Dropping the Slide on Empty 1911s

Read this post from Nighthawk Custom, a company that provides customized 1911s at a price tag between $4,000 and $6,000 each:

I’ll let y’all fight this one out in the comments, but…

You SHOULDN’T repeatedly drop the slide on an empty chamber of a finely tuned 1911.

And we have more 1911 gunsmiths at Nighthawk who have been inducted into the American Pistolsmiths Guild than any company in the world,…

— Nighthawk Custom (@NighthawkCustom) August 25, 2026

I tried to use and carry 1911s, I really did. They are gorgeous handguns. They are also finicky out of the box. After spending a kilobuck each on four of them, I got some beautiful handguns that looked great in a holster. They were also unreliable safe queens because they couldn’t reliably digest whatever ammo I put through them.

They told me to break the pistol in for 500 rounds and that would fix it. It didn’t. I was accused of “limp wristing” by people who hadn’t even watched me shoot. I was told to change ammo, because some 1911s are finicky. I was told to lube them more, and was also told to lube them less. Other advice was change the springs, get more gunsmithing done, and tons of other things.

Even after you spend $5000 on a custom from one of these high end gunsmiths, you end up with a pistol that still doesn’t work as well as a modern handgun. I was even looking at an Ed Brown. I finally decided that, if I were going to spend thousands of dollars, I might as well get something fun that won’t be a safe queen. Here is my experience from 14 years ago:

So this past weekend, I thought that it had been awhile since I had taken the Pro Carry for a spin, so I took it to the range. I brought 100 rounds with me, and I stopped after firing only 50 rounds because I had already had about 6 failures of the pistol to go into battery. I had the gunsmith there look at it, and he told me that the recoil spring was in need of replacement. It had been replaced at the factory only about 300 rounds before. I pointed that out, and he told me that Kimber 1911s needed new springs about every 500 rounds.

The design of the 1911 is over 100 years old, and firearm technology, metallurgy, and other technologies have come a long way since then. I just can’t trust my life to a firearm that won’t go bang every time you press the trigger, and the only way to reliably get a 1911 that will do that is to spend multiple thousands of dollars, only to wind up with a handgun that is made to such tight tolerances that dropping the slide on an empty chamber will ruin it and require more money to repair.

I have bought M&Ps for less than $500 that haven’t had a single malfunction in more than 10,000 rounds. Not one of my 1911s went more than 500 rounds between malfs, and a couple of them couldn’t get through an entire 50 round box without some sort of issue. They just aren’t reliable without thousands of dollars of custom work.

Instead of spending that kind of money on a handgun because it’s accurate or because you like the trigger, spend less than $1,000 on a decent factory handgun, then spend the rest of that cash on a class, a couple of cases of ammo, and year of taking weekly trips to the range. You will find it more beneficial than buying an unreliable safe queen.