The Spohr N670 is what happens when you take Smith & Wesson’s flagship classic magnum design, give it to an obsessive German gunsmith and say “make this, but do it your way.” We put it through its paces at the range, and the results speak for themselves.
Details are in the video below, or keep scrolling to read the full transcript.
Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from Lucky Gunner and today I’m going to talk about the .44 Magnum Spohr N670 – a revolver made with as few compromises as possible.
If you’re looking for the next installment of Project Rimfire, don’t worry, that’s coming soon. I finally got my hands on the Ounce folding .22 pistol so I’ll be covering that next time. Make sure you are subscribed to our channel so you don’t miss it.
Who is Spohr?
You guys know I have often lamented the declining quality control standards among today’s major revolver makers. Well, the gun we’re looking at today is a move in the complete opposite direction.
Now, I’m not going to hold you in suspense. That quality comes at a price. And that price is $4200. That is well outside my personal budget for a new wheel gun and I suspect the same is true for many of you. But that’s okay. Even if I can’t afford this gun, it brings me great joy that someone cares enough to produce a shooting machine as fine as this one. And by the time we’re done here, I hope you feel the same way.
Spohr is a relatively new company. It was started by Thomas Spohr, a German gunsmith with a very German commitment to quality, craftsmanship, and technical excellence. After years of doing custom work on Smith & Wesson revolvers, he figured he could build a better gun if he were to just start from scratch.
Spohr launched his own company in 2019 with a line of .357 revolvers. The design is based on the Smith L-Frame 686 with a number of improvements. This year, they added a .22 LR L-Frame and now, they’re shipping the .44 Magnum N670.
Spohr N670: The Basics
The sample gun they loaned us has a 6.5-inch barrel. They’re also available with three, four, or five-inch barrels. This is a new frame size for Spohr. It’s roughly the size of a Smith & Wesson N-frame. So you get six shots of .44 Magnum. They’re also planning an 8-shot .357 version for the near future. [EDIT: They’re actually taking orders now]
The grip portion of the frame has a round-butt profile, but it’s actually not N-frame sized. It’s patterned after the medium K and L-frame, which offers a much wider selection of aftermarket grip options. It comes with a set of premium Nill wood grips. They look fantastic, but for this caliber, I prefer something with a little cushioning. So I swapped them out for a set of Hogue wraparound grips for most of my range time with this gun.
The N670 is all made from machined steel and it’s heavy. It weighs 53 ounces unloaded, a little over 58 loaded. That puts it closer to the weight of a Ruger Redhawk than a Smith & Wesson 629. If that’s not heavy enough for you, the underlug is hollowed out so you can add weights. It comes with a plastic placeholder rod, and tungsten barrel weights are available from Spohr.
The weight tames the recoil a little better than a lighter gun, but it’s still .44 Magnum recoil. You’re going to feel it. But the Hogue wraparound grips and a pair of shooting gloves made it comfortable to shoot even for a couple hundred rounds in a single range session.
Features for Revolver Nerds
There are a lot of user-friendly features here. They’ve improved the parts that needed it and left alone the stuff that’s already working for most shooters.
Going with the medium grip profile is a great example. They also kept the Smith & Wesson hole pattern for the rear sight so you can install any Smith-compatible rear sight or optic mount. I replaced the included LPA adjustable sight with a Gideon Omega green dot optic on a Trijicon adapter plate. Say what you want about optics on revolvers – there’s no better way to find out what kind of mechanical accuracy a handgun is really capable of.
A few other nice touches here: An extra-wide cylinder release latch. The chambers are numbered on the cylinder face, which is important if you’re chasing maximum precision. The extractor star has alignment pins like the old Smith & Wessons used to. And the cylinder locks with a ball detent on the crane instead of on the end of the ejector rod.
Adjustable Trigger
If we pop off the sideplate (which is easy to do without hurting anything thanks to the Torx head screws), the action looks pretty familiar for anyone who’s poked around inside a Smith & Wesson. What stands out is the mainspring. In place of the old leaf spring design, we have a user-adjustable coil spring.
And you actually don’t even have to remove the sideplate to adjust it. You just remove the grips, loosen the set screws in this little brass housing down here. Then you can adjust the tension on the mainspring, which controls the weight of the double action trigger. It’s like an instant trigger job.
With the spring set as low as it would go, the trigger pull measured about seven and a half pounds. Maxed out the other direction, it was just under 12 pounds. I found that with it set around eight and a half to nine pounds, I was getting reliable ignition across multiple brands of ammo. And because you’re not messing with the rebound spring, you still get a nice strong reset. The single action is also unaffected – it stays at about 2 pounds.
It was really nice to get the action tuned to where I wanted it in just a few minutes. Normally, that requires a visit to the gunsmith or ordering spring kits and multiple range trips.
Regardless of trigger weight, the action is incredibly smooth. It’s consistent through the full range of motion with no stacking. It doesn’t have quite the same feel as a well-tuned Smith & Wesson action. It’s kind of its own thing. I like it, but it’s not what impressed me most about the Spohr N670.
Uncommon Precision
What really made me appreciate this gun was this five shot group fired at 25 yards that measured just 0.8 inches. And then the next group at 0.6 inches. And then another 0.8-inch group.
So I moved the bench back to 50 yards and I got a nearly perfect linear dispersion – 1.4-inch average group size. That’s double the distance, double the group size. That’s not just “good accuracy” that is an uncommon level of consistency for a handgun.
Now, it wasn’t quite as accurate with every load I tried. But it really seemed to like the Hornady 240-grain XTPs, which are often considered some of the best .44 Magnum factory hunting loads available.
And it wasn’t just accurate from the bench. I went five for five on our steel target at 100 yards firing double action unsupported. And four out of five at 150 yards single action. That was with the sun right in my face and the optic window. I broke one of my shots a little early and missed. But that’s no fault of the gun. I feel confident saying that if you feed it the right ammo, the Spohr’s mechanical accuracy is effectively beyond the shooter’s reach. The gun itself is never going to be the limiting factor.
I can’t explain exactly why this gun is so accurate. It might have something to do with the exceptionally tight cylinder gap. The polygonal rifling in the barrel might help. It certainly makes the barrel easier to clean. And, by the way, Spohr says it’s completely okay to fire non-jacketed lead bullets through this barrel. It’s not going to hurt anything.
A Rejection of Lowered Standards
Spohr makes a big deal of the fact that there are no MIM parts in their revolvers. I think that’s worth some context. Among revolver fans, MIM (metal injection molding) has a reputation that’s more severe than it deserves. When it’s used correctly, it has real advantages, especially for large manufacturers. Without it, truly affordable revolvers likely would not exist today.
But simply avoiding MIM doesn’t get you a gun like this. There are plenty of pre-MIM Smith & Wessons out there that don’t come close to the performance of the N670. What separates this revolver is not the absence of a particular process, but the discipline behind the whole operation: tight tolerances, careful execution, and strict quality control. Spohr’s revolvers are not about any one manufacturing method – they are the ultimate rejection of lowered standards.
That’s the Spohr N670: a big four thousand dollar middle finger to mediocrity. If you do end up making some questionable financial decisions to pay for this gun, don’t forget to set aside a few bucks to order some ammo from us with lightning fast shipping at Lucky Gunner.
