cherryriver
Member
This one's been keeping me awake nights for a while, now.
This is the left side of my Combat Commander, the one that was my first gun. There's a mark here just behind the scallop that sure looks to me like a crack.
At the limits of my close-up photography skills, you can see two marks, a shorter curvy one that is what I first saw, and then that second, longer one.
The loopy squiggle atop the one mark that looks like an old television antenna really is there; it isn't just a piece of fuzz.
There is a shade of a hint of a mark across the bottom of the slide there, and it is exactly in line with the start of the dustcover part of the slide.
There's no such anything on the starboard side.
I fretted over this last year on a forum and learned there's no realistic way to weld up a forged slide like this. I did make a half-hearted attempt to find a replacement but without success.
If this was another gun, and I have other Commanders, I would just set it aside or throw on any old slide. But this one is the most prized possession of any, and I'd really rather see about keeping it going.
Since I've already seen a Para slide break in this general vicinity, I take it seriously. Still, once a local smith looked at the curvy mark and said he thought it was a dent, not a crack, I went on shooting it, about another 1000-1300 rounds. (The thing probably has well over 50K lifetime, and yes, I didn't know back in my youth that you had to change recoil springs every so often.)
I can't make up my mind whether the extra shooting changed it, but I think there's a chance it did.
I think I'm appealing to those who've seen a fair number of slide breaks over the years and might recognize it for such.
Since I put a Brown barrel and some other stuff in it a couple of years ago when I first started shooting practical matches, it shoots and runs absolutely wonderfully, far better than it ever did back in 1973, and better than the highly-customized replacement I got last year to get me to stop shooting this one.
Thanks
Bill
This is the left side of my Combat Commander, the one that was my first gun. There's a mark here just behind the scallop that sure looks to me like a crack.
At the limits of my close-up photography skills, you can see two marks, a shorter curvy one that is what I first saw, and then that second, longer one.
The loopy squiggle atop the one mark that looks like an old television antenna really is there; it isn't just a piece of fuzz.
There is a shade of a hint of a mark across the bottom of the slide there, and it is exactly in line with the start of the dustcover part of the slide.
There's no such anything on the starboard side.
I fretted over this last year on a forum and learned there's no realistic way to weld up a forged slide like this. I did make a half-hearted attempt to find a replacement but without success.
If this was another gun, and I have other Commanders, I would just set it aside or throw on any old slide. But this one is the most prized possession of any, and I'd really rather see about keeping it going.
Since I've already seen a Para slide break in this general vicinity, I take it seriously. Still, once a local smith looked at the curvy mark and said he thought it was a dent, not a crack, I went on shooting it, about another 1000-1300 rounds. (The thing probably has well over 50K lifetime, and yes, I didn't know back in my youth that you had to change recoil springs every so often.)
I can't make up my mind whether the extra shooting changed it, but I think there's a chance it did.
I think I'm appealing to those who've seen a fair number of slide breaks over the years and might recognize it for such.
Since I put a Brown barrel and some other stuff in it a couple of years ago when I first started shooting practical matches, it shoots and runs absolutely wonderfully, far better than it ever did back in 1973, and better than the highly-customized replacement I got last year to get me to stop shooting this one.
Thanks
Bill
(Kidding, kidding -- I think?)