So Shelly sent me to Vuurwapen which led me to some truly odd ramblings at TTAG about a guy from MSW.
If you don’t want to follow all the links, here is the Gunblogger’s Digest version:
Tim Lau (ModernServiceWeapons.com) comments in a blog post that, “Those of us who’ve been around the 1911 platform know it is a finicky gun that requires a dedicated end user and strict maintenance schedule if it is to be relied upon. Many 1911 style guns on the market won’t even work well out of the box.”
Then some guy who goes by the anonymous moniker Dyspeptic Gunsmith (quoted at The Truth About Guns) explains that Tim is wrong by waxing historical about pre-1911 prototype 1911s, basically. He then follows up by explaining that the only reason modern 1911s don’t work as well as those early military prototypes is because, essentially, they’re modern. Reader comments tend to be of the, “I’ve got a 1911 with eleventy billion rounds through it and it’s never had a single malfunction.”
I can’t claim to know as much about the 1911 platform as either of these guys — assuming, for the sake of discussion, that “Dyspeptic” actually knows what he’s talking about, since unlike Lau it’s impossible to establish his bona fides. But I do know maybe a little bit about handgun reliability and government weapon testing/selection.
First, 1911 aficionados who talk about the M1911 military tests as proof of anything really do themselves a disservice. Testing protocols back then were substantially different and had far fewer controls or oversight than we have today. More importantly, the 1911 of that day received a substantial amount of hand fitting of parts by trained gunsmiths. Back then, it was cheaper to train a guy how to file on metal and fit parts individually than it was to manufacture drop-in parts. That’s not the case today, and almost every part in almost every off-the-shelf 1911 is — at least in theory — a drop-in part.
Second, blaming things like allen head grip screws for modern 1911 troubles is just silly. Seriously… go read the blog post, “allen head grip screws” are the very first modernization he complains about. I’m no gunsmith, but I’m pretty sure the head of the grip screw doesn’t play an important role in feeding, firing, extracting, and ejecting. Then again, the only two 1911s I own came with slotted screws so maybe I just got lucky Springfield went all old-school on the FBI SRT & SWAT guns.
Third, I probably see 50-100,000 rounds go through various student 1911s each year. Plenty of instructors see as much or more. I’ve never met a single big name instructor who’d suggest an average off-the-shelf 1911 is as likely to be reliable as the average off-the-shelf HK, Glock, SIG, Smith M&P, etc. Are some base model 1911s reliable? Of course. Some Yugos were reliable, too. But most people wouldn’t bet on a random Yugo over, say, a random Toyota.
Now, someone is going to say that I’m just sticking up for Tim Lau because all us gun-blog type people love each other. I haven’t seen or spoken to Tim Lau in years. If Tim Lau walked up to me on the street wearing a shirt that said “I’m probably Tim Lau,” I wouldn’t recognize him. And I’m quite sure the reverse is true for him, though admittedly he might just be confused by seeing a cherubic white dude wearing a shirt that said “I’m probably Tim Lau” so maybe that’s not a good comparison.
But the point is that when you’re talking about a fairly well known guy who makes part of his career about shooting, promoting, and teaching the 1911 it seems stupid to think he’s just randomly attacking the platform out of ignorance. And it doesn’t take a purple belt in Google Fu to find other highly respected professionals with unparalleled 1911 experience making similar cautious comments about the general reliability of 1911s.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
Anecdotal (it’s reliable because it worked for me) and circumstantial (it’s now worse because it’s different) evidence: the favorite tools of the confirmation biased.
If you’re going to start debunking dumb things posted by “experts” you’re going to need a bigger website.
Perhaps they should follow Pistol-training.com for a while.
I vote you start having pistol-training.com shirts made that say on the front “I’m probably Tim Lau”
Tim may not be as amused by the association.
Shawn beat me to it and it’s still a great idea, b/c my I’m probably Tim Lau” shirt has never failed me when cruising for chicks.
However, if we make new ones, we’ll have to use the old fashioned stitching/fastening methods, b/c I don’t want to see any cherubic white guy man boobs 😉
I’d buy one. lol
Ok, that image made me laugh out loud in the office. Now I have to explain what I was looking at and why I was laughing so hard to my non-gun-owning cow orkers…
I have found nothing else in the gun world except caliber wars and guys who promote point shooting that sets off the retard meter as badly as people who are deeply emotionally attached to the 1911.
To be fair, you’ve gotta have an anti-1911 retard and a pro-1911 retard for complete retard annihilation to occur.
For heaven’s sake, it’s just a gun, people.
Folks, we desperately need to clarify the grip screw situation.
Proper grip screws are a crucial component in a properly functioning 1911, but they are hardly the whole enchilada. Lots of un-perfect 1911’s are made that have slotted grip screws, like the ATI, RIA, and Auto Ordnance. Now to be perfectly fair, I don’t mean like “un-perfect” as if they are “unreliable”, because most folks who have them have at least 50 or even 100 rounds down the pipe without malfunctions. I mean “un-perfect” in that they cut corners like using plastic grip panels instead of the originally spec’ed wood (which does not affect reliability, but can affect accuracy, taking what should be a 1 MOA pistol and making it 1.25 MOA or worse), using non-union laborers to file/sand/fit those parts (little known fact: JMB personally specified in the original plans that all 1911’s had to be made in union shops, but that part of the specs were changed to comply with Federal law at the time), and occasionally having the grain of the metal in the wrong orientation (JMB specified that any 1911 pointed due east in Springfield MA should have the grain in the metal pointing towards Sydney, Australia… it’s a very complex thing involving the magnetic poles, metal stress, and the chemicals at the time used for blueing… I don’t understand it, but it is such a difference maker that it even hurts the gas milage of a car that a 1911 is in if this precaution is not taken).
J.Ja
“…like the ATI, RIA, and Auto Ordnance. Now to be perfectly fair, I don’t mean like “un-perfect” as if they are “unreliable”, because most folks who have them have at least 50 or even 100 rounds down the pipe…”
See, when you got to the point about most folks with RIAs having 100 rounds down the pipe is when I knew you were just making stuff up. :p
The issue with the 1911 is the same that plagues all pistols that are of good design- Quality Control.
We have seen it happen recently with some highly respected manufacturers of modern pistols.
whenever I see threads like that, I want to write “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data'” on a large baseball bat and beat them all with it until it makes an impression >:D
Dang, are we still arguing about the 1911 on the internet? Let me sum it up. Some people say they’re awesome, somebody else will say their not. Then somebody will talk about mags and ammo and the need for a gunsmith…then we’ll talk about something else until we talk about the same thing again. Oh, Beretta’s have locking blocks that break, Sig QC is in the toilet, and HK’s are overpriced.
I read the original post by Tim Lau yesterday. Here’s the dirty little secret about John Browning’s finest design: He guessed on a lot of design details. There simply weren’t many engineering tools available in his era.
He couldn’t run finite element analysis on his springs and discover that the recoil and magazine springs were being subject to too much compressive force (properly designed compression springs don’t take a permanent set – get shorter with use).
He didn’t have slow-motion video to observe the contorted path that cartridges take while feeding.
There are many examples like that. What he delivered was like a farm tractor of the era – it usually worked pretty well and if it completely broke down, it was serviceable by somebody with a typical education of the day.
You can see that in his attention to the procedure for detail stripping a 1911 without tools. That was the design priority- not bullseye accuracy, and certainly not 100% reliability over thousands of rounds. (It was designed to fire 1 or 2 magazines reliably and get the user out of an immediately deadly encounter.)
Like classic autos, I am amazed at the customization of the 1911. However, if I need to drive across country, I’m not taking a ’57 Chevy – I’m going to drive my Audi.
Well, sure a 1911 requires maintenance. If I’m not mistaken, Larry Vickers himself is often considered the foremost expert on the platform and will go so far as to recommend not buying a 1911 if you aren’t willing to put the money, time and effort into making it work. ’nuff said.