grip safety eliminator manufacturing cue

​Apparently - according to several reputable 1911 aficionados - Browning did not have a grip safety in his original design of the pistol. This was added at the insistence of the Army who were commissioning the firearm with a view to suppressing the Philippine natives who were proving a tough opponent to US soldiers. Either way, it makes sense to me that a firearm engineer of Browning’s caliber would NOT have intuitively seen the need for the grip safety, and may actually have viewed it’s inclusion as a potential trip-up for some shooters. For my part I’m a single-action fan and the 1911 still leads the pack, but my hands aren’t fleshy enough to consistently disengage the grip safety and I get those frustrating momentary failures-to-fire that could, I suppose, be catastrophic if my life depended on it or if I was trying to win a match. My personal fix has always been a short length of bicycle inner tube pulled up over the grip and safety to keep it down, this works great, but I know Novak offered “The Answer” - a one-piece backstrap that included the mainspring housing and beavertail (pictured above) as one of his custom packages. I can’t see on his site if that’s still available though. And there used to be a machinist out of Montana called KT Ordnance who made 60% competition 1911 frames and a very nice one-piece drop-in backstrap to solve this issue for competitive shooters (I hear purists grinding and nashing their teeth at the mere hellatious thought of removing this item). Except for the vintage 1911 clones by Star, the Argentinian Ballester Molina and Wilson Combat's upcoming EDC X9 there’s nothing to resolve this for pre-existing grip-safety pistols, instead manufacturers all go with oversized safeties to ensure even the boniest hands can depress the safety before firing. So here’s a manufacturing cue for someone: put out a drop-in one-piece backstrap (in both modern beavertail and original A1 configuration) for those of us who love the 1911 as originally intended by Browning prior to Army mandates. Judging by the online threads and discussions on this matter, guaranteed there’s a sturdy market for this item. Ed.

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