Sig P210 – A Connoisseur’s Pistol

The Sig P210 is one of those few pistols that creates love as first touch. The perfect grip, a superb glass-rod trigger, and a slide that moves like butter. It’s as close to a match pistol as was ever adopted by an Army (and no surprise, the army in question was the Swiss one).

The P210 was adopted to replace the Luger (apparently the Swiss took all the sleek out of their rifles and put it into their pistols) in 1949. Like the Luger, the P210 (originally known as the SP 47/8) was ridiculously expensive to make thanks to extensive hand-fitting, but it made up for this with exceptional accuracy. Mechanically, the P210 is based on the Browning short recoil system. It does have the somewhat unusual characteristic of the slide running inside the frame rails instead of outside. This was done to prevent the slide/frame fit from loosening over time. It also sets the hammer and much of the fire control group into a single removable unit, much like a TT-33 Tokarev.

You can read a more complete history of the P210 and its variants on the Sig P210 page in the Vault, where we also have a number of original manuals and sales brochures available for download.