Posted: 9/30/2007 3:53:17 PM EDT
|
....which do you like better and WHY? Kimber Compact Stainless II or Springfield Loaded Champion Stainless?  |
|
Springfield, hands down, 1.Kimber has the PITA Swartz safety that cannot be completely removed easily. SA uses the ILS safety that can be removed with a simple parts replacement. 2. Kimber is built tightly. It makes the gun feel solid and adds a negligable (extremely small) amount of accuracy, since the real key to accuracy is NOT with the slide to frame fit. This tightness comes at a dear cost. Wilson Combats can be built tightly because someone is there hand fitting the parts and inspecting these closely before releasing. Kimbers (like Springers) are slapped together with a minimal amount of attention, largely due to the mass volume produced. Pistols/parts built slightly out of spec will probably work fine on a loose pistol. The margin of error is narrowed considerably on a tight pistol. So, tight build - rigorous QC - 1" off the slide = recipe for disaster There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of Kimbers. There are hundreds if not thousands of Kimber Compacts that work great, and I am sure at least two people will be here to tell you how great their Kimber has been to them. I played the "production pistol compact CCW game" and I was burned hard. I was also in a gunfight. That changed everything for me and I went semi custom, because I needed to be as close as humanly possible to 100% confident in the man-made machine my life depends upon, and the odds of that are damn difficult with a production compact pistol, based on this hit or miss QC BS. I don't mean to bag on production pistols in general and Kimbers in specific, but inevitably I am. You can cut some corners to make a cost-competitive 1911 that is basically consistent with X good eggs and Y bad apples, but when you start chopping length off the slide and barrel, the margin of error narrows considerably. Kimber makes a pistol that's too tight for what they are willing to invest in QC (IMO) and that already narrow margin of a tight pistol being narrowed even further by a short slide is too much for my comfort zone. It's your life, it's your call. Even if the consensus is that this argument is making a mountain out of a molehill (which I would go to the mat over) My suggestion still stands due to the Swartz safety sucking ass. If you need any other reasons, Springfield seems to offer somewhat better service than Kimber (at least that's what I seem to read around here) and the Kimber rollmarks are ugly, which is the most important decision about buying a gun, period. Ok... kidding there. Go with the Springer. |
