Guns that need tweaking
May 19th, 2005 by Syd
â??I read in American Rifleman a couple of months ago a review of one of the many, I don’t remember which, but it was one of the high price spread 1911’s out on the market. The reviewer went on about how nice a gun this was and how he’d just love to own one. At the end of the article he tells how the slide will not stay open on the last round and this is with the factory supplied magazine. He states that the gun needs a little “tweaking”. Does anybody but me find this a little odd that you shell out $900.00 or so for a pistol and you can not expect it to work properly when stone cold new out of the box.â?
You’re right. A $900 pistol should work right stone cold new out of the box. It took John Browning, the Colt shop, and the Army Ordnance Board six years to develop the M1911, and that came on the heels of another 10 previous years that JMB had spent tinkering around with autoloader designs. And also, a part of that process was the design of a cartridge with a particular powder, bullet, and case which was built with and for the pistol. If today’s manufacturers, including Colt, would build them just like they did in 1911, and if people would only load them with 230g GI ball ammo, they would have the legendary reliability that saved the lives of countless GI’s in the 20th Century and beyond.
Today’s manufacturers seem to bring out a new pistol every week, often with “design innovations” that haven’t been adequately tested. We, the consumer, want something new to write articles about and show off at matches. We want a gun that weighs four ounces of rare metal, that conceals in a watch pocket, that launches exotic death ray hollowpoints that run at 2400 fps., that prints a .5″ pattern at 100 yards, that’s lawyer friendly, California approved, with internal locking systems, loaded chamber indicators, firing pin blocks (so that if we drop them off the Empire State Building on their muzzles they won’t go off) and we want it yesterday. If they don’t do this, they go broke. Colt went broke. Dan Wesson had to sell out to CZ. Charter Arms has gone broke so many times that it’s comical.
I’m not saying that it’s our fault as consumers, but the competitive marketplace plus consumer and legal demands on gun builders is not the ideal environment for the production of this gun. The M1911 is a great design â?? in my humble opinion still the fastest and best shooting of the autos â?? but it is a design from an era in which quality handguns were hand fit by craftsmen who cared about what they were doing. Consequently, it’s wise to let someone who knows these pistols to give them a good looking over before they’re deployed for serious business.