Posted: 11/30/2013 1:00:38 PM EDT
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i am trying to build a lightweight 1911 for my mom.
the plan is to start with a titanium frame and work from there. what other things can i do to shave weight? |
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Weight savings will determine a lot of the choices you may want to make yourself.
For example, what kind of thumb safety do you want? A single sided safety will be lighter than an ambi, while a non-extended one will be even lighter. A flat mainspring housing will be lighter than a curved one, a short aluminum trigger should be lighter than a long one. You may end up with a gun with a negligble weight difference over one where you pick out the parts you want. The titanium frame should already put you in the light zone. |
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Do you think your mom will enjoy shooting a lightweight 1911? You can feel the difference, and my wife who is a better than average shooter doesn't care for them. Just a thought.
Anyway, I went about building a lightweight 1911 for my son, simply because it's a dedicated .22 upper. I went with an aluminum frame. I also used a plastic mainspring housing as suggested. You could also try and locate an aluminum mainspring housing and skeletonize it like a LW Commander MSH. There are a couple alternatives to hogging out your beavertail. One is to find a factory Springfield Armory beavertail, as they are already hollow. The other is to try an locate an aluminum Caspian beavertail, which I was able to find from a guy on eBay. I just bought one recently, and he had a ton of them. Some other places to shave fractions of an ounce are the trigger, the hammer, and the sear. Look at some of the ultralight hammers out there, such as those offered by Cylinder and Slide or Koenig. C&S also offers a skeletonized sear and disconnector. For a trigger, you might look at the Dlask magnesium/titanium trigger, as their short trigger might be the lightest out there. Same goes for the STI carbon fiber/titanium short trigger. I would also look at the frame cutouts under the grips, as Caspian has smaller cut outs than standard. You can remove quite a bit of metal there. If you have a mill, there are quite a few places to hog out metal without being visible when the gun is assembled. Same goes for the slide. You can save a little more weight with a plastic recoil spring guide. I don't know if there are plastic mag releases, but I wouldn't be surprised if Para Ordnance uses them on their single stacks, since they already use plastic on their double stack mag releases. In any event, please update us if you end up going with an ultra light build, and where you shave the weight. |
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Quoted:
Do you think your mom will enjoy shooting a lightweight 1911? You can feel the difference, and my wife who is a better than average shooter doesn't care for them. Just a thought. the only thing she doesn't like about my colt 1991a1 compact is the weight, she says it is heavy. that coming from the best shooter i have seen, that isn't paid to shoot, ill build the lightweight and if she doesn't like it, i can rebuild it. |