Don is a standup, old school smith who does excellent work. I can also recommend Greg Derr up in MA. Amazing work and cut from the same cloth.Originally Posted by Rock185
Don is a standup, old school smith who does excellent work. I can also recommend Greg Derr up in MA. Amazing work and cut from the same cloth.
Appears to have a shallow slot milled into top of the slide, and either soldered, or silver soldered in place. My idea was, since it could probably be removed in one piece, was to remove it, shorten it up, reinstall it..Doing this, you’d still have the original front sight in the gun, just shorter..
Based off An old Jim Clark interview/article that I haven’t seen for about 20 years, the front sights are silver soldered. He made a comment about guys having their staked front sights fly off during a match.
I believe the silver solder was performed before the slide and frame were fitted. I’d have to have a lot of confidence in someone’s knowledge before I let them put heat to a finely fitted bullseye pistol, to convince me it’s not a big deal.
Guys I used to shoot bullseye with had a number of Clark’s pistols. One guy measured his sear hooks in his son’s new Clark wad gun at 0.014”. He was a pretty good shade tree gunsmith, he did a lot of trigger jobs for people at the MTU Pistol Club. He was amazed at how short the hooks were, and how things were fitted. Kuhnhausen recommends 0.020” minimum.
Not that my opinion matters, but I think you’re on the right track with swapping out the sear/hammer and leaving the front sight alone. Any more than that and trading it might be the easier route.
Thanks for that.. Fitting the sight to the slide before fitting the slide to the frame makes a lot of sense. That little tidbit of information is very valuable to me, as it helps me make a decision.. Sadly, while knowledge about shooting, and how these guns were shot is still around, the techniques involved in building them, are not, and a lot of this knowledge has been lost.I used to be a pipe fitter, and have been around welding for 32 years, I myself have done silver soldering. As you probably know, silver soldering involves a lot of heat, and I could see how this could interfere with the slide/frame fit.. As it is now, I cannot feel any play in the frame/slide fit, I don’t want to do anything to alter that..
That was pretty common back in the day. You can have really short hooks and be fine, so long as the placement of the sear and hammer in the frame are proper. What you can't have is short hooks and a really long-lasting trigger. Modern sear/hammer fitting is more about controlling the shape of the engagement surfaces, which is a thing that we can now do easily and reliably with modern tools.
Yes and now. Yes, there are damn few true bullseye pistolsmiths left around, because there just isn't a ton of market for it and hand-building a 1911 is a slow process. People don't want to pay for it, and even the fewer shooters there are will either pick up a used gun or just have a decent 1911 accurized,given a trigger job, and fit for an optic.
No, the techniques haven't really been lost. Silver soldering is still done. In fact, there are pistolsmiths using it to fix red dots to slides. In other areas, techniques haven't been lost, but replaced by better ones. Staking a front sight can leave it vulnerable to breaking, for instance, so silver soldering became common. Now we have access to much better machining equipment and techniques, so dovetailing the front sight is popular--it's secure, and makes it easy to replace the front blade. So the expertise has moved to properly cutting the dovetail, and then blending the front sight's base into the curve of the slide.
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