I'm toying with the idea of putting a BarSto semi-dropin barrel in my 10 mm Colt Delta Gold Cup. BarSto calls them semi-dropin, I guess, because they say 7 out of 10 will fit fine. I do a lot a lot of shooting in the river bottom and I can't keep up with my darn 10mm brass. Everywhere you look the ground is lousy with .40S&W and the old girl has been a faithful companion for many years and I wouldn't mind lightening the stress load on her a little.
My plan is to order the barrel and see if I'm one of the lucky 7 out of 10. If not, it'll go to the shop. I labor under no delusion that I can make it work myself.
My Colt shoots fantastically well in 10mm and always has. Far better than I.
My question is, will anything be done to my gun that would compromise the accuracy of my 10mm barrel/slide fitting? I'm not sure why but I expect the accuracy of the .40S&W to suffer a little bit. That would be acceptable to me as long as the 10mm performance remained the same.
If it is done right, there need be no alteration to the gun itself. I guess if you shot thousands and thousands of .40s you could put on some wear that would affect the fitup of the 10mm barrel, but that seems kind of far fetched.
Ken Waters got a .40 barrel/magazine/recoil spring kit for his Delta Elite so as to be able to write up a new caliber without buying a new gun. He found that he used only the barrel; that the .40s fed better out of the 10mm magazine and cycled the 10mm double spring better.
If "fit" is a concern then send the barreled slide to Bar-Sto and they will fit it to your gun - no problem!
They will not make any changes to your gun - what they do is make the new barrel "fit" your gun.
I have a .40S&W to 9mm Bar-Sto conversion barrel for my SIG 229R and I like it!
Vern had to fit this barrel to my SIG 229R because my SIG was the "brand-new- at-the-time" Rail model, and the internal parts are different on the Rail compared to the normal non-railed SIG - just enough difference to cause the gun not to work with Bar-Sto's tighter tolerances. It took Vern about 5 minutes to mill off just a little bit of metal and that was it.
Thanks Jim and Sir A, that's what I was hoping to hear. Jim, yeah, I should have said normal wear and tear notwithstanding. Good to hear about the 10mm mags working well, I found that Fusion Arms offers a .40 mag for 1911's. I'm using a 24lb Wolf recoil spring now. I'll likely have to go back to the original double spring setup. This will be a strictly plinking setup. When I care enough to send the best, I'll be using the 10mm.
Aardvark, I'm going to look into that. I'll prolly call them and see if they want the slide before they make the barrel or want to ship the barrel and see if it fits. I'm just going by lockup and function, I don't know any better to know if it's optimal fit or not. I'm guessing it will be pretty obvious if the gun won't go into battery that it's going to need some massaging.
That 8-12 weeks is something I just noticed, that's gonna suck.
I took a little different route and bought a ported stainless steel .40S&W for 150 bucks on Gunbroker. Just got it today and it looks like the blackeyed peas on New Years Day are kicking in already. (that's pickled herring for you northern guys).
This appears to be an EFK Fire Dragon brand. The guy said he didn't know.
The barrel plopped into my gun like it had been there all it's life. Barrel hood to breech is tighter than my old barrel, fore and aft play is significantly less in the lugs with it just laying in the slide. As pretty much expected, the barrel bushing is a little sloppy. I think I'll have EGW make me a custom fit bushing.
The original is obviously worn a bit as it's a bit sloppy with the original barrel too.
I'm off to the river bottom to see how well my luck is going to hold up.
I guess I'd better go buy some lottery tickets. I could not be more pleased. With Winchester white box 165gr FMJs it functioned fantstically with one fail to feed on the last round in a clip. Weird one on that too. It managed to flip the shell into the air and caught it with the base sticking out of the slide. This was using the 10mm magazine. I also forgot to change out the 25lb spring that I use with my healthy 10mm loads. It was dropping hulls about 2-3 feet away perpendicualrly and a little forward.
I didn't have any proper targets, sand bags or rests so I just shot at stuff I could easily get a consistent sight picture on. It grouped very well. Surprisingly to me, it seemed to hit at the same POA as the 10mm at about 15 yds.
So at roughly half the price of 10mm I can spend quality time with my Gold Cup. I would recommend it to anybody with a Govt Model 10mm. Now I have to work up some reloads.
Glad I resisted the urge to buy a bunch of barrel fitting tools before I got the barrel.