Do yourself a favor. When you buy a new gun, ESPECIALLY an upper-end 1911, recognize that it's gonna have tight tolerances and it's gonna take you several hundred rounds to get the gun to work flawlessly.
While I usually agree with most of your posts & comments, & I agree with your assessment of the accuracy of the 1911 Forum survey, I am going to rant and say that the above comments are almost entirely misguided & have generally (except for custom guns) come about as a way for commercial gun manufacturers to take themselves off the hook for new guns that perform at less than an optimum level.
I've built a lot of
TIGHT match guns & have worked on countless other commercial guns & have bought several new guns from Colt, S&W, & Kimber for myself.
Tightness is rarely
THE problem but is simply an excuse not to fix the issues that are really the culprit so the manufacturers can avoid service work, Kimber has this down to an art & has convinced the buying public of its validity.
Over the last 2-3 years I've bought 3 new new guns; in each case before the gun was ever fired, it was stripped, extractors were tuned, feed ramps, throats & chambers were polished to a mirror finish, slide stops checked to insure no interference with rounds so as to inadvertently lock back unexpectedly & the maximum diameter of a round (reloads) over the bullet near the case mouth, that will drop into the chamber is determined.
Barrel hood to slide fit is checked, bushing to barrel fit is checked.
Reliable magazines are selected; most OEM stuff is usually lacking. Not every magazine works equally well with every spring, extractor, gun combination.
Then when the time to shoot comes, as you so aptly said, the gun is kept well lubed.....slide/frame, barrel/bushing, barrel locking lugs/slide.
When all these steps (which sound like a lot) which are really quite simple, are taken, rarely will a new gun not be reliable, assuming good ammo.
The 3 recent guns have had exactly zero issues not attributable to either ammo or magazines & even those have been almost non-existent.
I have a 20 year old "parts" gun built with a Mark IV NM barrel that has
NEVER, EVER had a single malfunction, & that slide was
VERY TIGHTLY fitted to the frame.
So, most problems, IMO are not from tightness, per se, but usually other issues, but perhaps most 1911 users are not generally capable of either diagnosing nor fixing the real issues.
Rant over for me for now.
MM
