I’m embarking on a 9mm 1911 project and after much consideration, research and pricing I decided to start with a complete gun. Being on a tight budget I looked at economical 1911s. After much consulting and research I selected the Tisas 1911 Duty, It has a lot of the features I want, uses quality components, is from a well established and well-regarded company. It also saves me over $200 over buying a quality frame and and all of the internal components.

When the gun arrived at McCallen Defense I got to examine it, and I think I made the right decision. The fit and finish is very good and the trigger is outstanding. In 5-10 business days the background check will be completed and I’ll do a full review of the stock gun before I begin to interfere with it. In the meantime other components for the build are arriving from various sources. You, dear readers, will get a two-fer out of this one; a review of an impressive ‘economy’ firearm and a 9mm 1911 build. Good times!

I was in need of an N-frame to use as a model for making custom grips, and happened across a Brazilian Contract S&W model 1917 .45 ACP revolver. It’s in fair-to-good shape and is a nice shooter. I expect you’ll be seeing an article about this gun as well.

I’ve had an irrational love for big-bore snubbies ever since I stumbled across a used Astra Jovino Terminator .44 Magnum in the late 80’s. Honestly they aren’t a very sensible gun, but I adore them. When I got the 1917 I was mightily tempted to molest it to cater to my twisted desires, but I resisted manfully.

Then a buddy of mine mentioned he had gotten a 1917 that didn’t particularly do it for him. It’s a British gun that was originally chambered in .455 Eley. When it was re-imported they reamed the chambers for .45 Colt and polished the ever-loving poop out of it, completely removing the S&W logo and smearing the proofs. Zero historic value, and we made a swap that made us both happy. You’ll be reading about that one too.

Last but not least I had a major WTAF?! moment this morning. I was watching a security video of a civilian self-defense shooting. A man an his family pulled up to a store, and a suspect attempted to rob them at gun-point. The target produced his own handgun, eventually shooting the suspect twice in the course of the gun battle… which the civilian spent dodging behind the van his wife and family were still sitting in.

ARE YOU FECKIN” KIDDING ME?! The dude used his family as a meat-shield component of his van while the perp fired 15-20 shots! OK, I know he was reacting in the moment. He didn’t have a lot of time to really think his actions through. But still… seriously?

This is why you need to think things through in advance and have a plan. Having pre-decided a response he would have avoided endangering his family. Even if he’d chosen to crouch behind the front of his van behind the engine-block he could have minimized the danger to both himself and his family. But he hadn’t considered it, and the van made mighty tempting cover; dodging behind it was no doubt instinctive.

In fairness it worked out OK and no innocents were injured so I gotta’ chock this one up as a win. But I still feel a thrill of horror as I think about him dodging behind the van with his wife and children in it… *shudder.*

Try to think these things through in advance people; you cannot have a plan for every possible contingency. But seriously, you can try to do better than putting your family in the path of gunfire. Seriously.

Stay safe and take care.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 6 November 2021

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Rant Commences

I like guns. I think they are neat-o. Because of this I watch a lot of reviews, and a surprisingly large number of them are, not to mince words, stupid. A badly done review is sometimes worse than no review, and it’s ten to twenty minutes of my life I want back.

“We’re going to review the Tisas Duty 1911 .45. Since we know that 1911s like to be lubricated we’re going to run it dry straight out of the box. Oh, and we’re going to put funky magazine extensions of unknow quality on the stock magazines because a sponsor sent them to us. We’re also going to use extended magazines a different sponsor sent us without commenting ion their quality, whether we know they are reliable or have any experience with them.

Next we’re going to show ten minutes of footage of us shooting the gun not particularly well. We’re not going to tell you how many rounds we fired or what type of ammunition we used. We will comment that out of however many rounds we fired there were several times the gun failed to go into battery, but we didn’t show that in the boring shooting segment and we’re not going to tell you if it was a specific type/brand of ammo or if it happened with every type. We also won’t tell you if it happened with specific magazines or all of them. We’ll mention that other than those failures the gun functioned flawlessly with every type of ammo we fired, but we’re still not going to mention what exactly those were. We will absolutely not speculate as to whether the free magazine stuff we got might have something to do with this, and we will not test it with the unmodified factory magazines.

We will also not take the gun apart to examine the interior finish or quality of construction, comment on the fitting or anything else useful.”

So all I can really glean from this is that the gun did not function 100% with modified and aftermarket magazines and whatever random ammunition they used. Uh, great?

This, sadly, is not an isolated incident, not is it restricted to Youtube. From a print article:

“We’re going to review a specific caliber in two different 1911s. To evaluate this caliber we’re going to throw cheap conversion barrels into two random cheap 1911s. To make sure this is a fair test we’re going to compare these rather dubious assemblies to a purpose-built $3000 custom gun in a different caliber. Because science.”

Imagine my shock when they liked the $3000 gun best despite the fact that it’s in the wrong caliber and has literally nothing to do with the caliber they are supposedly evaluating.

Seriously, WTAF?

If you want to review guns find a good youtuber who does reviews and watch a bunch of their videos to see what they think is important and DO THAT. Also, if you are going to show yourself shooting the gun it will increase your credibility if you are actually good at shooting. Mind you you don’t have to be a great shot to review a gun well, but it helps. Oh, and show us if the gun malfunctions, because that’s useful.

Please, please, if you are going to review guns at least know what you should be looking for, talking about and showing us.

Rant ends. Thank you for your time.

Stay safe and take care.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 1 November 2021

CCI’s Blazer line of economy ammunition has been around for a while. Originally they were Berdan-primed aluminum cases, but then they introduced Blazer Brass. Still inexpensive, but with boxer-primed brass cases. This brings me to my shameful confession…

“Hi, my name is Mike, and I pick up brass at the range.”

I reload, and some of them are pretty odd calibers so grabbing the brass just makes sense. I usually only grab my brass but random stuff gets mixed in. Years ago as I was sorting my brass I noticed something odd; some of the .45 ACP brass had small-pistol primers. All of it was Blazer, so apparently at some point they switched to small-pistol primers. OK, whatever. I tossed them in a different bin from the regular ones and went about my life.

Over the last several years I’ve wound up with quite a few of these cases, and today I decided to load some. As I was doing so it occurred to me to wonder- does it make a difference? I mean, if it does I would assume CCI loaded their ammo to compensate. But what about us re-loaders?

I had some target loads on-hand, using a 200gr. LRNFP bullet over 6.2gr. of Universal with Winchester WLP primers. This is a pretty light load, so I figured I wasn’t likely to get in trouble with it. I duplicated these, but used the CCI Blazer brass with Federal Small-pistol primers. I set up my backstop and the Caldwell Chronograph and fired some shots.

Testing yielded a couple of surprises, the first being that this a far weaker load than I thought. Lee Precision load data says that this bullet with 6.0gr. of Universal makes 891 fps. but I got a very different result from 6.2gr-

Small Pistol Primer: 742fps. average with an extreme Spread of 44 fps.

Large Pistol Primer: 737 fps. average with an extreme spread of 23 fps.

This is way, way slower than the listed velocity led me to expect! OK, I know chronographs and conditions vary, but a minimum difference of 150 fps.?! This is one of many reasons reloading data should be approached with caution.

The second surprise was that the CCI cases all failed to extract. I a can’t account for this. I measured the two types of cases and for all practical purposes they’re identical, differing by only .002″ here and there. That’s about as much variation as I find between any two random cases of the same brand. Removing the cases was no problem; I inserted a rod down the barrel and they popped right out. The standard cases did eject, but with less enthusiasm than usual.

One thing I did change on the gun; I installed a new hammer-spring that is significantly stouter than the one that was in it before. It’s noticeably more difficult to rack the slide. It still isn’t hard, but overcoming the tension on the hammer does take more effort. I suspect this load was only just powerful enough to cycle the gun, and the new spring was enough to interfere. This does not explain why the CCI cases failed to extract. Perhaps they use a cheaper, ‘stickier’ alloy of brass that was just enough with a load of marginal power to make a difference.

Summing it Up

Looking at the results I cannot say that using small-pistol primers made any real difference. Yes, the extreme spread was almost twice as large, but it wasn’t a huge difference even so, and could just be a difference between the brands of primers. If you want to use CCI Blazer Brass .45 ACP cases with small-pistol primers go for it; it really doesn’t seem to make a notable difference in velocity.

Stay safe and take care.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 24 October 2021

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