Well the gun has about 1500 rounds through it now and I figured it's time to disassemble it and see whats going on.
Came apart easily, ambi-safety gave no problems, and the rest just came out like normal.
While cleaning I was suprised that there was not a lot of crud or anything in the frame save for some buildup (slight) in the trigger rail grooves.
Once everyting was clean I started to look at the wear patterns of everything. To put it short and sweet, there wasnt any to speak of, just some bright spots. All well in that department.
Next was the sear and hammer engagement hooks. Here is where I got my big suprise. Doesn't look a damn thing like Kuhnhausen shows. At the bottom of the hammer hooks there is an undercut radius with a small flat left to act as an engagement surface for the sear. The sear had the normal angle cut on it, but the 45 degree back cut was missing. In its place was a radius, so there is no sharp sear point. I've posted before that this gun has a very nice crisp trigger , which it does. This trigger breaks every time at exactly 52 oz. When I checked the engagement rub mark, it was even across the width of the sear.
I'm wondering if this is just a different way of adjusting the hook engagements, by using a radius rather than a 45 degree honed back angle. Has anyone else noticed this sear and hammer work on their Les Baer's ?
I was very suprised that the trigger feels so good, since most of my experiences with a radiused nose on a sear haven't been all that positive. Those experiences were not with a 1911 though.
I had some pretty serious jamming problems with this gun originally till I sent it back to Baer for correction. Has been reliable for the last 800 rounds. Well, that is, until this weekend. I got some range loads for the local shooting place and one of the bullets was seated about 1/16" deeper than all the rest in the box. That round as luck would have it, was at the top of the mag when I loaded the gun. It failed to feed into the chamber from a slide lock. I tried it twice again and it still failed before I saw what was wrong with the round. To be quite honest about the whole thing, Im real real happy the gun didnt feed this round. I dont know what the pressures would have been had I shot that round, but i can imagine it would not have been to pleasant.
So , long story short, after 1500 rounds, gun is breaking in nicely. Its easier to rack the slide than when new but still tight like a bank vault at lockup. No unusual wear indicators or burring, all safety functions still working propperly, and continues to be my most accurate gun. I'm confident in the guns functioning and my abilities with it.
For my purposes its a great carry gun, the short grip hides easily, and the commander length slide helps to leverage the grip into my body.
Will it run flawlessly for the next several thousand rounds? I doubt it. But thats just because I've had about 30 semi-automatics and havent found one that would run that long without a bobble for some reason or another. Considering it's very unlikely that I will ever have to use the gun, and it will probably have a reliability somewhere in the 99%+ range, the likelyhood of the two events ever coming together to cause me a problem are so remote as to be a statistical improbability. Based on my experiences with semis , thats plenty good enough for me.
