That was easy

Current status:

Blend undercut trigger guard.

Fit trigger to frame.

Fit hammer, sear, disconnecter.

Trigger job.

Fit and blend grip safety.

Fit firing pin stop.

Fit extractor.

Fit thumb safety.

Fit slide stop.

Do a general de-burring and pre-finish clean up.

Refinish.

Decide on grips.

Install sights.

Test fire.

Adjust ejector.

Lock-tite the grip bushings, trigger overtravel screw, and rear sight set screw. 

The trigger is a polymer/glass epoxy model from STI.  I had never used one of these, but wanted to try it.  The bow arrived in perfect condition, so I didn't have to do any bending or forming.  All I had to do was swipe the top and bottom of the shoe a few times over some sand paper, test fit, swipe, test, swipe, test, over and over again until it fit.  It took 30 minutes at the most.  Here's the before:

And the after.

If I end up not liking the feel of the extremely lightweight polymer trigger I plan to install the flat one from 10-8.  Right now it seems pretty good, though.  The nice thing about doing these things yourself is that you can take the time on the things that are really important to you within the building process.  In this instance, I could have just sanded the trigger until it slid into the frame easily, but instead I took my time, and now have a trigger with absolutely zero up and down slop, but that doesn't drag on the frame at all.  

Next is to fit and install the hammer, sear, and disconnecter.  I pulled the parts out for a close inspection, and noticed that the hammer has a strange seam inside the thumb notch.  

It's going to take some careful work with a very small file to get rid of that, but that kind of detail is what this project is all about.  

I think the next step I'll tackle is fitting together the slide assembly.  Once I fit and install the fire control group, I'm going to need a complete slide in order to test it, so next up is the extractor and slide stop.  

tBlending the Checkering and riggerguard Undercut

List of tasks to complete:

Blend undercut trigger guard.

Fit trigger to frame.

Fit hammer, sear, disconnecter.

Trigger job.

Fit and blend grip safety.

Fit firing pin stop.

Fit extractor.

Fit thumb safety.

Fit slide stop.

Do a general de-burring and pre-finish clean up.

Refinish.

Decide on grips.

Install sights.

Test fire.

Adjust ejector.

Lock-tite the grip bushings, trigger overtravel screw, and rear sight set screw.  

First the before pics.

First I threw a couple of zip ties (4 total) in the areas I didn't want the file or sandpaper to remove metal.  Then I covered the area with Dykem blue.  

It's very important to know what area you're working with, and how much metal you're willing to remove.  The absolute worst thing I could do is weaken the frame, so I measured a lot with my micrometer prior to beginning.  It seemed that the most sensitive area is the sort of dished out area above the checkering.  I decided that I didn't want to remove much metal there at all.  The Dykem blue helps with that, because it allows you to see exactly where your tools are working.  

This was the thickness of the metal before I started working, and after it was the same.  Nice.  

This is after working for a bit.  You can see the checkering overrun lines beginning to disappear.  For this I used a small triangular file and light pressure.  

Getting there...  At this point I took off the zip ties and used a solvent to remove the Dykem in order to see the progress.  After that I used thin strips of 220 grit sandpaper in a "shoe shine" motion to remove more of the finer scratches and tooling marks.  

From this, to this:

I still have a tiny bit more to do, but that will be part of the general touching up before refinishing.  The frame will be bead blasted before ionbonding, so it's not necessary to evenly polish the whole thing.  

This whole process (considering it was my first time) took about 3 hours today.  Next up I'll fit the trigger to the frame, which should be a cinch by comparison.  :-)

The beginning of the Fusion project

My Fusion kit arrived yesterday.  I'm so excited about this project, and the anticipation leading up to this moment has been heavy.  Now, however, I have everything I need to get to work, and I'm feeling a little bit daunted.  Anyway, here are the details and the photos.

It's a bobtail commander kit in .40S&W with a ramped barrel.  To my knowledge, it isn't possible to buy a production version of this exact pistol.  Hell, it's hard to even find a commander length 9mm, let alone one that's bobtailed.  I've gone (so far) with all Fusion parts, mostly because they've given me such a good deal.  It appears that a lot of it actually comes from STI, which is a great Texas company, and most appear to be pretty good quality.

This should give you a sense of what it will look like when it's complete.  The finish, however, will be ionbond, so the whole thing will be black.

Some of the parts I know are made by Fusion in house, like this bushing and spring cap, for example.  The quality on these parts is among the best I've ever seen.  The good news is that Fusion is producing more and more of its own components, and hopefully the quality will be on-par with their other offerings.  The bad news is they still out-source certain components that I consider to be a little crappy.  Take the thumb safety that I ordered with this kit, for example.  Sure, I didn't pay much for it, but it turned out to be a MIM part, and along with the usual ugly MIM injection marks, the shaft wouldn't fit in the frame.  I tried a little filing and sanding (of the part, not the frame), and it turns out the shaft has some bulges.  Oh well.  I ordered a new thumb safety from cylinder & slide, and should have it in a few days.  

So on to next steps.  The picture above is an example of some of the file and sandpaper work that needs to be done.  This is why I'm a bit daunted.  It should be fine, but removing metal from my new frame is going to take careful planning and a lot of preparation.  So speaking of planning and preparation, I think my first step is to measure all the parts with my micrometer, and compare them to the specs in the Kuhnhausen book.  Next I'm going to try to figure out what - if any - of the other parts need to be replaced.  For example, if I know I'd rather have a different grip safety, then I want to order it now so it won't delay the project later.  The actual first step of the building process will be to either fit the trigger to the frame, or blending the undercut trigger guard above.  I suppose it depends on how much time I have when I finally sit down to start moving the chains on this project.  

Here's a rough outline of what needs to be done:

Blend undercut trigger guard.

Fit trigger to frame.

Fit hammer, sear, disconnecter.

Trigger job.

Fit and blend grip safety.

Fit firing pin stop.

Fit extractor.

Fit thumb safety.

Fit slide stop.

Do a general de-burring and pre-finish clean up.

Refinish.

Decide on grips.

Install sights.

Test fire.

Adjust ejector.

Lock-tite the grip bushings, trigger overtravel screw, and rear sight set screw.  

And that should be about it.

New Les Baer TRS - First Impressions

I just took ownership of a new Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special.  My God she's pretty.  Here's a picture with her older brother, my Kimber Custom II.  This will be kind of a lead in to a full comparison of these two pistols.  I'll add a more detailed, side by side comparison - complete with range visit - once the Baer is broken in.

I'm going to leave the TRS stock.  It's just too perfect to mess with it.  The Kimber, on the other hand has been worked over a bit.  It has the following parts from Ed Brown:  Mainspring housing, mag well, thumb safety, and slide release.  I also tried an Ed Brown firing pin stop but it was so loose and sloppy I sent it back.  Truth be told, the Ed Brown parts I've used have been only OK in quality.  In addition to the very undersized FPS, the slide stop is bead blasted, and the thumb safety is polished stainless.  When you order two parts you would think the finish would match, but they don't.  Anyway, so I replaced the Ed Brown FPS with one from EGW.  That puppy took a while to fit, but now it's perfect.  The extractor was replaced with a Wilson Bulletproof unit, the sights are three-dot night sights by Trijicon, and the grips are the diamond back G10 from VZ grips.  I love them.  I also added a small piece of grip tape to the front strap.  All of those replacements were in response to something that went wrong with a Kimber factory part.

I keep thinking with the Kimber that the next parts to replace are the hammer, sear, and disconnector, but I never get around to doing it, because it means I'll most likely need to replace the thumb safety as well.  The Kimber came to me with a decent trigger - it had a tiny bit of creep and broke at about 5.25 lbs.  After I smoothed some internal parts and adjusted the trigger bow and leaf spring it now breaks at a consistent 4.5 lbs.  The creep is diminished but still there, I suspect the last bit comes from the engagement of the hammer hooks to the sear.

Now, after 250 rounds through the Les Baer, I can say that the Kimber trigger pull needs to be fixed, like, yesterday.  I feel like I've finally been treated to a truly world class 1911 trigger, and there's no going back.  It's like eating steak au poivre and then trying to go back to dog food.

Anyway, more comparison stuff.  The Kimber is older, has way more rounds through it, but has always been looser than the TRS.  No big surprise there, as Les Baers are known for being extremely tight.  This one wasn't so tight that I had trouble racking it, but I definitely need a bushing wrench to take it down.  Here's a pic of the rear of the TRS's slide.

And for comparison, the Kimber.

Other random musings about these two:  I don't know what the finish is on the Kimber, but it has been really durable.  There has been no rubbing off, peeling, or flaking even though it's been in and out of a kydex holster thousands of times.  Of course, there is some of the blackness worn off on the slide rails, but that's to be expected.  The bluing on the Les Baer is gorgeous.  We all know bluing is sort of out of date, and that there are all kinds of modern finishes that are supposedly better at resisting corrosion.  I considered that, but then I also considered that most old hunting rifles were blued, and their finishes stood up to worse abuse than I ever plan to subject my Baer to.

I think I mentioned that today I put 250 rounds through the Les Baer.  Standard break-in is 500 rounds without cleaning.  You just lube it up from time to time and blast away.  I did have three FTF's, but none were the gun's fault.  I brought the three factory 7 round magazines, and just for fun brought a Wilson 47D 8 round magazine.  The three FTF's were all on the 8th round out of the Wilson magazine.  All three times the round skipped into the chamber before the extractor hook could grab the rim.  That's a magazine problem, not a reliability problem inherent to the gun.  So I'll either think about replacing the spring on that magazine, or I'll just stick to the factory magazines with this pistol.  Accuracy was great, and the gun was very shootable.  I ended my session with some Mozambique drills, and had no problems staying fast and accurate.  I put a lot of that on the excellent trigger job they do at the factory.

I absolutely love the slim grips that come standard on the TRS.  I'm now rethinking what grips to put on my Fusion build.  Luckily, I have a lot of time to decide.

It will be interesting to see how the two compare once I get them to the range together.  The Kimber weighs more (with the mag well and its full length guide rod), but the Les Baer is tighter and has a better trigger.

CZ 75B Stainless vs. Glock 26

Greetings and welcome to my pistol blog.  Today we're going to draw some comparisons between two pretty disparate pistols, the CZ 75B in polished stainless and the Glock 26.  This is one of those apples to oranges comparisons, as these two pistols have fundamentally different purposes.  However, these are the two I took to the range yesterday, and that was before I had the idea to do a pistol blog.  Some of the pictures are ok, most are bad, and I promise they'll get better as we go.


First features, then some range results and impressions.

The only mods to this particular G26 are an extended slide release and a +2 baseplate for the magazine.  It came with factory night sights.  The CZ, on the other hand, has been sort of hotrodded as it was my intention to use it for IDPA competition in the ESP class.  It has the competition hammer, single action trigger, 15lb hammer spring, fiber optic front sight/competition rear sight, rough aluminum grips from www.czcustom.com, and a couple of pieces of grip tape tastefully applied to the front and back straps.  I added all the mods to these two myself.  For what it's worth, the Glock is about a million times easier to work on than the CZ.  I have a Glock 17 that has been more heavily modified, but with its modular design more parts are truly "drop in."  Whereas with the CZ, even if a part is "drop in" like the trigger, you still have to detail strip the gun a few times which is a royal pain in the ass.  The CZ has a bunch of tiny springs inside, and getting them in the right places and under tension either requires lilliputian hands, or patience, time, deep breathing exercises, safety goggles, and a stress ball.  


Anyway, some of the obvious differences between these two are the weight (duh, one is a subcompact polymer frame and the other is an all steel duty pistol), hammer vs. striker firing mechanisms, grip angle, and size.  We won't cover those much because there is a lot of information already available.

First, even though the CZ is a full-size pistol, it's advantage in sight radius is actually quite small, maybe an inch.  One of the big advantages of striker-fired designs is that, given a similar barrel length (which of course these two don't have), the striker-fired pistol will have a longer sight radius because of its longer slide.  Similarly, a subcompact striker-fired pistol won't give up much on a full size pistol with a hammer and firing pin in terms of sight radius.  

The Glock's barrel is 3.46 inches, while the CZ's barrel is 4.7 inches.  So the difference between the barrel lengths is greater than the difference between the sight radii.  Something to consider when choosing a subcompact, for sure.

A lot is made of chamber support these days, so I thought I'd throw in a picture of each pistol's chamber with a snap cap inserted.  This is the CZ 75B:

This is the Glock 26.  You can see the red plastic of the snap cap quite clearly sticking out of the Glock's chamber.  I truly don't know whether the Glock has enough chamber support.  For 9mm, I assume it's ok.  However, you can clearly see in these two pictures that the CZ has more chamber support than the Glock.  Is that a good thing?  Does it even matter?  I don't know.  But there you have it.  I will say that neither the Glock nor the CZ has had any kind of failure the whole time I've had them.  Well, one time I was shooting some Eastern European ammo on a cold day, and one of these things had a rock-hard primer that the Glock failed to fire on the first strike.  I ejected the round and inspected the primer, to find only the lightest of indentations. Throwing caution to the wind, I loaded the round into the CZ (this was back when this CZ was DA/SA), and whanged on the round until it fired.  It took 5 or 6 hammer strikes.  On a side note, is double strike capability really better if you spend time trying to fire the same round 5 or 6 times, or is it better to just extract that round the first time it won't fire, like one would have to with a striker-fired pistol?  I'll leave that up to the tactical experts.  Besides, it's now moot with this CZ considering I converted it to be single action only.

Some shooting impressions from yesterday's trip to the range.

With it's longer sight radius, longer barrel, and precision fiber optic front sight the CZ is definitely the more accurate shooter of the two.  No big surprise there.  Sorry I don't have pictures, like I said I didn't think of doing this blog until after yesterday's range trip.  Here's an example of what I've done with the CZ (wearing different grips and the original double action trigger, this was 100 rounds of 9mm at about 9 yards, with probably 1.5 to 2 seconds between shots):

It's a very accurate gun, when I do my part.  I can't make a G26 shoot one hole like that, but then again, it is a subcompact.

What some may find surprising is that, even though the CZ weighs 35.2 ounces, and the Glock weighs only 19.75 ounces, the muzzle flip on the Glock is quite a bit less pronounced.  Shot to shot, my sights come back on target much quicker with the Glock, and though the night sights aren't as precise as the carbon fiber sight on the CZ, I feel like follow up shots are a bit easier.  I think this has to do with two things.  First, the Glock's bore axis is about 1/3 of an inch lower than the CZ's using my informal measuring technique.  Second, the Glock's controversial grip angle allows me to lock my wrists a little more positively, with the result being a firing platform that is a little more firm.  I'm an isosceles shooter by the way.   

Aside from the above, the main difference between these two is the trigger.  This particular CZ has about the best trigger one can get on a 75B without removing the firing pin block and switching to the pre-B sear.  It's single action only, and has two screws for adjusting over travel and take up.  With the competition hammer and reduced power hammer spring, the break is crisp and clean and is right at 4 lbs on my trigger pull gauge.  However, the way the trigger is designed, you have to let the trigger almost all the way forward in order for it to reset.  That means for each shot you have to push all the way through the firing pin block safety mechanism, making each single action pull quite long.  This makes follow up shots, for me, slower and a little less accurate.

The Glock, on the other hand, has a simple stock trigger and connector, and my gauge measures it at about 5 lbs.  Pulling the trigger disengages the firing pin stop just like on the CZ.  However, for the Glock trigger to reset it isn't necessary to let the trigger all the way out like the CZ requires.  The result is, for follow up shots, the only pressure required is that which causes the striker to be released.  You can pre-load the trigger, and with its short pull, 2nd and 3rd shots are very fast and accurate.  

Of course, neither trigger is comparable to the venerated 1911, but the Glock isn't far off for a skilled shooter once the pre-travel and pressure required to disengage the firing pin safety are out of the way.  

Next up, my new Les Baer TRS compared to my old Kimber Custom II, the CZ versus a Glock 17, the Glock 26 versus a Ruger SP101, my efforts to build a .40 S&W commander length 1911 from a frame kit and parts by Fusion Firearms, and other pistol-related musings.