Sunday, November 2, 2008

1911 Mainspring Housing.

When customizing the 1911, a frequent item to swap out for your preference is the mainspring housing. That's this guy:


It holds the spring that pushes the hammer onto the firing pin.

You have to be careful when you knock out the pin at the bottom corner of the grip. If the hammer is back the spring is under tension, and small gun parts and thing can FLY across the room, bouncing off of eyeballs and hiding in a dusty corner of the basement shop, never to be found again. DAMHINT (Don't Ask Me How I kNow This)

You can chooser verious type of no-stickum patterns to help you hang onto your shootin' arn better. Vertical grooves. LOTS of vertical grooves. Checkering. Or even smooth. You can have a straight or arched mainspring housing. An extended one with a tapered mag well to help you reload faster in competition. A bobtail type. Or one with a loop on the bottom so you can tie a lanyard to the gun and then around your neck. If you are in the horse cavalry and you drop your pistol with all the bouncing you get cantering about you'll appreciate the utility of the lanyard. Remember, pistols are horse guns and officer guns. Dog face doughboys have the much more powerful rifle to lug around.

My choices was straight or arched or either with a lanyard looped. I chose arched. I need to get a straight (aka 'flat') one one day and see if that helps my shooting. Arched:


Flat or Staight:





I'm a conservative type when it comes to gun design. Also known as crotchety and set in my ways, even in this case, when I don't really have any ways to be set in. But here is what the classic lanyard loop should look like and it is the inestimable JPG Expert Witness' gun. And JPG earned his right to be set or not set in any ways he'd like to:


The way a 1911 is supposed to look. Honest and straigthforward. And ready for going to the field saddled or no. So why not do that for me? Why do I hesitate?

You see the issue? Do you? It might be a bit of punishment during malfunction correction. Slap Rack Bang. Slap the bottom of the magazine to be sure it is seated, rack the slide to clear any obstructions and reset the single action hammer, and try to fire again. With that loop impacting your palm it might be painful on the Slap part. Or just in regular reloads. But it is the classic look.

Do I, personally, need a lanyard anyway? Almost certainly not. There is a modern solution that just doesn't look right:





And I don't know if I'd be comfortable even with the checkering. I'll have to try a checkered type for a few hundred round some day, just to see.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude!

Stop it!

It's making me want another 1911 just to have a hobby fixer-upper...

Bob said...

I'll point out the post directly above this in which the unlucky shooter finds him/herself on the roof sniping at zombies. If your pistol is lacking a working lanyard, you may lose your pistol in the scramble up to the roof.

Jenny said...

Clearly Tam hasn't explained the real reason for the lanyard loop to ya yet... :)

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

I can open a beer with PLENTY of other tools, Jenny...

red said...

Who makes the last one? I'll be rescuing my 1911 from lay-away tomorrow. =]

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

Dunno, Red. Just search through them all on Midway