What exactly makes a custom automatic more accurate?

[OH25shooter]

I was looking at the Nighthawk site and noticed their automatics costing between $1800-$2000 plus, claim to be accurate within an inch at 25 yards. What exactly is the difference between a custom made automatic handgun and your everyday $500-$700 under the counter gunstore gun? How can a custom builder guarantee such accuracy?

 

[Old Fuff]

Usually this involves a 1911 style pistol.

The answer to your question is that the costom-built pistol is hand fitted using special parts - particularly the barrel and barrel bushing - that are oversized at certain places so that they can be individually fitted to the particular gun.

That said, some of the $800 to $900 guns can come close to the one-inch standard (measured center to center of the most outside holes) @ 25 yards.

Last but not least, some of the cost of the high-priced custom guns will be for cosmetics, shuch as checkering.

 

[Correia]

Old Fuff is correct. Most of the custom builders use their own in house barrels, or barrels from Jarvis, Bar-Sto, Schuman, or one of the other nice barrel companies. These are usually just of higher quality than a factory barrel. Then they are fitted better than a standard production piece. Also they fit the slides to the frames.

Not that standard production guns can't be that accurate. Some are, but it tends to be more of a crapshoot.

 

[OH25shooter]

Thanks...appears the custom guns get more up close and personal TLC compared to the line built guns.

 

[Sean Smith]

The major points have been addressed already, to wit:

1. A higher-quality "match" barrel, made to tighter tolerances internally & oversized in external dimensions.
2. An oversized match bushing.
3. #1 and #2 are fitted to the gun precisely by the gunsmith. This eliminates the factor of variations in slide/frame/barrel dimensions if they just used mass-prodced parts made to drop into place with loose tolerances.

Another factor is... they test-fire the gun to make sure it delivers the required accuracy! However, that accuracy is "guaranteed" only with certain ammo used to test it, so your real accuracy may vary. 2" @ 25 yards with GI-spec hardball is very different from 2" @ 25 yards with Federal Gold Medal Match!