Here's my first attempt at photographing one of my 1911s and posting it here on LTW. Jim Hoag recently built this on an SA GI Mil Spec:
A package by Jim Hoag
Kart barrel and Ed Brown match bushing
Ed Brown standard beavertail safety
CMC hammer & Ed Brown sear, trigger set to 4.5 lbs
Ed Brown extended safety wide
Kings long trigger
Bomar BMCS low mounted into slide
Soldered and staked front sight
20 lpi bordered frontstrap and MSH checkering points deburred
40 lpi checkering front of trigger guard
Slide flattopped and serrated
Checkered rear of slide 50 lpi
Reliability tuned
Dehorned
Mag well beveled
Ejection port lowered and flared
Stock ejector, extractor, slidestop
Hard chrome lower and Cobra Coat upper by Tripp Research
Larry Davidson Wyrm grips
Jim built this in 4 months which I consider a very reasonable time and at what I consider a very reasonable price. Here's what I think:
THE GOOD:
Shoots like a dream- reliable and accurate
20 lpi checkering with the points knocked down is the most comfortable, functional 20 lpi checkering I've ever shot. Comfortable for extended range sessions.
Old style touch is the checkering on the front of the trigger guard
Checkering on rear of slide is excellent
The dehorn is excellent- I've shot it a fair amount and there are no sharp edges to tear up my hand. I also had Tripp do a more radical dehorn job on the Bomar rear sight before they coated it.
Tripp did a great job hard chroming the lower and Cobra coating the upper
THE BAD:
The fit of the frame tangs to the top side of the beavertail wasn't great. This was my fault because I requested an Ed Brown beavertail and Jim said he does it all the time and it works fine. The frame tang probably should have been welded up, but I'm not complaining- it doesn't look horrible.
THE UGLY:
This SA GI mil spec frame has some dimensional variations that cause less than perfect results such as:
There is an abnormally large gap between the MSH and the beavertail grip safety. I tried three different MSHs from 3 different manufacturers and they all had the same issue so the cause was SAs manufacturing. Jim said sometimes the tolerances stack up that way.
The MSH has some side to side movement inside the frame- again this was the situation with the 3 different MSHs, so it is a manufacturing issue.
The metal finish on the contours on the underside of the dust cover is uneven. It looks like someone buffed it by hand and the hard chrome brings out every imperfection in the underlying metal.
Several of the serrations on the top of the slide forward of the ejection port are not cut cleanly and look like the cutter was dull or was chattering.
Interestingly enough, Jim chose to keep the stock extractor and ejector even though I said he could replace any parts he wanted to. Also it's interesting he used a CMC hammer (yes I know it's MIM). To my critical eye, this gun is not cosmetically perfect, but it's still extremely good. To me it's a keeper and a shooter. My goal when I started this project was to get a classic looking two toned 1911 from one of our veteran classic 1911 builders, and that's exactly what I got.
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