Lets see what we have here…
Prestigious Gun Company (PGC) in Hartford CT. turns out a (very expensive) pistol of the sub-compact 1911 variety. Former owner then turns it over to Big Name Pistolsmith (BNPS) who does his thing and adds more bucks to the project. By now we must be well over a grand and climbing.
Trouble is this pile of peanut squeezings won’t run. What we have here is a big-bucks paperweight.
Apparently the former owners sells it (likely taking a loss) to the current owner, who travels into the wilds of rural North Carolina to see a redneck gunfixer named “Buba-T.”
Buba-T downs a mug of Turbo-coffee, casts his bloodshot eyeballs on the suspect pistol, and then goes to work. Using his trusty file with a safe edge he hogs out the breechface, and then reams out an undersized barrel chamber – which BNPS didn’t notice. He apparently didn’t check the headspace or test fire the gun either. Them Buba-T grabs his homemade scraper and scratches away on the barrel ramp, which isn’t right either.
Not yet satisfied, he makes a skim cut on the back of the recoil spring guide and circumcises the recoil spring. I would suspect that somewhere in this he should get out his big hammer and make some more adjustments.
By now he has observed that a combination of fast slide cycling combined with a short run-up isn’t too good of an idea – something that escaped the (too) highly paid engineers at the PGC back in Hartford, CT. If Buba-T makes this piece of junk run (which he does) it’s probably because he doesn’t have an engineering degree – John Browning didn’t either, and seemed proud of the fact.
After consuming gallons of Turbo-coffee the pistol’s present owner goes out and shoots it, and discovers to his delight that it now actually does work – in spite of the PGC and BNPS. Clearly the redneck gunfixer has wrought his magic.
Meanwhile others are still shelling out big bucks to both the PGC and BNPS and receiving guns in return that too often don’t work. Not too worry, the government has shown them the way – simply throw more good money after bad.
The Old Fuff has become a crippled, cranky old…. But he wonders about today’s gun buyers. In his day the PGC would be bankrupt (and maybe it is) and the BNPS would be sitting somewhere on a corner with a tin cup. As for the redneck gunfixer, Buba-T would have a lot less work to do, because the guns would have worked in the first place. Old-time gun buyers took it as a given that guns worked, out-of-the-box, and if they didn’t all kinds of h..l would break loose.
Times have sure changed…
