentially — anything else.
But first, let’s clear the air and tackle the obvious. These are not price-point revolvers. They are works of shooting art deserving of a place at the very highest peak of gun-making skill and distinctive design. They’re an inspiring celebration, showcasing what gifted engineers and artisans in steel and wood can do when no limits on expectations force them into that corner where price-point meets polymer. They are, in short — breathtakingly unique and shameless in their obvious beauty and functional distinction.
While a Custom Korth Heritage — the lovely case-colored model in Rob’s sublime photos — may not be within your budget, you can still allow yourself to enjoy what it is of its own accord. We were once mortified to read about custom 1911s in these very pages costing “upwards of $1,200!” in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The same price seems quaint today, nudging what many stock factory handguns cost. So, lest you risk your hair catching on fire at the “horror” of it all; let’s agree this little adventure with the Korths is just that — a modest exploration in creative and capable excellence.
Building The Brand
What we have here are two guns, very different yet very much the same simultaneously. Both come from the fertile mind of Herr Willi Korth, a German engineer having a gift for firearms design. Born in 1913, Korth grew into machining and in the summer of 1944, worked briefly at the Mauser-Werke as a designer of small arms. Bouncing around a bit, in 1952 he decided to pursue his own ideas, designing a 9mm blank firing “gas” revolver. At the time “real” guns in Germany were heavily restricted, and Willi’s blank guns were so over-built they were easily converted to “real” guns! Something evidently not lost on Herr Korth.
Following the post-war ban on gun-making in Germany, Willi founded his first gun-making company in 1955 — “Willi Korth, Waffenfabrikation.” His first revolver was in .32 S&W Long (due to restrictions) and had some interesting design ideas. Perhaps the most novel was the button on the frame’s right side you could push to easily remove the cylinder and crane. That touch is still in the designs today.
As the brand grew to more resemble today’s guns, Korth’s quality of workmanship followed the lines of Rolls rather than Ford. Five gunsmiths made revolvers at the bench, building an average of 120 guns a year. Except for a small handful of screws, every part was made in-house. Rather than being milled or cast, each part was ground to size and fit. It took 70 man-hours and over 600 operations to create a single revolver. Major parts were surface hardened to 60 Rockwell — unheard of even today.
Original production ended in 1981, and much to my surprise, included not only .38/.357, but also 9mm, .22 LR and even .22 Magnum. Can you imagine a Korth in .22 Magnum? Barrel lengths ran the gamut of 3″ to 6″, with 5- and 6-shot cylinders.
Market Challenges
At this point, the company bounced around a bit from one investor and gun-maker to another, with some production maintained off and on. Improvements to Willi’s designs were made, but the Korth brand struggled with marketing and consequently sales. Never, however, losing their reputation as one of the world’s finest revolvers.
Herr Korth passed away in 1992. In 1999, Korth underwent bankruptcy, but it was taken over in 2000 by Armurerie Freylinger of Luxembourg. During this ownership, the eye-catching plasma TiA1NPVD surface coating was introduced and the U.S. market grew.
But more changes were in the works. In 2008 the Korth factory shut down, but the Korth trademark was reborn in 2009, exhibiting revolvers — and Korth’s auto — at the SHOT show in 2013. A few years after that, Mark Stone, president of Nighthawk Custom met with the Korth team, forming an alliance and breaking entirely new ground for both companies.
Korth now had a sure method for U.S. distribution, and NHC embraced the elegant designs and engineering — mirroring their own guns — of the respected Korth brand. Magic was about to emerge in the U.S.
A Fortunate Meeting
“In January 2016 at Shot we went over to the Korth booth and introduced ourselves,” Mark explained to me. “Great people at every level. They’ve been awesome to work with and we truly have a friendship that has developed. Everyone at Korth, from the owner, Martin Rothmann, to their gunsmiths and machinist are simply first class,” Mark told me. “We’ve been at their factory in Lollar, Germany several times, and they’ve visited us as well several times. It’s always a great experience!
“What struck me at first — and still does — is the quality of the Korth revolver, their long history of perfecting the designs, and how their build strategy is very similar to ours,” Mark explained. “Just like we here at Nighthawk Custom do with our guns, every part of a Korth revolver is fully machined out of a block of steel — and a single gunsmith hand fits each part, building the revolver from start to finish. The pairing of our products, engineering and skills is a natural and has been reflected in the enthusiasm ourcustomers have for the Korth revolvers.”
According to Mark, Korth is selling a lot of revolvers in the United States thanks to the relationship with Nighthawk, and Nighthawk is pleased to offer a great product line here. Every Korth imported from Germany has the Korth logo and the Nighthawk Custom proudly visible.
“If we sell something we stand behind it,” said Mark. “That’s why we wanted our logo on each revolver. We don’t just import and resell like many importers. We have input on the design, cosmetic and artistic details. Once the revolver arrives at NHC, we will log it into our books and then each revolver is checked over by one of our gunsmiths. Each revolver goes through a quality control inspection and is then test fired, targeted and cleaned before it ships to our customers,” explained Mark. “The program is every bit as rigorous as our 1911 inspection and testing procedures.”
When a proud owner opens his Korth Nighthawk Revolver, it’s accompanied by a Nighthawk test target, signed off by the gunsmith who inspected and tested the revolver. According to Mark, their customers love the Korth Revolvers.
“I love getting reader feedback,” said Mark, “Things like ‘Great Gun! Unbelievable!’ and ‘Best trigger I’ve ever felt on a revolver!’ are common. Another one we hear regularly is ‘Truly a work of art!’ — and I agree completely!”
Mongoose Carry Special
Custom barrel lengths are all part of this package and our test gun had a handy 2.75″ barrel. A 6-shot, all-steel hand-built revolver, there’s an optional 9mm cylinder assembly available and easy to manage thanks to the push-button cylinder change built into each Korth. It’s a conventional DA/SA revolver but that’s where convention pretty much stops.
The action is smooth, and the polished trigger face excellent, yielding a comfortable DA and SA experience. My test gun had a consistent 3-lb. SA pull (average over 10 tries) and a smooth 7-lb. DA pull (average over 10 pulls). The DA trigger pull has two distinct stages but isn’t grabby or gritty at all and the SA pull sort of “rolls” off rather than “breaks.”
Keep in mind too, the hammer spring tension is easily adjusted by the user, as well as the trigger return spring. So, they can be tuned to your own desires and ammo needs. The majority of domestic revolvers require the attention of a talented gunsmith to accomplish the same thing.
Sights are bold but compact and fully adjustable via a clever design. The fit, finish and interplay of the parts is uncommonly admirable, spoiling you for other factory revolvers more commonly encountered. I was particularly taken by the obvious care and attention taken with the muzzle crown. It’s, dare I say, perfectly done — and no doubt a strong contributor to these guns’ outstanding accuracy. The business-like coating on the gun is the modern “industrial” DLC type.
Handling was a bit like an L-Frame S&W when it comes to size and weight. At about 30 oz. give or take, the Mongoose is no lightweight, but the Hogue designed “rubber” grips really lend a hand in control, comfort and feel. Small things like the slippery “snick” of the cylinder locking home and the unusual hammer spur shape helped to create a revolver shooting experience different from the norm for me. I have experience with a Korth from around 2000 (with the sort of lever arrangement to the right of the hammer unlocking the cylinder) and I confess this is a much better gun in design, action and feel. I like the more conventional cylinder release although the classic style is still available on some models.
Shooting, with full-power .357 from several makers and various .38 Special loads was, as you might expect — a delight. All were in the sub-2″ range, regardless of maker, with most doing much better at the 25-yard line. The classic 148-grain wadcutter — from Black Hills — dropped into a solid 1″ at 25 yards when I used my “computer” glasses with the innovative “Eyepal” peep sight attached to the lens. This gun is a shooter!
This late 1990s Korth Roy tested back then displays the distinctive plasma TiA1NPVD finish.
Note the cylinder release lever adjacent to the hammer. Photo: Roy Huntington
Korth Heritage
This is a new design and idea built on the collaborative efforts of NHC and Korth. While it hints at a sort of “Python-esc” look with the lugged and ribbed barrel, this is no Python. Featuring everything good about the Korth design, it ups the game with the “Heritage” finish and even higher attention to detail.
While it seems longer, the barrel is actually 5.25″ but looks just right. I’ve always noticed about older DA revolvers — most feel “just right” with 5″ barrels. But being a custom gun, you can have the barrel length you desire if you’re willing to pay the piper. The grips are Turkish Walnut and in typical German fashion I might label them more “functional” than beautiful. They feel good, even great, in the hand and definitely contribute to how this gun handles. But if it were me — I’d find someone to make me some custom grips worthy of this genuine barbecue gun.
Alas, I confess I didn’t shoot it. I know Mark Stone would have encouraged me but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It mirrors the Mongoose in all-things mechanical, right down to the remarkable muzzle chamfer. The included NHC test target showed a slightly oval one-hole group at 12 yards — so what was I going to prove? And since this gun will ultimately be sold to a customer (and it’s passed NHC’s quality control already) I simply didn’t want to risk a scratch or get it dirty. I want this “first shot” experience to go to the first delighted owner. Will that be you?
Closing Considerations
The Nighthawk Custom Korth Mongoose 2.75″ Carry Special MSRPs right at $3,699 — well within the price range of custom 1911s from Nighthawk. The even fancier Heritage 5.25″ rings the bell at $8,999. Just like a Nighthawk Custom 1911, Korth Revolvers are not inexpensive. But when you actually get to see how they’re built, the attention to detail and craftmanship going into every build then you can understand the price — and many don’t mind paying it.
“We had a customer a few weeks ago write a note to us,” Mark Stone told me recently. “He said, he could be blind-folded and pick up a Nighthawk 1911 and know it’s a Nighthawk just by the feel. Korth Revolvers are the same way — and that’s just one thing making our collaboration really special.”
I’m sure, as I’ve said before, you own guns you rarely — or never — shoot. They’re possibly even guns worth a good deal. With an open mind to your dreams, cast a critical eye at your gun safe and ponder the possibilities lurking within. Then feel free to wonder what might be in your own future.
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To the civilized mind, there is a great deal about which to be bewildered as regards the Liberian Civil War. The first installment ran from 1989 until 1997 and killed perhaps a quarter-million people. The details are labyrinthine and convoluted.
The players included eclectic names like Prince Johnson, Chuck Norris, General Mosquito, and his counterpart General Mosquito Spray, Samuel Doe, Roosevelt Johnson, and Charles Taylor. I have it on reliable information that this Charles Taylor was no relation to the Chuck Taylor of Converse All-Stars sneakers fame.
There resulted a tenuous peace that lasted some two years and ultimately saw Mr. Taylor installed as President of Liberia. In 1999 the Second Liberian Civil War conflagrated, claiming another roughly quarter-million dead. Charles Taylor was arrested in 2006 and tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity. This included wanton murder, rape, weapons proliferation, and the widespread use of child soldiers.
Charles Taylor was the driving force behind some of history’s greatest atrocities.Taylor was sentenced to fifty years behind bars. At his sentencing, the Presiding Judge said: “The accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.”
As he was 58 at the time of his sentencing Taylor should be released sometime around his 108th birthday.
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
Joshua Milton Blahyi was born on September 30, 1971. During the First Liberian Civil War, he served as a military commander in the employ of the Liberian warlord Roosevelt Johnson. The world knows Blahyi by his eclectic nom de guerre. To the public, Joshua Blahyi went by General Butt Naked.
Imagine if all the cops, National Guard troops, and authority figures in the greater Chicago area suddenly retired en mass. Now visualize a pile of some 150,000 or so AK47 rifles left outside Wrigley Field alongside a sign reading, “Free, Take One. No More than three Magazines per Customer. ” Voila, you have Liberia circa 1989.
Joshua Blahyi was born into the Liberian Sarpo tribe and appointed a Krahn high priest. This animist belief system orbited around a variety of “bush spirits” that must be appeased before good things can happen. Blahyi’s principal deity was one Nyanbe-a-weh–“a high-ranking god in the West African Black-witch coastal line division.” It turned out that Nyanbe-a-weh had some peculiar tastes.
At the hands of men like Joshua Blahyi the blood flowed in torrents across Liberia.In the service of Nyanbe-a-weh and Roosevelt Johnson, Blahyi ultimately killed some 20,000 people. He also engaged in regular human sacrifice as well as cannibalism, particularly of children. Blahyi ultimately came to believe, rightly so I suspect, that Nyanbe-a-weh was actually the Devil.
Unconventional Combat Gear
That brings us back to Joshua Blahyi’s catchy stage name, General Butt Naked. Blahyi frequently led his troops into battle wearing nothing more than his shoes and an assault rifle. He believed that only in nudity could he be rendered immune to bullets.
Before engaging in combat, Blahyi and his men would usually sacrifice a small child to satisfy the blood lust of Nyanbe-a-weh. Blahyi stated that he needed, “Someone whose fresh blood would satisfy the Devil. We would kill an innocent child and take out the heart, which was divided into pieces for us to eat.” Blahyi also claimed that he, “Met Satan regularly and talked to him.”
Blahyi said during an interview with the South African Star, “So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink the blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colorful wigs and carrying imaginary purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, and drunk yet strategic. We killed hundreds of people—so many I lost count.”
Whilst in combat Blahyi claimed he had special powers that rendered him invisible. Blahyi’s soldiers, many as young as nine, would fight naked or while wearing women’s clothing. The mercenary unit he commanded became widely known as the Naked Base Commandos. They were full-bore psychopaths.
The Guns
The countless internecine squabbles that blanketed Africa during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s served as proxy fights for the Cold War superpowers wishing to expand their influence and ideologies remotely. While that occasionally meant military advisors, aircraft, and armor, for the most part, it was simply small arms, lots and lots of small arms. By the time the First Liberian Civil War kicked off in 1989 the entire continent was covered in a thin patina of Kalashnikov rifles.
I couldn’t find many specifics about the weapons used to prosecute this tidy little genocide, but I did study a lot of pictures. AKs seemed to predominate in both fixed and folding versions. There were also quite a few FN FAL rifles and Combloc PKM belt-fed machineguns. Additionally, there seemed to be a smattering of HK G3 rifles as well as PPS-43 and Uzi submachine guns.
Specifics
The Avtomat Kalashnikova was, so the story goes, the brainchild of a WW2-era Soviet tank driver named Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov. Comrade Kalashnikov was the 17th of 19 children born to Russian peasants. In 1930 most of the Kalashnikov family was deported to Siberia as part of Stalin’s purges.
The earliest AK47’s were formed around a stamped steel receiver, but this was found to be inadequately robust for hard field use. The definitive AK47 was therefore built upon an expensive milled steel receiver. This rugged tire tool of a rifle weighed some 7.7 pounds empty, fed from a 30-round detachable steel magazine, and cycled at 600 rounds per minute.
In 1959 the AK47 got an extreme makeover. The stamped steel receiver was finally perfected, and the gun assumed the new designation AKM (Avtomat Kalashnikova Modernizirovannyj). This version weighed 7.28 pounds empty and was much easier and cheaper to build. The AKM used the same magazines and had the same cyclic rate of fire as the AK47. All totaled around 100 million AK-variant rifles have been produced, and they are still churned out around the globe today.
The FNFAL has been rightfully referred to as the “Right Arm of the Free World.” Designed by Dieudonne Saive in 1947 and initially chambered for the German 7.92×33 kurz round, the FAL ultimately fired the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge. The gun weighed between 8.3 and 9.8 pounds depending upon particulars. The FAL’s designer, Dieudonne Saive, was also the guy who polished up John Moses Browning’s last semiautomatic pistol design into the P35 Browning Hi-Power.
There are around 30 million military weapons currently in circulation in Africa. The disintegration of the Libyan state and subsequent looting of government arsenals provided literally countless more. The ready availability of weapons combined with an entrenched tribal system results in a near-constant state of war someplace on the continent. Sprinkle a little radical Islam across the top for flavor and you have the chemical formula for pure unfettered chaos.
The Rest of the Story
In 1996 Joshua Blahyi met Jesus. He claims he had a vision from God who told him, “Repent and live, refuse and die.”
Blahyi began sleeping on a pew in a nearby church. Afterward, he said he met Jesus in a blinding light who addressed him as a son. Blahyi handed over his weapons and amulets to his immediate commander and declared, “My new Commander is Jesus Christ.”
I once met a guy on a psychiatry rotation who claimed to be indwelled with three spirits named Dagon, Demidagon, and Begored. He shot a complete stranger in the belly five times with a .38 because the voices in his head told him to do so. When we met he was thirty days out from a five-year penitentiary stay for this unsettling infraction.
As near as I could tell, this guy did nothing but lift weights for five years straight. He was, as a result, an incredibly imposing figure. After he presented to the Emergency Department he also intentionally ingested a drywall screw along with the needle off of a hypodermic syringe.
My buddy’s formal diagnosis was schizophrenia. He was also remarkably articulate and intelligent. He explained to me that as a teenager he had prayed to Satan to send these three guys to keep him company. Yes, it was freaky weird and super creepy. Thanks for asking.
Regardless of where you fall on the subject of demonic possession, in the case of Joshua Blahyi, it is hard to argue with success. Blahyi’s life turned completely around in that single instant. Today he is 49 years old and runs a residential facility that teaches his former child soldiers life skills. He seeks out the families of those he killed requesting forgiveness. He proclaims Jesus and salvation at every opportunity. I found a YouTube video of him preaching. He seemed quite sincere.
Joshua Blahyi was once described as, “the most evil man in the world.” Since he found Jesus, however, his life has been characterized by service, repentance, and forgiveness. In General Butt Naked’s stark transformation from bloodthirsty psychopath into pastor, evangelist, and mentor we see manifest the simply breathtaking power of forgiveness.
