Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois


Phil Davis



The Taurus 1911 .45

 Phil Davis
 SCRA meeting 3/3/08
April 2008 GunNews






I've talked about the 1911 before but at my other job I work at Birds N Brooks and we sell a lot of handguns and this is probably the best selling handgun we've got right now.  It's Taurus' version of the venerable 1911 .45.  John Browning invented it in 1911, probably one of the most enduring and well known semi-automatic handguns in the world.  I've talked to friends of mine who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and some of them have been lucky enough to have a 1911 and they're well respected over there too.

When you're working a roadblock and someone refuses to stop , you can point an M-16 at them and they'll get a little nervous.  You can yell at them when you're behind a machine gun but when you pull one of these out, rack the slide and hold it level with their forehead, they speak English real quick!

Anyway, the Taurus 1911 is probably, in my opinion, the best buy on the 1911 market right now.  I've had several people say that this is the gun that, if they had a listing of gun of the year best  .45 under $1000, a Taurus 1911 would get it.

I'm going to explain to you why it's a good value and why it's a good gun.  First of all any .45 that you buy now that's a decent quality is going to cost you upwards of $500.  If you find a .45 for under $500 and it's not completely worn out and it's not a pot metal piece of junk you probably ought to buy it if you're looking for a 1911.  The 1911 style, you can't get any more reliable if it's a well built built gun put together properly, it will feed just about anything from target loads to good defensive hollow points.

Taurus wanted to enter the 1911 market and they basically did some research talking to people who used the 1911, competitive shooters, IDPA shooters, IPSIC shooters and practical pistol shooters.  They said, "If you're going to buy a gun, what do you want on it?"

The people who responded said they wanted forward grasping grooves. Secondly they said they wanted good high visibility sights.  Dick Heinie developed a set of low profile, high visibility sights that he calls the speed eight sight.  Basically it's a Novak type sight, a low profile sight.  The way the dots are arranged, everybody is used to seeing a three dot sight where you have to line up the three little balls in a line and that helps you in low lighting.  He changed it to being a single dot on the back and a single dot on the front so you make a figure eight  It's very quick to line up when you bring it up to see.  They're low profile sights so they don't snag when they're coming out of a holster or when you're re-holstering.  The sight is dovetailed in the front so if you want to put a night sight on the front or if you want to put a high vis sight on the front, all you have to do is loosen the set screw and slide in the high vis sight or slide in a tritium night sight.  It's already set up for that.

They also said, "Well, what else do you want on it?"   One of the things that people who shoot 1911's complain about in the unconfigured form is hand bite.  It might might bite here if you don't have the beaver tailed grip safety.

So not only did they put  an extended grip safety on it, they also put a memory hump or a memory bump on the grip safety.  What that is designed for is when you grasp the gun quickly that indexes your hand and pushes it and forces you to take a proper grip.  If you don't have that you can grip it low or you can grip it improperly.  This puts your hand in there and it pushes your hand up into that, the little memory hump here.  That's something that your after market beaver tailed grip safeties have. 

They said, "Well we want extended safety so that it's easier to grasp in a hurry."  Well not only did they extend the safety, they made it ambidextrous so left handed shooters could operate it left handed.

They put a lot of the necessary things to make it a good, quick reloading gun.  They beveled the magazine wells.  It makes for easy no hands, no eyes insertion of the magazine, just get it started and it funnels it in.

They put a commander hammer on there so it doesn't have the long spur.  It's an extended gold cup style trigger that is adjustable for over travel just like a Colt gold cup has on it.  They put some of the niceties on there, checkering the flat main spring housing, checkering the front strap and checkering the trigger guard.  Even if your hands are hot , sweaty or wet, it gives you something to grasp ahold of.  It improves the grip.  As a matter of fact I wish my Colt had the checkered front strap on it because it feels really nice.

The ejection port is beveled so you have good sound ejection.  You also have less denting of your brass so you can reload without having the case mouths all torn up.

It has a full length guide rod which keeps your recoil spring from binding or kinking.  It makes it more reliable and more accurate.  It has a stainless steel match grade barrel that is very reliable.

If you started out with a $500 plain Jane Springfield Armory  GI .45, added the Heinie sights $125, did all the cuts on the enhanced cuts for gripping $100, beveled or tapered the mag well $75-$100.  Checkering, it all depends which gunsmith you have do it and how much they value their time at but it's not cheap.  A new trigger, if  you install it yourself and you know what you're doing, $25-30.  If you have a gunsmith do it a trigger job with an extended trigger $150-$200.  A new safety is $50.

All said and done, Taurus added up what the cost would be if you took a plain .45 and did to it what this gun has added from the factory it would be over $650 worth of custom work.  That's less than what the gun costs retail brand new with two magazines.

In order to get around the laws where every new gun is required to have a gun lock, this one has one built in.  It's in the top of the hammer.  If you haven't seen a 1911 Taurus, it has a little allen key right in the top of the hammer.  If you cock or uncock the gun you twist that and it basically locks the hammer.  It pushes out a little nut and it makes sure no matter if you dry fire it or anything, it hits before the hammer does.  So it has a built in safety system.

If you want to do other things to the Taurus, it is parts interchangeable with other 1911's.  If you don't like the grips that's easy to solve.  You can buy Hogues, Pachmayrs, or whatever you want.  Personally I think putting a set of Pachmayrs on this and covering up the checkered front strap would be sacrilege.

There was a time when you couldn't entice me to buy either a Taurus, a Rossi or anything else.  How many of you when you hear the word Taurus think back to the 1970's and think cheap, junk gun?  In the 1970's and even as late as the 1980's Taurus equalled cheap, junk gun.  If you bought a Taurus that meant you didn't have enough money to buy a Smith & Wesson or that someone had talked you into it.

A little known fact is that if you bought a Taurus in the 1960's it was probably made out of pretty good steel because it was made out of steel salvaged from a pocket battle ship made of German craft steel.

The one that is available now in this is the standard blue finish.  Just in the last month and a half they have started to show up on the scene available in stainless steel and, blue and stainless steel with a accessory Picatinny rail on the bottom, kind of like the TRP or the Operator that Springfield Armory sells, or a lot of the high dollar ones.  The difference in price between the blued one with the Picatinny rail and the blued one without the Picatinny rail is $10.  The difference in a Springfield Armory without the Picatinny rail and with the Picatinny rail is $480.  So if you one of the light rail go with a Taurus, pay $10.

Realistically for around $575 or $580 you can have a gun that is on par with a lot of guys custom guns that they have over a grand in.  They come with two 8-round competition magazines.  You might think a 1911 .45 is too much gun for someone with small hands but the nice thing about the 1911 is it is so slim.

When you buy a custom .45 you wave bye bye to the $1000 mark real quick.  $2800 is not outrageous for a custom built .45.

They also are coming out with a night sight version of this.  There's a dual tone, all the high dollar guns are coming out this way,  stainless bottom, blued top.

I want a Commander length and it started out they were going to make a commander length version of this.   I was desperately wanting them to do so but the demand for this has been so high, they had to take that out of their lineup and just make this.  Hopefully they will be coming out with the Commander length because when they do I will own one.   The Commander is going to be 4 1/4 inch.  It's an all forged gun, very durable, very reliable.

Really I haven't found anything that Taurus has made in the last five years that I didn't like and if I were to buy this gun right now I would be hard pressed to think of anything to do to it that hasn't already been done.

Another really great presentation followed by Davis answering questions about Taurus guns.
 


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