ken_mays

Good looking rifle! Seems to have a few features I’d want like that buttstock style, so you have a good cheek rest and sling swivel sockets fore and aft. Extended charging handle is handy especially if you have a scope mounted. Trigger may or may not be ideal for precision. Larue makes a decent budget replacement.

Love the PPQ and the PDP. I wasn’t a big fan of the P99 but they remedied most of my complaints with the PPQ. About the worst that can be said about them is the factory recoil spring delivers unnecessarily snappy recoil, but that’s easily fixed. There are so many different, excellent pistols that they kind of get lost in the crowd, and I’m as guilty as anyone of not giving mine the attention they deserve.

Palmetto makes the JAKL which is an AR compatible piston upper. There are also a good handful of other proprietary AR piston uppers. Moving to different designs, there is the FN SCAR, CZ Bren rifles, Galil ACE, Robinson XCR, Beretta ARX, Bushmaster ACR, and a few more that escape me at the moment.

I have never really adopted HK as a carry / competition platform. For daily use, there is usually something else in the safe I would rather shoot or carry. However, there is something about them that makes me buy them when I see a good deal on one. I would have absolutely no problem using a HK pistol as an end-of-the-world sidearm, since they are basically bombproof.

I have carried 1911s a fair amount, they are flat and conceal pretty well. The Government size steel models do get pretty heavy by end of the day. I have a couple of Lightweight Government models that I really need to do something with, I bought them for when I felt like carrying a 1911, but I haven't gotten around to tweaking them like I generally do. The lightweight Commanders make a lot of sense too, but I personally prefer the longer slide when carrying and shooting. LW Commanders and Officer's length guns have a narrower window of reliable operation when it comes to spring force balance; worn mag and recoil springs will give you grief if you don't keep up with changing them.

Everything happens harder and faster on the short slide 1911s. Keeping proper spring tension balance is critical to keeping them reliable. I like to install flat bottom firing pin stops and have installed heavier hammer springs to address cycling issues with them. Ejector tuning may also improve matters if it throws brass in the wrong direction. This mostly consists of moving the contact point where the ejector strikes the case up or down by putting an angle on the ejector tip. If the slide comes back too fast, it can catch the ejected case in flight and bounce it back at you. That’s when slide energy reduction might be something to address.

I’ve sent in a 320 not long after they first came out. Mine had trigger slap so bad I could not put more than a couple mags through it. They sat on it awhile and after I finally called them to see where it was, got it moving and back to me. They did fix the issue and pay for shipping so I guess it could have been worse.

It’s not exhaustive by any means, just that he didn’t encounter or report seeing any.

Dug up my Jerry Paregien (RIP) book on the FEG HPs. No mention of stainless in that e-book, so no help there.

The things to call out here would be that the Carry has a fixed rear sight instead of adjustable, and remains when the optic has been installed, as a BUIS. The firing pin block was a good addition for a carry oriented pistol, especially in light of the ongoing P320 imbroglio. I'm probably in the minority here, but I applaud the addition of a decocker, though I'd say it probably could be trimmed down a bit more. I find the thumb safety on CZs difficult to reach and use, due to their location and safety lever shape, so I prefer all my CZs to be in DA/SA/decocker mode. It's hard to see how it can offer 3x the value of my optic cut P-07, but I'm glad to see this variation added to the lineup.

I believe Warner sourced his frames from FAMCO, Florida Arms Co, who were offering stainless frames and slides around that time. He probably got them to tweak the CNC model for his specific want list (thicker frontstrap etc.). It's likely there could be other one-offs built out there on other FAMCO frames, but I mentioned Warner's guns as he was the only one offering a series of guns on stainless that I know of. I also had an e-book on the FEG High Powers but I'll have to hunt it down to check if FEG ever actually offered stainless pistols. Then there were the Arcus 94 guns which were BHP inspired but that's kind of beside the point for this topic.

That FEG looks chrome plated, as you can see by the difference in color on the (in-the-white) barrel and everything else. The Brownings (Practical etc) were chrome plated as well; I'm not aware that they ever did a run of stainless BHPs. Even the later BDM and HP DA were chrome plated. The FEG was a decent enough copy, especially for the price, but the fit and finish weren't quite up to Browning standards. The rear edge of the front sight on mine was over-buffed and the barrel needed re-crowning, but it certainly would have sufficed for general police issue at the time.

Great find! Didn't some of these get imported with the heel mag release, or were those just the Browning marked ones?

I hate to say it but I don't think there's really much of a market anymore. I own a lot of handguns but all I ever seem to buy (or make) anymore is Kydex for holsters, and I'm pretty picky about the kind of designs I like. I wouldn't waste my time at gun shows either, those tend to be Uncle Mike's kind of crowds. It's been my observation that 98% of gun show attendees don't know the difference between quality workmanship and cheap junk. One group still investing in leather are SASS shooters. I don't know if there are any active clubs around you, but I would think that there would be a pretty good demand for custom leather. Competition shooters tend to be pretty specific about what they want, and if you're willing to build what they want, I think you could probably get a lot of business once your name got out there.

This list might be useful. American Bladesmith Society smiths listed by location. This won't have every knife maker on it (not everyone's a certified ABS smith) but it's a good resource. https://www.americanbladesmith.org/2022/11/21/rated-abs-smiths-by-location/ Tennessee list: Jason Knight – Master Bladesmith Dwight Phillips – Master Bladesmith Fuad Accawi – Journeyman Bladesmith Heath Bartholomew – Journeyman Bladesmith Casey Brown – Journeyman Bladesmith James Gibson – Journeyman Bladesmith Curtis Haaland – Journeyman Bladesmith Mak Kelsay – Journeyman Bladesmith Larry Kemp – Journeyman Bladesmith Fred Loving III – Journeyman Bladesmith Jay Replogle – Journeyman Bladesmith Warren Thacker – Journeyman Bladesmith Gary G Wheeler – Journeyman Bladesmith