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Exactly. Where the bulge is, being larger in diameter, it would get too tight in the unthreading of the comp and its long gooseneck.

What is your opinion of the replaceable breech face inserts that SVI markets for some of their slides?

Clever design and no doubt made to a high standard although I've never actually seen one. Another threaded thing to come loose I suppose. So, LocTite it and then it might be difficult to get out. To repair something damaged without getting a whole new slide might be its best use....? On say a slide that had a ton or work into it. But getting that cut made on a non-SVI slide would be a hurdle / expense. There might some big thing I'm missing here and I would incorporate pone if spec'd by a customer but other than that, I have not given them that much thought.

This was one of the first guns I did after dropping my “real” job and committing to guns full-time. THE first, actually, pretty sure. 25 LPI front and back; I had net yet met nor heard of Pete Single at this time (2001). I know Pete lays claim to the 25 LPI idea and I believe he did do it before this; goes to show you that the same ideal can come to more than one person. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes within a few years, sometimes it’s decades.

The grips are just place-holders. I don’t remember what grips shipped on it but they owner is casting about for something more appropriate. I let him know that my opinion of these grips on this gun is “EW”.



This one is from before I went full time. It showed up a few years ago and the new owner sent it to me for some work. This is not the kind of work I want to be doing to be quite honest; I’ve had requests for it from time to time and I have generally declined it: “I found an early gun of yours and I want to update and refinish it.” I want to be putting out new work, not recycling the old work. Let the old work represent my earlier years. I somewhat reluctantly put a Shield Driver sight on it, fitted the white VZ’s, a new trigger, and got it refinished. It got resold right after that, and just came back again because the safety had broken….. and the plunger tube too. Somewhere between 1999 and now, the plunger tube got replaced and when they did it, they really hogged out the holes that hold it, on the inside. They only thing for it was to install my four-post Extra Stout Plunger Tube; you can see where the outer bosses needed extra swaging to get a good hold. The inner two will be a big help too.

When the gun came to me originally in 1999, it had a Millett front sight, I didn’t like those. I fabbed one to fit into the two holes left by the Millett and silver soldered it on.


The Shield Driver fitted a few years back, with tritium. The slide-rear checkering is from the first time around.

The frontstrap has what I called Truncamyds, regular checkering but with a radius in the gullet. Being aluminum, and a pretty thin frontstrap, I didn’t want to use full-depth checkering. It works pretty well.

The back side is “standard” checkering, albeit 90° and not 60°, generally my preference for anything, but especially for carry guns. Front and rear both are at 22LPI.


The magwell—this was probably my first “FLH” magwell, where the bottom of the frame is cut to allow better access to the mag floorplate for positive insertion. The grips don’t get shortened, they are the original length, so they over hang a little. They get angled so that they sorta become part of the magwell area.


The grips got lightened when it was here three years ago. It is a LW Commander, afterall.

Wow! What a beauty.

Hey! I know both of those 1911's! Really cool to see the older work. Thanks for posting Ned:)

Continued monitoring of the Colt from "High Mileage Comes To Town":
https://forum.ltwguns.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8365

Vos ist!? I go to pains to make sure that the slide and frame match perfectly at the rear.... why is the slide forward slightly? My primary suspect: the barrel foot is being effected by many thousands of impacts on the slide stop. A little wear, a little rearward movement at the bottom? I've always felt that was a weak spot in the design, there's not a whole lot of metal there, and yet-- I don't think I've seen it before. I could almost, maybe, perceive a little out of squareness, between the barrel foot rear (impact) sureface and barrel body. But the foot is relived at the bottom 2/3rds, so hard to tell. However-- even with that relief and the bowtie cut, there is beginning to be a ghosted-in mark where the barrel foot is hitting the vertical impact area all the way to the bottom.





The three-lug barrel fit holds up forever. Nothing is moving, no flanges forming:


Barrel bore is holding up pretty well. Typical: the chamber is not perfectly concentric to the bore, so there is freebore on one side and not the other, I see it a lot and it doesn’t seem to be an accuracy-killer—to my surprise.

Interesting wear at the top of the chamber. I believe this is from cartridges feeding and pivoting down in front as they go over the “hump” in the barrel’s feeding profile. The hump that in many factory guns is left fairly sharp and causes feeding issues. Every cartridge chambered in every pistol bumps that area and if you do it enough thousands of times, it starts to remove enough metal that you can see it. It’s probably not even a thou or two deep, but it’s there.


Breech face topography continues. I’ll probably stone it flat by the end of summer. Yes, this one strikes the primer off-center. The 'smith only has so much control over that; fortunately it's a non-issue unless it is quite a bit worse than this. Notice that it is almost as much off left/right as it is up and down. The only path to perfection here is to bush the breech face for a perfectly-located firing pin hole. When you fit another barrel it might well have to be done again.

The EGW extractor continues to work well. But no matter the steel type and heat treat there will be wear. Two distinct, mild crescents can be seen on the hook—they indicate where the case is positioned on it when firing, and when extracting.

That line on the top inside of the chamber? that looks suspiciously to me like the point where the case mouth edge starts to "scuff" the chamber wall as the cartridge tips over. If it was the bullet i would think it would be a line towards the bore, not cross-ways on the chamber.

And the breechface? I don't know what kind of thrust the primer creates, but it has to be some appreciable percentage of the chamber pressure. So, let's call it 10,000 PSI. Since the primer can move in the primer pocket, that means the breechface, in the surface area of the primer, gets a 10K "slap" on each and every round. Not surprising there's a result. The only correction is to make the breechface hard enough to withstand it, and that costs money and creates problems later on.

I've often thought about hard use 1911 wear points. For repair of a worn frame and barrel, particularly the barrel standing lugs, slide stop pin, and VIS, as well as the upper lug/barrel hood fit seems that a fella could take a W-N or C-P barrel and recut to a conventionol barrel profile, leaving a bit more on the back for a stronger standing lug while also remachining the VIS to clean up any damage and provide a fresh impact surface for the standing lug.

Might even consider that on a new build if you knew it was going to be run hard, although that might be a stretch since you could always do that on a rebuild after 40 gazillion rounds and several barrels. Nah, I think I would pass on inflicting that on a new build.