I sent a compensated two-toned 1911 to a gunsmith in Sacramento, CA. He is supposedly a very well-known HK pistol guru and used to shoot for them. Some folks say he can tune and trigger-job an HK better than any other smith, and supposedly his 1911 work is good, but for my time and money, he's the plague. What I wanted was a trigger job, restored trigger guard (from the old hooked style), and as an afterthought,a second, bull barrel to function interchangebly with the 'compensated' setup.
What I got was what he wanted--a fully parkerized, 5" run-of-the-mill .45. The trigger guard was restored, the trigger job was done, and I had a bull-barrelled gun, but he butchered the slide so the compensated barrel doesn't work anymore. In fact, the bull-barrell setup doesn'tw work without a sleeve between the slide and the dust cover that is required to allow proper functioning of the recoil plug and spring; he parkerized the entire gun instead of hard-chroming the frame (back to original), and replaced the grip safety with a model he preferred, and took 14 months to deliver what he said would be a 3-4 month job.
I was lucky to get it back at all; I've since loaned it to a friend, but if I don't ever get it back, it's no big deal--there's certainly nothing unique about it anymore. Wilson Combat does better work, and I've got a couple of those. That gun is a monument to "the stupidest thing I've ever done with a gun"--I sent it to that "gunsmith".
:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: 
