....both have Heinie rear sights, the one made for the BHP, but neither is a standard installation. "H" has the rear down-step milled off and the "T" has it and the forward extension milled off. Both guns are Parkerized. "H" has Shallowmyds and "T" has vertical serrations only, both at 20 LPI.
"H" has a gold-inserted front sight. I believe this is a copy of what Ted does..... the customer asked for a vertical strip of gold dovetailed in to the front sight's face. I told him I was not sure how robust that would be and that I might want to solder it in instead...... he was not comfy with that solution. We decided I would just do a round gold insert. Once I got looking for the gold, I found I could obtain what amounts to gold "bar stock" (ah, not to be confused with "gold bars", OK?). This stuff was about the size I needed and according to the source it is 14K. So in the end it is is, after all, soldered into a slot down the face of the front sight. This front sight ("H") is from an MGW blank, due to the need for the dovetail to be a cetain size on account of what had been in there to start with. "H" had no magazine safety but has the firing pin safety. It came to me with a C&S sear, not sure if that's their hammer. "H" also sent me the C&S sear lever which I did not use. This gun was shipped back to "H" with a 3.5 pound trigger and a promise from the customer that he would shoot it for a while as-is, and before carrying it, pop out the sear and bend the sear spring forward to make the trigger at least 4.5. The trigger itself is a stock part modified for take-up, overtravel, and a few other things, with no screws involved. I measure a BHP trigger with the scale's bar centered on the mag release... dunno how other guys do it.
Both guns have the factory ambi safety. For my part that is the best safety made for these things in terms of lever size and shape. I'm not big on ambis personally but both "H" and "T" wanted them. My own BHP has the same thing with the right side lever removed and the shaft shortened accordingly. On both guns, I separated the shaft form the left-side lever..... from the factory the shaft is straight-knurled and pressed into the lever, then swaged over. Pretty secure, but I've been waiting to see one that was loose (for about 20 years, the first one of these I saw was on my own BHP which I bought in '85). "H"'s was loose! So on both guns I took them apart and silver-brazed the shaft to the lever. This makes it good for about the next 1,000 years and has the added advantage of allowing the safeties to be narowed-down. Narrowing them without the take-down and re-solder would tend to make them more lilely to come loose.
Both guns have the slide tightened to the frame, a big contributor to a good trigger I feel, and it was done for this reason much more than for accuracy, although from the factory they are, how you say, loosey-goosey. "T"'s trigger is right around 6 lbs with the magazine safety in place (but this gun is pre-firing pin safety). "T" has standard Browning hammer and sear, and at the customer's direction does not have overtravel or pretravel taken out, which I think detracts from the, um, overall trigger experience of this gun. "T" has a BarSto barrel. "H" actually seems more capable of tight groups with certain ammo (more accurate with 124 Hydra Shocks, and I universally find Federal ammo to be really accurate) with its factory barrel, but the BarSto seems less sensitive to ammo type and groups better with ammo that groups pretty bad with the factory barrel. It's almost a wash, really, depending on what kind of ammo you use and if you're going to use one particular load or anything and everything.
"T" has a .020 drain hole drilled in the bottom of the slide at the front.
Both guns have been high-grip cut in front. "H" has Shallowmyds, and his frontstrap was thick enough to extend them all across the fronstrap.... they're only about .013 deep after all. "T"'s fronstrap was quite a bit thinner at the edges, more typical I think, so the serrations he wanted could not be taken beyond the middle 1/3rd of the frontstrap. I serrated around the serial number on "T", although the serial number was not perfectly centered. Dunno if that really jumps out in the pics. The s/n on "H" was not on the fronstrap, so no prob.
I tried to talk both customers into Conamyds and beavertails, neither one bit. Chickens
! Neither one wanted tritium inserts, either. Dang daytime-only shooters
. Also tried to talk both into more elaborate magwells, but criminy, they just weren't havin' it..... never even got to offering the scope mount, detachable shoulder stock, fake suppressor and brief case....... guess these boys ain't no men from UNCLE.
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