Madcap_Magician
Member
I crossposted my review from 1911Addicts, @WVsig
Had the opportunity to go shoot my new SA 1911DS Prodigy, the 4.25" variant, and wanted to add a little more data to the community knowledge base about this gun.
By way of background - I am neither a 1911 armorer nor a competition shooter, much less a top competitive shooter. I was in the Army, but not in the AMU. I have completed some formal law enforcement handgun training, but I don't jet off to Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, or the Sig Academy every weekend with fifty pounds of ammo in checked luggage. I've been carrying for about fifteen years and consider myself an average shot among the crowd of people who take shooting seriously but can't afford to shoot thousands of rounds a year (i.e. not the average CCW permit holder. Think... the 75th percentile?). I am not a gunsmith or an expert in anything.
I was getting jittery from worry about all the blooming threads around the gun boards reporting failures to feed, and I was hoping against hope to have gotten one that would run right out of the box.
I got one that runs... about 90% out of the box. Which is disappointing, but also I'm on the cusp of almost not being disappointed because I had exactly one type of malfunction, and it looked pretty much the same every time. This is really disappointing in a $1,500 gun. Frankly, I know 1911s and 2011s can be touchy, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a $1,500 gun to work reliably out of the box these days. It is only not totally disappointing because the malfunction is so consistent that I think it's a fairly simple diagnosis and fix.
Now, that being said...
THE GOOD.
1. This is how it shoots at 25 yards. So when it shoots, I thought it shot very nicely. Certainly it shoots in my hands at 25 yards better than any other handgun I've ever shot (OK, sure, some of you guys have more duplicate 1911s alone than different handguns I've ever shot, but whatever, you get the idea). The group you see was rapid fire and honestly that's as small a group as I've ever shot at 25 yards with a centerfire handgun, rapid or slow fire.
2. It's a very pleasant and comfortable shooter. Recoil is mild for reasons that are probably obvious, and you can shoot it all day without discomfort. Despite the girth of the grip, I find it much less blocky feeling than a Glock. It fills my medium-sized hands nicely. I like the little 'ledge' on the front strap, my pinky finger on my support hand just falls there naturally for a fantastic and natural grip. The grip texture is fantastic.
3. I like the sight picture. The U-notch, site serrations, bright green fiber optic insert, and the narrow front sight blade contribute to good accuracy with iron sights. Sights were well regulated and point of aim = point of impact as advertised with a 25-yard zero.
4. Personally, I think it's a good-looking gun.
THE BAD.
1. It's heavy. No getting around it.
2. The optic plates available are nice but they make six different plate options:
A. A19B: Holosun 509
B. A18B: Aimpoint ACRO
C. A15B: Leupold DeltaPoint PRO / EoTech EFLX
D. A14B: Trijicon RMR and SRO / Holosun 407C
E. A13B: Hex Dragonfly
F. A12B: Hex Wasp / Holosun 507K and 507K X2 / Shield RMsc and RMS2
And I bet you can guess which plate is included - that's right, the one for the Hex Dragonfly, which is neither the best nor the most common of the pistol MRDS optics available, and irritatingly it's also one of the plates that literally only fits one sight, as opposed to the A14B and A12B plates, which each fit multiple MRDS optics that are all better and more common than the Dragonfly.
THE UGLY.
Shoots great when it shoots. However, it only shoots about 90% of the time. I fired 250 rounds today, which were the first rounds I fired out of the gun (The gun was quite dirty when I bought it, which inclines me to think that it got shot some at Springfield Armory before it left, and more than a round or two). The 250 rounds were 150 rounds of Norma 115-gr. FMJ, 50 rounds of Speer Lawman 147-gr. FMJ, and 50 rounds of Federal HST 147-gr. JHP. Of those:
6.67% failure to feed (10 of 150) of the Norma 115-gr., with failures to feed occurring solely when the action was cycling under fire and never when being loaded manually (slingshotted from slide lock to load from magazines at full capacity).
22% failure to feed (11 of 50) of the Speer Lawman 147-gr. FMJ, again, with failures to feed solely when the gun was cycling under fire.
4% failure to feed (4 of 50) of the Federal HST 147-gr. JHP. Same pattern as all the other ammo.
I fired the Norma 115-gr. first and experienced the first failure to feed at round 38, and then again at round 42, using the 17-round magazine. I then had another failure to feed at 45 shots in the 20-round magazine, then at 48, 49, 58, 62, 64, 66, and 68 rounds. Neither magazine was more likely to malfunction. With the 147-gr. Speer FMJ, failures to feed occurred at round 2, 4, 6, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 30, 32, and 34. With the Federal 147-gr. HST, failures to feed occurred at round 2 and 4.
The failures to feed had a lot of commonalities:
1. They were slightly more likely to occur when under higher magazine spring pressure. I fired all magazines from fully loaded (except for a few where I didn't have enough of one ammo type to fill the magazine), and the round overwhelmingly most likely to fail to feed was the second round fired, and often in particularly bad strings, it was always even rounds failing to feed, which is to say, every automatically loaded round since I had to drop the magazine and reload it each time it malfunctioned.
My hypothesis is that due to magazine spring pressure, it is harder for the slide to strip the top couple of rounds vs. the bottom rounds in a magazine, and that the operating tolerance of the gun is so close to minimum that the slightest drag in the action plus perhaps insufficient return force from the recoil spring being undersprung is causing these malfunctions.
2. I do not think it is a bad magazine issue. Although I only have the two factory magazines, neither magazine exhibited a markedly greater tendency than the other to malfunction.
3. I think the Speer Lawman was most likely to malfunction because it is probably has the longest cartridge OAL, being both the heaviest bullet weight and FMJ profile.
4. The failures to feed were consistently looking like the picture below. The round would be stripped about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way out of the magazine and then nosedive into the feed ramp. Always in the same spot or very close to it, no matter which ammo type. The nice thing about this was that you could just drop the magazine and re-set the round to reload, there was not some goofy stovepipe-type malfunction.
Overall, I think this gun is likely to come right with a slightly heavier recoil spring and a feed ramp polish. I'm going to contact SA to see if they'll do these things for me, which will also give me an unfortunate opportunity to test the new situation with non-FFL individuals and trying to ship handguns...
Had the opportunity to go shoot my new SA 1911DS Prodigy, the 4.25" variant, and wanted to add a little more data to the community knowledge base about this gun.
By way of background - I am neither a 1911 armorer nor a competition shooter, much less a top competitive shooter. I was in the Army, but not in the AMU. I have completed some formal law enforcement handgun training, but I don't jet off to Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, or the Sig Academy every weekend with fifty pounds of ammo in checked luggage. I've been carrying for about fifteen years and consider myself an average shot among the crowd of people who take shooting seriously but can't afford to shoot thousands of rounds a year (i.e. not the average CCW permit holder. Think... the 75th percentile?). I am not a gunsmith or an expert in anything.
I was getting jittery from worry about all the blooming threads around the gun boards reporting failures to feed, and I was hoping against hope to have gotten one that would run right out of the box.
I got one that runs... about 90% out of the box. Which is disappointing, but also I'm on the cusp of almost not being disappointed because I had exactly one type of malfunction, and it looked pretty much the same every time. This is really disappointing in a $1,500 gun. Frankly, I know 1911s and 2011s can be touchy, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a $1,500 gun to work reliably out of the box these days. It is only not totally disappointing because the malfunction is so consistent that I think it's a fairly simple diagnosis and fix.
Now, that being said...
THE GOOD.
1. This is how it shoots at 25 yards. So when it shoots, I thought it shot very nicely. Certainly it shoots in my hands at 25 yards better than any other handgun I've ever shot (OK, sure, some of you guys have more duplicate 1911s alone than different handguns I've ever shot, but whatever, you get the idea). The group you see was rapid fire and honestly that's as small a group as I've ever shot at 25 yards with a centerfire handgun, rapid or slow fire.
2. It's a very pleasant and comfortable shooter. Recoil is mild for reasons that are probably obvious, and you can shoot it all day without discomfort. Despite the girth of the grip, I find it much less blocky feeling than a Glock. It fills my medium-sized hands nicely. I like the little 'ledge' on the front strap, my pinky finger on my support hand just falls there naturally for a fantastic and natural grip. The grip texture is fantastic.
3. I like the sight picture. The U-notch, site serrations, bright green fiber optic insert, and the narrow front sight blade contribute to good accuracy with iron sights. Sights were well regulated and point of aim = point of impact as advertised with a 25-yard zero.
4. Personally, I think it's a good-looking gun.
THE BAD.
1. It's heavy. No getting around it.
2. The optic plates available are nice but they make six different plate options:
A. A19B: Holosun 509
B. A18B: Aimpoint ACRO
C. A15B: Leupold DeltaPoint PRO / EoTech EFLX
D. A14B: Trijicon RMR and SRO / Holosun 407C
E. A13B: Hex Dragonfly
F. A12B: Hex Wasp / Holosun 507K and 507K X2 / Shield RMsc and RMS2
And I bet you can guess which plate is included - that's right, the one for the Hex Dragonfly, which is neither the best nor the most common of the pistol MRDS optics available, and irritatingly it's also one of the plates that literally only fits one sight, as opposed to the A14B and A12B plates, which each fit multiple MRDS optics that are all better and more common than the Dragonfly.
THE UGLY.
Shoots great when it shoots. However, it only shoots about 90% of the time. I fired 250 rounds today, which were the first rounds I fired out of the gun (The gun was quite dirty when I bought it, which inclines me to think that it got shot some at Springfield Armory before it left, and more than a round or two). The 250 rounds were 150 rounds of Norma 115-gr. FMJ, 50 rounds of Speer Lawman 147-gr. FMJ, and 50 rounds of Federal HST 147-gr. JHP. Of those:
6.67% failure to feed (10 of 150) of the Norma 115-gr., with failures to feed occurring solely when the action was cycling under fire and never when being loaded manually (slingshotted from slide lock to load from magazines at full capacity).
22% failure to feed (11 of 50) of the Speer Lawman 147-gr. FMJ, again, with failures to feed solely when the gun was cycling under fire.
4% failure to feed (4 of 50) of the Federal HST 147-gr. JHP. Same pattern as all the other ammo.
I fired the Norma 115-gr. first and experienced the first failure to feed at round 38, and then again at round 42, using the 17-round magazine. I then had another failure to feed at 45 shots in the 20-round magazine, then at 48, 49, 58, 62, 64, 66, and 68 rounds. Neither magazine was more likely to malfunction. With the 147-gr. Speer FMJ, failures to feed occurred at round 2, 4, 6, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 30, 32, and 34. With the Federal 147-gr. HST, failures to feed occurred at round 2 and 4.
The failures to feed had a lot of commonalities:
1. They were slightly more likely to occur when under higher magazine spring pressure. I fired all magazines from fully loaded (except for a few where I didn't have enough of one ammo type to fill the magazine), and the round overwhelmingly most likely to fail to feed was the second round fired, and often in particularly bad strings, it was always even rounds failing to feed, which is to say, every automatically loaded round since I had to drop the magazine and reload it each time it malfunctioned.
My hypothesis is that due to magazine spring pressure, it is harder for the slide to strip the top couple of rounds vs. the bottom rounds in a magazine, and that the operating tolerance of the gun is so close to minimum that the slightest drag in the action plus perhaps insufficient return force from the recoil spring being undersprung is causing these malfunctions.
2. I do not think it is a bad magazine issue. Although I only have the two factory magazines, neither magazine exhibited a markedly greater tendency than the other to malfunction.
3. I think the Speer Lawman was most likely to malfunction because it is probably has the longest cartridge OAL, being both the heaviest bullet weight and FMJ profile.
4. The failures to feed were consistently looking like the picture below. The round would be stripped about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way out of the magazine and then nosedive into the feed ramp. Always in the same spot or very close to it, no matter which ammo type. The nice thing about this was that you could just drop the magazine and re-set the round to reload, there was not some goofy stovepipe-type malfunction.
Overall, I think this gun is likely to come right with a slightly heavier recoil spring and a feed ramp polish. I'm going to contact SA to see if they'll do these things for me, which will also give me an unfortunate opportunity to test the new situation with non-FFL individuals and trying to ship handguns...
