This was my first pistol. I bought it just after I turned 21. Looking at it now, I can't believe that it's that old. It's fairly stock except for the Houge wrap-around grips, the hi-visibility 3-dot Millet sights, an ambidextrous safety, and a trigger job done by Pat Sweeney back when he was just a simple gunsmith at a nearby local gun shop. In fact, Pat talked me into buying this gun after I'd walked into the shop, cash in hand, to order an Essex 1911 frame. I'd just read a magazine article about how to build a 1911 from parts and decided that I could do it. Pat however knew better and after showing me a few botched homebuilds that he had in the shop, he convinced me to spent $369.00 on a complete gun and I walked out of the shop with this pistol. The first few months that I owned it, it stayed in a locked ammo can bolted to the firewall of my old Ford F-100 pick-up truck because my then anti-gun father had made it quite clear that no handguns would ever be allowed in his house.
(He's come a long way, hasn't he?)But back to this 1911.
I used to take it shooting every week at a range near my then place of employ. Problem was, I couldn't hit a thing with it. I finally went out and complained to the range owner that my new pistol was incapable of hitting anything. He came in, loaded a magazine, and quickly put five out of five right into the ten ring of the same target that I'd been missing quite consistently. "You got to learn to shoot," he told me. Ouch.
But he made a couple of recommendations, one being the Houge grips and the other being a trigger job to lighten up the nearly 16lb trigger pull on that pistol. The grips made an immediate difference and after Pat Sweeney cleaned up the trigger and took it down to a more manageable 4.5lbs, I was on my way to learning to shoot. Over the next couple of decades, I carried this gun, competed with this gun, and put thousands of rounds through it. Along the way, I had my first (and hopefully only) Accidental Discharge with it, firing a round off inside my house one day when I picked it up to dry-fire it in preparation for a match without first checking to ensure that it was still unloaded. (I knew better, but complacency breeds carelessness.) I learned two valuable lessons that day, the first being to always treat every gun as if it's loaded even if you "know" that it's not. The second lesson had to do with carpentry and how to replace a window. But we won't go there now.
Anyway, taking it out today, I put 100 rounds through it. No malfunctions, no problems with the ammo, and unlike my shooting sessions of decades past, every round went right where I wanted it to, giving me a renewed sense of pride and confidence in this old companion of mine.
Next up, I moved over to the rifle range and took out another old companion from days gone by. This M1 carbine, produced in 1943 by General Motors Inland Division, used to accompany me on many a backpacking and camping trip due to it's light weight and compact size. Sadly, I've ignored this one for quite some time but I've decided to compete in the 2008 Carbine Match at the Nationals next summer so I took it out to see if the little war veteran was still up to it. And boy, was it ever. I was easily able to put 50 for 50 rounds on a paper plate at 100 yards with it, which is about what I'll need be able to do at Perry. What was more fun was watching two guys next to me shooting a Bushmaster M-17S and an M-1 carbine of their own. The Bushmaster had a big but cheap scope on it and they were still unable to group with it at all. Of course the owner of the Bushmaster blamed the scope. he said that he'd put it on to replace the "poor quality" scope that was on the rifle when he bought it and he was a bit put out that he'd bought two bad scopes in a row. I of course suspected that the problem wasn't in the scopes at all, and this suspicion was borne out when they started shooting their carbine and performing equally poorly with it. At 100 yards, he had a "group" that was completely off the target itself and just partially on the lower right corner of the paper. (Pretty much what he'd done with the Bushmaster...and he was firing both of them from a bench rest to boot.) When I left, they were trying to figure out how to adjust the rifle's sights and the guy was complaining that the rifle'd been beaten and abused by the military long before he ever got it. well you know it's a poor musician who blames his instrument and it's a delusional one who blames all of his instruments. Shame on me, but I took considerable pleasure from putting all of my shots into a six-inch group firing off-hand and rather rapidly to boot. But then I never forgot what that range master told me decades ago, and I eventually did learn to shoot.
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