5 ms·

I don’t think the original 1911 were hand fit, but all of the modern, upper tier 1911 claim to be hand fit. Why the purpose behind this; reliability?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
If you're really lucky hand fit translates to "our QA department is stocked with measuring tools and they actually use them to confirm parts meet spec before being assembled, maybe if you're lucky they write down how over/under something is so that the assembly guys can pick combos that work well". (If you're paying big bucks this is hopefully the case.) More likely it means someone cycled the thing to make sure it worked before slapping their "qa by <unintelligible scribble>" sticker on the product or packaging It's mostly just marketing mumbo jumbo to make it seem like a fancy hand crafted product. Back in "the day" the marketing people would have advertised that things were made by precision machines. Today labor is expensive and machines are cheap so they're advertising that they put a lot of labor into it in part to justify the price (and the reverse would have been true in the early 1900s, they'd emphasize the machine contribution). Firearms are tight like a retired hooker compared to the kind of tolerances any reasonably modern manufacturing operation of that sort (mostly machining and stamping/forming) is capable of working in (they need to be loose so all those steel on steel parts will move like they're supposed to). Loose fitment tolerances translate to less need for super precise parts to begin with. Say you have a slide that wants .010"+.002"/-0001" of clearance. Sure you can make that part to .0005 but insisting on that level of consistency just adds unnecessary cost to do so when you have an entire .0003" space to shoot for. For ultra high precision stuff tighter tolerances and more consistency are used but that's mostly limited to the pressure bearing parts of the action that touch the case/bullet (the goal is to get that cartridge to fit in there the same way each and every time). Some of the most reliable firearms out there use very loose tolerances. For a 1911 I feel very safe saying that the modern high end ones do it more because they can than because it improves performance in any measurable way. High end guns almost by definition will never see enough use to get to the point where manufacturing it more precisely could ever effect reliability.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

If you're really lucky hand fit translates to "our QA department is stocked with measuring tools and they actually use them to confirm parts meet spec before being assembled, maybe if you're lucky they write down how over/under something is so that the assembly guys can pick combos that work well". (If you're paying big bucks this is hopefully the case.) More likely it means someone cycled the thing to make sure it worked before slapping their "qa by <unintelligible scribble>" sticker on the product or packaging It's mostly just marketing mumbo jumbo to make it seem like a fancy hand crafted product. Back in "the day" the marketing people would have advertised that things were made by precision machines. Today labor is expensive and machines are cheap so they're advertising that they put a lot of labor into it in part to justify the price (and the reverse would have been true in the early 1900s, they'd emphasize the machine contribution). Firearms are tight like a retired hooker compared to the kind of tolerances any reasonably modern manufacturing operation of that sort (mostly machining and stamping/forming) is capable of working in (they need to be loose so all those steel on steel parts will move like they're supposed to). Loose fitment tolerances translate to less need for super precise parts to begin with. Say you have a slide that wants .010"+.002"/-0001" of clearance. Sure you can make that part to .0005 but insisting on that level of consistency just adds unnecessary cost to do so when you have an entire .0003" space to shoot for. For ultra high precision stuff tighter tolerances and more consistency are used but that's mostly limited to the pressure bearing parts of the action that touch the case/bullet (the goal is to get that cartridge to fit in there the same way each and every time). Some of the most reliable firearms out there use very loose tolerances. For a 1911 I feel very safe saying that the modern high end ones do it more because they can than because it improves performance in any measurable way. High end guns almost by definition will never see enough use to get to the point where manufacturing it more precisely could ever effect reliability.