Sean Smith
Member
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2002
- Messages
- 4,925
Paying a pistolsmith to customize a 1911 is fundamentally different from buying an off-the-shelf gun. Aside from being a relatively expensive and time-consuming proposition, it requires more thought and knowledge on the part of the buyer if they are going to get what they really want. I’ve had custom work done by three pistolsmiths so far, and would have been a lot better off if “I’d known then what I know now.†So I’m going to try to share the results of my experience in the hope it will do some good.
Misconception: pistolsmith work costs more than an off-the-shelf gun like a Wilson or Baer. The reality is, the cost is widely variable depending on how much work you want done. There are a limited number of performance-oriented modifications you can do to a 1911, and if you fixate on those you can get equal or greater performance than an off-the-shelf gun for less money. At the other extreme, it is possible to spend as much as $3,000-4,000 on a custom gun completely hand-built from scratch. The main savings with an off-the-shelf gun is time, not money.
The most important modifications, interestingly enough, are also the cheapest: reliability work, trigger work, and simple accurizing (muzzle re-crown and match bushing) are all quite affordable. It is the “nice to have†items where the cost starts building up out of control if you let it.
Misconception: unlike a limited-production gun like Wilson or Baer, a pistolsmith’s work isn’t covered under warranty. Actually, NONE of them are covered under warranty. Brown, Baer and Wilson specifically state that they have no warranties whatsoever. In either case you only have the word of the company or individual that they will stand behind their work.
Misconception: a pistolsmith’s work won’t keep its value, and will be hard to sell. The reality is the exact opposite: a good pistolsmith’s work will only add value to the gun. I (unfortunately) had to sell a Dane Burns custom gun. Within 24 hours I had sold it for exactly what my total investment had been in the first place.
Misconception: ANYTHING you ask a pistolsmith to do will take forever. While many pistolsmiths have waiting lists measured in years for their full custom guns, it is important to consider that the lead-time is proportional to the amount of work being done to the gun. Thus, even a relatively “famous†pistolsmith may give you a trigger job in a relatively reasonable time span. There are also somewhat less well known pistolsmiths that will have more manageable lead times for even big projects.
But the biggest concern shouldn’t be, “who will do it fastest?†The biggest problem for the consumer is choosing the right person to do the job. A good pistolsmith is worth their weight in gold, but a bad one can break ANYTHING. The American Pistolsmith Guild is a good place to start, but a LOT of the really good ones don’t bother with the guild at all. The bottom line here is, you need to do your homework. The guys who consistently get rave reviews from their customers FOR THE SPECIFIC WORK YOU WANT are the ones you want to consider. Rely on firsthand customer experiences, not hearsay and gossip from people who have never even seen the pistolsmiths’ work in the first place.
Most pistolsmiths have pictures of their work on the Internet. Your best bet is to find a pistolsmith that has a “style†that appeals to you, and makes the kinds of guns you wish you could own. Almost any pistolsmith will, within reason, make you what you ask for. But you are more likely to get exactly what you want if the pistolsmith already tends to make the sort of guns that appeal to you.
Once you have a credible pistolsmith to do the work, the next most important thing is that you have a clear idea what you want. Don’t necessarily sweat the specific hardware details; the pistolsmith will almost certainly know which extractors and ejectors work well, for instance. And just giving a pistolsmith a big pile of parts you bought and saying, “build it†is a dumb idea. But you need to have a real understanding of what you want, and why you want it. This may seem obvious, but it is easy to think you want or need some feature, only to find that it doesn’t appeal to you once you get the gun in hand. This is common with “trendy†features that everyone says you need, but you often don’t need – or even like. Handle and shoot as many guns as possible, develop a clear idea of what you like and don’t like, then articulate it clearly. A good pistolsmith will try to get a clear grip on what you want, but you can’t rely on him to read your mind.
Sort of the flip side of that is that you should always ask for the pistolsmith’s ideas and input for different ways of tackling a requirement. They’ve seen lots of guns and lots of customers, and may have a trick or two for making your gun more like you want it that you haven’t thought of. Sometimes the off-the-wall questions actually have good answers you – or the pistolsmith – didn’t consider at first.
A pistolsmith customized 1911 isn’t the solution for everybody. For one thing, you may not want to make the money investment for an expensive 1911 at all. Or, if a high-end, off-the-shelf gun like a Baer, Brown, Wilson, or Valtro has EXACTLY what you want, then there is nothing wrong with getting one of those guns instead. But if you have very specific requirements, then a pistolsmith will be able to give you a much better solution tailored to those requirements. Also worth considering is that a good pistolsmith will easily surpass the detail work of the off-the-shelf guns, simply because they can give it more individual attention than a company that makes hundreds (Brown) or even thousands (Baer, Wilson) of guns a year. Pistolsmiths also have the advantage that you don’t have to deal with a customer service bureaucracy, but rather with the one person doing the work for you. To me at least, that is a considerable advantage.
The main disadvantage of the pistolsmith’s work is TIME. Are the advantages worth the wait? Are your requirements specific enough to make it worth the trouble? Only you can decide that; there is no one size fits all answer to what 1911 you should get…but it helps if you are asking the right questions.
So whom do I recommend? Dane Burns made me a flat-out awesome Delta Elite. His only downside is that his lead times are creeping into the years. Dave Berryhill is working on another Delta Elite for me now, and has been great to deal with. There is a gunsmith in Carrolton, Texas, who I won’t name that should be avoided like the plague. I’ve heard a lot of rave reviews by customers of (in no particular order) Ted Yost, Ned Christiansen, Victor Tibbets, George Smith at EGW, and Don Williams at The Action Works. But don't take my word for it; do your own research.
It is important to bear in mind that once you are spending more than, say, $600 on a gun, you are definitely talking about “wants,†not “needs.†Nobody “needs†a $1,000 or $3,000 gun. Heck, for $350 you can get an excellent weapon in a CZ-75B, so maybe those $500 Glocks are just frivolous indulgences.
Will the roughly $1,700 (base gun + parts & labor) going into my tricked-out Delta Elite give me a huge magical advantage over a more basic weapon? Not really. Will it have SOME objective advantages over less expensive guns? Up to a point, yes. But its main advantage is just that it is exactly what I want. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Misconception: pistolsmith work costs more than an off-the-shelf gun like a Wilson or Baer. The reality is, the cost is widely variable depending on how much work you want done. There are a limited number of performance-oriented modifications you can do to a 1911, and if you fixate on those you can get equal or greater performance than an off-the-shelf gun for less money. At the other extreme, it is possible to spend as much as $3,000-4,000 on a custom gun completely hand-built from scratch. The main savings with an off-the-shelf gun is time, not money.
The most important modifications, interestingly enough, are also the cheapest: reliability work, trigger work, and simple accurizing (muzzle re-crown and match bushing) are all quite affordable. It is the “nice to have†items where the cost starts building up out of control if you let it.
Misconception: unlike a limited-production gun like Wilson or Baer, a pistolsmith’s work isn’t covered under warranty. Actually, NONE of them are covered under warranty. Brown, Baer and Wilson specifically state that they have no warranties whatsoever. In either case you only have the word of the company or individual that they will stand behind their work.
Misconception: a pistolsmith’s work won’t keep its value, and will be hard to sell. The reality is the exact opposite: a good pistolsmith’s work will only add value to the gun. I (unfortunately) had to sell a Dane Burns custom gun. Within 24 hours I had sold it for exactly what my total investment had been in the first place.
Misconception: ANYTHING you ask a pistolsmith to do will take forever. While many pistolsmiths have waiting lists measured in years for their full custom guns, it is important to consider that the lead-time is proportional to the amount of work being done to the gun. Thus, even a relatively “famous†pistolsmith may give you a trigger job in a relatively reasonable time span. There are also somewhat less well known pistolsmiths that will have more manageable lead times for even big projects.
But the biggest concern shouldn’t be, “who will do it fastest?†The biggest problem for the consumer is choosing the right person to do the job. A good pistolsmith is worth their weight in gold, but a bad one can break ANYTHING. The American Pistolsmith Guild is a good place to start, but a LOT of the really good ones don’t bother with the guild at all. The bottom line here is, you need to do your homework. The guys who consistently get rave reviews from their customers FOR THE SPECIFIC WORK YOU WANT are the ones you want to consider. Rely on firsthand customer experiences, not hearsay and gossip from people who have never even seen the pistolsmiths’ work in the first place.
Most pistolsmiths have pictures of their work on the Internet. Your best bet is to find a pistolsmith that has a “style†that appeals to you, and makes the kinds of guns you wish you could own. Almost any pistolsmith will, within reason, make you what you ask for. But you are more likely to get exactly what you want if the pistolsmith already tends to make the sort of guns that appeal to you.
Once you have a credible pistolsmith to do the work, the next most important thing is that you have a clear idea what you want. Don’t necessarily sweat the specific hardware details; the pistolsmith will almost certainly know which extractors and ejectors work well, for instance. And just giving a pistolsmith a big pile of parts you bought and saying, “build it†is a dumb idea. But you need to have a real understanding of what you want, and why you want it. This may seem obvious, but it is easy to think you want or need some feature, only to find that it doesn’t appeal to you once you get the gun in hand. This is common with “trendy†features that everyone says you need, but you often don’t need – or even like. Handle and shoot as many guns as possible, develop a clear idea of what you like and don’t like, then articulate it clearly. A good pistolsmith will try to get a clear grip on what you want, but you can’t rely on him to read your mind.
Sort of the flip side of that is that you should always ask for the pistolsmith’s ideas and input for different ways of tackling a requirement. They’ve seen lots of guns and lots of customers, and may have a trick or two for making your gun more like you want it that you haven’t thought of. Sometimes the off-the-wall questions actually have good answers you – or the pistolsmith – didn’t consider at first.
A pistolsmith customized 1911 isn’t the solution for everybody. For one thing, you may not want to make the money investment for an expensive 1911 at all. Or, if a high-end, off-the-shelf gun like a Baer, Brown, Wilson, or Valtro has EXACTLY what you want, then there is nothing wrong with getting one of those guns instead. But if you have very specific requirements, then a pistolsmith will be able to give you a much better solution tailored to those requirements. Also worth considering is that a good pistolsmith will easily surpass the detail work of the off-the-shelf guns, simply because they can give it more individual attention than a company that makes hundreds (Brown) or even thousands (Baer, Wilson) of guns a year. Pistolsmiths also have the advantage that you don’t have to deal with a customer service bureaucracy, but rather with the one person doing the work for you. To me at least, that is a considerable advantage.
The main disadvantage of the pistolsmith’s work is TIME. Are the advantages worth the wait? Are your requirements specific enough to make it worth the trouble? Only you can decide that; there is no one size fits all answer to what 1911 you should get…but it helps if you are asking the right questions.
So whom do I recommend? Dane Burns made me a flat-out awesome Delta Elite. His only downside is that his lead times are creeping into the years. Dave Berryhill is working on another Delta Elite for me now, and has been great to deal with. There is a gunsmith in Carrolton, Texas, who I won’t name that should be avoided like the plague. I’ve heard a lot of rave reviews by customers of (in no particular order) Ted Yost, Ned Christiansen, Victor Tibbets, George Smith at EGW, and Don Williams at The Action Works. But don't take my word for it; do your own research.
It is important to bear in mind that once you are spending more than, say, $600 on a gun, you are definitely talking about “wants,†not “needs.†Nobody “needs†a $1,000 or $3,000 gun. Heck, for $350 you can get an excellent weapon in a CZ-75B, so maybe those $500 Glocks are just frivolous indulgences.
Will the roughly $1,700 (base gun + parts & labor) going into my tricked-out Delta Elite give me a huge magical advantage over a more basic weapon? Not really. Will it have SOME objective advantages over less expensive guns? Up to a point, yes. But its main advantage is just that it is exactly what I want. And there’s nothing wrong with that. 
