I have owned five Dan Wesson 10mm 1911s. None of them worked out of the box. All needed from minor to major work to get them running, and DW was no help. I had one Kimber 10mm and it was fine. Hardly a good sample of Kimbers, but I would argue that my DW sampling would be hard to match. Five out of Five guns, 100% failure out of the box.
I love 10mm so often go to extremes to get guns that I want. The least problematic of the DWs was a PM10 that I later sold. My smith had easily corrected its issues, and the present owner reports he is very happy with it. So when I recently saw a PM10 on Guns America cheap I grabbed it. Despite being severely burned by DW, I saw it as a good base gun for further customization. I expected it not to run and that is what I got. For $650, a pistol that would not feed but should be easy to fix. It was actually pretty funny. I went to my smith's to pick it up and we ran out back to his range. He loaded up a mag and started shooting. I stood by expecting failure. Sure enough on round 2 an FTF. He cleared and the same thing happened on round 3. He had to hand cycle/clear his way through the rest of the mag. Rounds hung on the chamber mouth or on the breech face. No biggie. Some polishing and it should be good to go. The previous PM10 was shipped with the wrong length ejector and an extractor that had not been tuned. This one seems better.
So my advice is get the Kimber or look closely at Tanfoglios. Of course one cannot fault a Glock 20 for reliability if you like Glocks. Consider DW only if you are willing to throw further money at it. I would not pay full price as they are going way to high right now. I cannot believe it when I see someone pay over $900 for them on Gunbroker. They will be out a bunch of money if they have to do major work getting the guns to run.
GR
