This is my RIA. I had a $100 gift card and Gander Mountain had these on sale for $400.00 I was able to buy a full sized 1911 for $300!! What a deal!! Gander was nice enough to let me pick the best out of three, this has a great trigger and is tight all over. It is amazingly tight. No slide play, no barrel hood play, its tight all over!!
This is the pistol with factory grips. Boring.
This is my RIA with prettier grips. I just love the double diamond and the brown/red of Cocobolo. I also liked the checkering. Looks a lot more GI with just a change of grips.
First thing out, magazines unlatched. This part was defective:
RIA sent me a new magazine release for free, new one works perfectly.
My RIA ejected brass reliably but the stuff went 20 feet. It also ate up shock buffs. I am lazy and don't like chasing brass all over the country side and I started installing heavier recoil springs. I have a 24 pound recoil spring inside, it takes some hand strength to rack the slide, but now brass ejects like all my other 1911's. I really don't know if such a heavier recoil spring will do anything bad to the pistol or not, I have noticed my shock buffs are doing very well. I wonder if a stronger spring improves feed reliability. The sucker will chamber a round.
This pistol shoots to point of aim, but it is clearly not a target pistol. It will hold everything inside my 12" gong target at 25 yards, I don't remember exactly the group size, but I think it was half of the gong target, so maybe everything goes in six inches at 25 yards.
My Les Baer will do this:
Ernest, a 72 year old Bullseye shooter, did this at 50 yards with his pistol:
To have a 1911 that will shoot as good as Ernest's pistol will probably cost you between $2500 and $3500 dollars. And you will have to wait a year, maybe more. I recently asked the Gunsmith for the Army Reserve Team how many months he was behind, and he just groaned.
My RIA leads right in the throat with cast lead bullets. No problem with jacketed. I am going to load up some abrasive bullets and shoot them down the tube and see if that polishes the throat. This pistol has zero problems feeding my 200 LSWC's, 230 LRN, and of course, 230 FMJ RN. Every 1911 should feed a 230 FMJ RN.
I don't have any problems with the skinny sights, and it is not like I can see iron sights clearly any more. They are good enough for general orientation. These GI sights are adequate for spitting distances, and as the range master said, when I moved the target out to 25 yards, "
if they are that far away they are not a problem". Well, maybe not to me. But I will be to them. The original configuration GI sights are snag free, if that is any consideration.
I wanted a thumb cocking 1911. I did not want a beavertail. I think cocked and locked is dangerous, I have had the thumb safety bump off too many times, and a beavertail just gets in the way of thumb cocking a 1911. And it gets in the way of lowering the hammer. You might as well go striker fired if you are going cocked and locked. If I carry the thing, or use it as a "truck gun" it will be transported in condition 2, that is, round in the chamber and hammer down. This is how the gun was designed to be carried, accidental discharges changed the mode of carry to cocked and locked, in the flap holster. By the time you get to Vietnam you were not allowed to put a magazine in the pistol until you were on the way to the drop zone, and you could only chamber a round once you were on the ground. But the pre WW1 mode of carry was round in chamber, hammer down, in the flap holster. Incidentally this is the mode that General Hatcher recommended, and he personally knew John Browning. These guys who carried Colt SAA's on the Indian frontier were not scared of thumb cocking nor lowering the hammer. I can thumb cock with the best of them, either using the pistol hand, or the support hand to thumb cock.
I use two hands to lower the hammer. The middle finger of the left hand is between the hammer and slide, the forefinger in the hammer spur notch. I pull the trigger with the right hand and pull out the left middle finger, which lowers the hammer, and use the forefinger in the hammer spur notch to control things once the middle finger is free. That gets the hammer down slowly. I did notice in the Texas Ranger Museum in San Antonio, lots of pictures of Texas Rangers on horseback, with 1911's in open holsters, and the hammer down. I can't prove the 1911's were loaded, but I don't think those men were all that scared of condition 2.
