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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 might incorporate one 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 idea 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 the 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) surface 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.

Good thinking there Bill. I have turned many a ramped barrel into an un-ramped one and thought it would be good to leave more metal there. I never thought about it as a repair but that is a great idea.

I'll be waiting for your tutorial and photos!

Well it begins with a hack saw:

Crude, but effective.

Commander, 1968:

Interesting Frag work on the recoil spring retainer.

Cool Commander! No mistaking the signature work on that one.

Thank you.

I am and long have been "kinda disappointed" in the way so many 1911's come from the manufacturer "not ready for service." It's frustrating, especially when, the majority of the time it's the same ol' same ol' issues-- extractor tension and frame / barrel feeding profiles. By now everyone should have that down, doesn't it seem? And it's not like I'm hoping for something that would require another 45 minutes of everything being carefully fitted and perfected by the kindly old gent in the white apron with wire-rimmed glasses who's been doing this forever. With today's manufacturing methods, the feeding profiles should be practically automatic. Extractor tension probably could be, and if some final tensioning was required, well, friggin' do it! That is not something that takes a decade of experience to get right. Probably could be pared down to an average of three minutes a gun. I know price point is king and the bean counters have things time-studied down to the second, but take that three minutes, charge another $10 to cover it, and your guns will work. People might notice, and you might sell more guns, "because they work." Or don't charge $10 more-- you will make it back on having way fewer people sending a gun back because it doesn't work. You will make it up by getting the reputation as, "the production gun that runs right out of the box."

I know-- sometimes it happens: it runs right out of the box. Not sure if it's the rule or the exception. It's not like hundreds of new guns of various brands pass through my hands each year, and I function test them. But, what I do see, it's the exception.

Getting a 1911 to run, I have said in the past, is almost a color-by-number process. Slight exaggeration, perhaps..... and there are definitely exceptions. But when a 'smith is doing it after the fact, because the frame feedramp needs to go into the milling machine and the barrel needs some expert profiling and polishing, and the extractor needs tensioning and maybe a little profile work..... it takes a lot more time than it would have to just do it right in the first place. Let the manufacturing process be the expert!

If only the manufacturers would live up to their advertising. The ad on the back cover of a gun magazine is going to set you back "many thousands" of dollars. Many. Maybe pull some of that back in and apply it to making guns that are reliable.

Preach it. It feels like "bean counters" have become the natural enemy of quality and craftsmanship in just about every industry. I understand companies need to make money, but when obvious QA issues become normalized because shaving a few minutes off production matters more than delivering a reliable product, that’s a problem. Especially with firearms, people shouldn’t be expected to “finish” a brand new gun they just paid good money for.

Getting a good product-- the methods have been evolving and improving since the days of Eli Whitney and before. Currently, making a product has a lot more science in it than old-timey craftsmanship, but there is always room for craftsmanship even if you're not feeding it directly into the product hands-on. You apply it to the design, the programming, the tooling and the processes, and material selection. Modern methods for making things should absolutely result in a better product, or at least one "as good as" one made the old ways. It should result in a product that costs less to make than one made the old way. I think that is universally true. But there are a few ingredients in the old way that are so often missing-- pride is chief among them. I feel certain that many manufacturers actually say out loud at some point, "It's not good enough, we know this. It's not going to work right. But if we make the extra effort to make it work, profits go down. Let's leave things as they are, most people won't notice. Of those that do, only a few will realize that the problem is with our product. And only a few of those will ask us to fix it. The cost of that is rolled into every gun. Everyone pays a little extra to cover us on the repairs."

Whatever that cost is, I kinda wish they would leave that cost in there and use it for making the thing right rather than for the repair of those that get sent back. Anyway-- few and far between are the stories of sending it back and the problem was fixed. As I have said before, it would seem that the majority of the time, the company that didn't make it right in the first place doesn't know how to make it right the second time around.

Of course-- I have not been to the moon so I can't really talk about that based on experience. And I have not been involved the manufacture of 1911's..... I imagine that running a gun factory and selling thousands of guns would teach me several things. But the bottom line is, it doesn't seem like too much to ask: make me a gun that works.
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(Edit) I knew this sounded familiar...... I posted the below in this same thread almost exactly six years ago:

Some comments on quality in the firearms industry (and industry in general).

You see issues in every industry, manufacturers put a product on the market because the market has called for it. They are in business to make money and if they offer this thing there is a demand for, it's a sure thing it will sell.

It doesn't even have to work reliably. To a certain segment of the market, it doesn't have to work as advertised, it just has to look as advertised. It has to seem as advertised.

They put it out knowing it's not fully developed or even knowing it's unsafe (cars are a great example). Sometimes in some industries they probably continue trying to improve it behind the scenes; other times it seems certain they don't. It's the mentality of "every one we make, flies off the shelf".

There will be some blowback from some of the people who buy it, but the manufacturer has already considered the cost of this and rolled it into the price: they're not going to lose money just because their product doesn't work. They know or hope or predict that the number sent back for re-work will be statistically tolerable and within budget. The policy will be to pretend you're the first one to have this problem, and suggest that you must be doing something wrong.

Some companies, let's narrow this back down to the gun industry now, some companies have rather made a habit of this, with models and features that are not fully developed or tested, designed to sell but not necessarily to work. Sometimes the product or feature is bad enough that even profuse amounts of advertising can't keep it selling; blowback and returns are enough that the cost to the company of warranty work cannot be absorbed by the padding added to the product's price. The internet and gun magazines are onto the issues and the manufacturer can't ignore and BS their way around it ("What? Oh that's a new one on us, no one else has reported this problem. Are you sure you're not limp-wristing it?"). Without notice, without fanfare, they discontinue the model or feature and maybe even quietly offer to replace faulty parts for a while.

Sending a non-working gun back is a great way to send a message to them that "we're not putting up with this" but my observation is that in the vast majority of cases (across many brands in the gun biz) the people that didn't make it right in the first place (and very likely knew it), will not be able to fix it. It will go to a person who is firstly, not a bad or lazy or stupid person but does not understand how these things work and has not been given adequate training or resources to address the issues. What they have been given is a check list: "Customer says gun does not extract; replace extractor. Customer says gun does not feed; replace magazine. Fire three rounds, advise customer it is working perfectly now, return gun. Remind customer that we said up front gun is expected to malfunction in first (200, 400, 1000) rounds", etc. AKA "break-in period". Puh-leeze.

My $.02.

RE: QC - I think we all agree on that. However, the general public is more concerned with the price vs quality. It's not until the item fails to perform as intended/expected that they start complaining about poor manufacturing. When confronted with the cure many will fall back on price before anything else. The leaves those of us who demand that our equipment perform to a higher standard. That keeps the gunsmiths and auto repair shops in business.

I have never looked seriously into .45 Super, nor .450 Rowland, nor.... isn't there another one? .450 Detonics maybe....? Not turning my nose up at them, just never felt a need. I remember years ago from one of my first Shot Shows, Dick Casull had a 1911 in a proprietary caliber. I think it used. .357 bullets and might have been called .357 Casull. The recoil spring on it was tremendously heavy. Part of what attracted me to .50 GI was the fact that it's actually pretty mild-- unless you don't want to to be. I will say that the factory load of a 185 solid copper HP with slots milled into it, at 1200, is stout and alarmingly loud, like a .357 SIG.

I had occasion to drive from Seattle back to MI last week, quite a haul. On the way back I was able to drop in on someone I've been wanting to reconnect with for years. Decades. It's been a long time since I was thirteen, and that's when my older brother's friend Ray Ordorica handed me the first 1911 I had ever handled. 1911's were so much bigger back then! I was shocked by its size and heft. I never forgot that meeting, and handling that 1911 was definitely a seed. In those days Ray and my brother were partners in a screaming little Tohatsu roadracer; Later, Ray raced a Ducati, before Ducatis were so exotic. The dumb young "me" perceived them as an off-brand but later I had to have one of my own. After the RR days Ray lived in the real outback of Alaska for three years, and wrote about it. https://www.amazon.com/Alaskan-Retreate ... B017WS30ZO (Also, Sixty Years of Testing Guns: https://www.amazon.com/SIXTY-YEARS-TEST ... 103&sr=1-3 )

There was a period of hunting in Africa, as evidenced by several mounts at his place. He might have said he hunted sometimes with Ross Seyfried, I do know they shot some IPSC matches together.

Many years later I saw an article by Ray in the American Rifleman, and one in an early American Handgunner. Ray was in on the ground floor of IPSC and was friends with Jeff Cooper. He trained with Clint Smith, probably just as Clint was getting started. After that I saw his name again as editor for DBI books (offering a variety of gun-related books), then as editor of and author for Gun Tests Magazine, where they took no advertising so as to be free to lambaste a product if it was not good.

After my brother died, some years passed and I somehow established contact with Ray. We've been in contact ever since and finally I had this chance to be passing within an hour's drive so I stopped by. I learned a lot more about this most interesting man. I don't know if I've ever known anyone with more "missed callings", because he has been so good at so many things. He showed me some of his gun engraving and it is superlative. One was Linebaugh's 21st gun done, personally for Ray (they were chums, of course.) Another-- one of his dangerous game English double rifles in .375, that was a game-getter while in Alaska (he was way out there and lived off the land.) Plus-- quite a musician. You name it, he plays it well.

He lives in an interesting house in an interesting, wild place, surrounded by and tending to the local critters. So glad I had a chance to meet him again. Some of his engraving:

This Colt CCO was the second 1911 he ever handed me, the two being about 56 years apart! Minimally engraved by Ray; I see much discussion about EDC guns and the pics very often show what must be unfired or almost unfired, very large and/or expensive guns next to a holster that just came out of the bag. Sometimes you get the passport, the Rolex, and a wad of $100's in the pic too. Sometimes I want to start a thread about "real, actual EDC's" but that might be mean. Anyway, this is Ray's and it was at 98.6° when he showed it to me. Lots of rounds fired and years in the holster.


Linebaugh #21:


And a US Patent Firearms SAA:

I vaguely recall that from an article.

Now that's a name I recall from many articles. Haven't heard it in quite a while. Got an old Army buddy down in Pensacola that owns a bunch of them. He runs a tuning shop for them and has some customers that ship their bikes to him. I beleive he published a maintenance manual for them in the form of an Army TM, too.
Gun Tests - Never missed an issue!
I believe the name for folks like that is polymath.

Sounds like an idyllic lifestyle. Very jealous. I still regrett passing on an opportunity to purchase a few hundred acres in Moffat County, CO some years back. I had the cash, but my wife was not on board with that idea.