ah1356

North Tennessee Practical Shooters will host a USPSA match at Strategic Edge Gun Range in Chapel Hill, TN next Saturday 7/15/17. Stages and link to registration on PractiScore here: https://www.facebook.com/ntpsclub

After a brief hiatus, the North Tennessee Practical Shooters are happy to announce that we will be hosting USPSA matches on the 3rd Saturday of each month, starting 11/21, at Strategic Edge range in Chapel Hill, TN. Strategic Edge is a private club, but membership is not required to shoot these matches. Huge help to all those who helped make this happen. More details here: Strategic Edge NTPS Facebook

I did it for less reciprocating mass and a non-reciprocating front sight without the extremely heavy front end of a sight tracker, with the added bonus of it being an interesting design challenge. The slide on mine is 4.5 inches long so fairly light. The front sight holder is aluminum, and the entire barrel assembly (barrel, come comp adapter, front fight block, and front sight) weighs what the bull barrel weighed before we started. It is much less nose-heavy than a 6-inch sight tracker. I have since added an SV steel grip, so it is quite heavy, but it balances great and is very flat. I like it a lot and I would do very little different.

I have been running this setup for almost 2 years. Works great. http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6195&p=2092211

It's a 10-pound recoil spring with an aluminum shock buff and I think it's a 17-pound mainspring. Runs great and very flat. If you're using jacketed bullets you'll need to up the powder charge. I need another 0.5 grains to match the power factor using Montana Gold bullets in my 5-inch 1911.

I load 165gr Black Bullets to 1.185-1.19. 5.2gr of N320 makes 168-170 PF in my 6-inch limited gun and my 5-inch single stack gun.

I use a comp-tac made for an edge for my racemaster SS gun. Works perfectly.

I run a 6-inch barrel with a 4.5 in slide. Maybe not exactly what you're thinking about, but this runs great. Post 780. http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6195&page=32

Mine is also roughly 38oz with the tungsten GR installed. The custom barrel lockup length is a great idea - that did not even occur to me when I was playing around with this design. Definitely try 165's. That's all I shoot, and they feel much better than 180's (same powder, same OAL, same PF).

There is more than 1 way to skin this cat.. http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6195&page=32#entry2092211

This is a 6-in barrel on a 4.5-in slide. http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6195&page=32#entry2092211 The barrel is a 6-inch bull barrel turned down and threaded to accommodate an egw cone comp adapter and a chunk of aluminum to hold the front sight. Runs great.

Tim Calhoun did exactly that for me on the limited gun in post 780. Ended up with a 6-inch barrel with a 4.5 inch slide. A bit more extreme that the OP suggests, but the concept works great. This uses a standard 5-inch guide rod and plug. http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6195&page=32

Yes - "Rangemaster." Sorry for the confusion. We cut the dust cover back to SS legal length but the frame started life looking like the above.

It started out as a Racemaster frame, so no, not a weld job. The trigger guard started out square before the double undercut. I helped design the gun, but TIm Calhoun built it. http://www.calhouncustomfirearms.com/ Check him out. He builds some awesome 1911's and 2011's.

Those are not Perman grips. I made the grip panels myself, shaped from 1/4 inch basswood with a handplane, then wrapped in skateboard tape. $5 in materials and a little patience and I love the result. The shape is very similar to my limited guns, and it is very light. And yes, the square trigger guard is a huge improvement, in my opinion.

Fresh back from IonBond. Blacked out everything.

Here is a picture of the business end before we profiled the "comp" to match the slide. Yes, I could have bought a steel comp blank, but it would be heavy and require the same machining steps as the cheaper, lighter, much softer aluminum. I probably could have bought an aluminum comp blank. I didn't look too hard, because the ones I saw looked like they were .22 specific and not big enough to cut to match the slide.

Yes - "AL" is aluminum (abbrev. from the periodic table). The barrel is proud of the aluminum for the reason you suggest - because we were'nt sure that the hot gasses wouldn't chew it up. It also looks better that way, but you'll have to take my word for it on that one until I'm home. I can't access picasa at work so I can't post the picture. The gun is an experiment to see how much better a 2013 legal limited gun could be (if any, and if I'm good enough to know the difference). I think "solid comp" is a good way to describe it. We didn't want a Trubor style - too much weight, no powder benefit from the extra barrel length. We didn't want to bore out and thread a steel cone comp blank - too heavy. I wanted a thumb rest, so that ruled out front-cocking the gun (which will be a tough habit to break), which meant that the slide didn't have to be 6 inches long. A 6-in sight-tracker barrel on a shorter slide just doesn't look right to me and is nose heavy. I bought a cone comp adapter months ago just to see what options it gave us, and we went from there. The chunk of Al was from Ebay and cost about $5. If it doesn't last we can replace it with titanium, but it should be OK since it doesn't reciprocate or touch the slide. Like I said, it's an experiment. We'll see how it goes. I shot it in the white without the thumb rest for about 500 rounds and early indications are promising. I'm shooting it Saturday with the thumb rest, testing a couple different bullet weights. Time will tell.

It was a bull barrel, not a bushing barrel. We went this route because we wanted to be sure that we could thread the cone comp adapter far enough down to remove 1.5 inches or so of the slide, and we wanted the adapter to have all its threads engaged with the barrel. Bushing barrels have a step down in outside diameter that is only about 1.5 inches from the muzzle. We weren't sure that the OD after the step down was still enough to thread (just eyeballing on another barrel, I don't think it is thick enough after the step-down). This cone comp adapter (it's an EGW) has threads throughout the interior and looks like it is designed to thread onto a bushing barrel using most or all of the thicker portion of the barrel. Rather than thread the aluminum "comp" onto the comp adapter, we simply cut the outside threads off the adapter threaded the AL onto the barrel until it was flush with the remainder of the adapter. This way we could snug the two pieces against each other on the barrel to help lock both in place. This is a pic of the barrel assembly (not sure what else to call it) on my kitchen scale. What's left of the barrel, plus the cone comp adapter, plus the AL, plus the front sight weighs 191 grams, which is 1 gram lighter than the barrel was before we started. You can't see it in this picture, but the barrel extends through the AL and stands slightly proud. That way we get the benefit of longer sight radius without weight penalty while keeping the extra inch for the expanding powder to accelerate the bullet (as opposed to a steel expansion chamber made from a steel comp blank).

I'll try to post a picture of the barrel tonight. It is a 6-inch bull barrel turned down then threaded to accomodate an EGW cone comp adapter. The "comp" is then screwed on to the threads so the barrel extends all the way through it. The muzzle is a few hundredths proud of the front face of the aluminum. The gun is so much lighter than my other 6-inch gun that I am considering adding a tungsten GR.

Here is mine, fresh back from IonBond and built by Tim Calhoun. He keeps letting me design crazy stuff, so I keep letting him build them. This is a 6-inch barrel on a 4.5-inch slide with an aluminum "comp" holding the front sight, which does not reciprocate. The barrel, cone comp adapter, and aluminum "comp" weigh 1 gram less than the 6-inch bull barrel out of the box, and much less than a 6-inch sight tracker barrel. Total reciprocating weight is 12.4oz. The slide is monogrammed "AH" just for grins. There is a thumb rest on the left side invisible in the pics. Pics don't do it justice - really hard to capture inky black IonBond with a cell phone. Did the grip myself.

Yes - thanks for the clarification. BTW, if you decide to have one built to similar specs, PM me and I'll be happy to share build details and other info.

My gun linked above passed muster for SS division at the Battle in the Bluegrass, as did other similarly configured pistols. It fits the box, makes weight, has a bushing barrel, has a dust cover .05 inches shorter than the maximum allowed length, and has none of the prohibitted modifications. I see nothing in appendix D5 that prohibits square dust covers. In fact, a word search of the rules shows only 2 instances of "square," one describing targets and the other describing shooting boxes. Were such a rule to exist, I would think it would be difficult to define "square dust cover" unambiguously, especially guns with rails are allowed.

Here is mine still in the white: http://www.calhouncustomfirearms.com/?p=160 Tim Calhoun builds a hell of gun. This one runs lights out, makes weight easily, fits the box, and is SS legal.

Yup. Fun match. See you next time.