I am beginning a 1911 built (Springfield frame and slide) and plan on using bits and pieces from different manufacturers. With a careful discretionary budget, I will be buying 3-4 components a month and hand-fitting them. I am beginning with the frame.
Does anyone have a suggested order of purchase and assembly? In other words;
Should I worry about buying and fitting the trigger before I buy and fit the hammer, sear, disconnector?
At what point in the process should I run off to my local gunsmith and have the new plunger tube staked?
Some of the steps seem obvious to my little pea brain…like fitting the thumb safety after the hammer and sear are ready to go…but then again, that is an assumption and I have no knowledge base to work from.
Plunger tube: as soon as you buy the frame.
Trigger, hammer, sear, disco, sear spring AND thumb safety, in the same time.
Save the money stake the plunger tube yourself.
Then the order John gave you. Grip safety last, You'll have taken the thing apart about 50 times before it is ready to be fitted. Leave the Grip safety off to "look" into the back of the gun as your fitting.
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Should I worry about buying and fitting the trigger before I buy and fit
the hammer, sear, disconnector?
The hammer, sear & disconnector are not needed to fit an oversized trigger pad so it'll fit in the frame. And fitting the hammer so it fits in the frame needs to be done before any other work gets done on the firing group, so there's no real reason I can see for having all four of those parts on hand before starting with the trigger fitting - other than, perhaps, saving time.
Not sure about the plunger tube. May depend on the final finish desired or even the likelihood of knocking it loose during subsequent work.
FWIW, Brownells has a series of articles in their Gun Tech section about building a 1911 from scratch. Might be worth a look.
One caveat - if you are going to polish and reblue the frame then wait on the plunger tube. It's much easier to polish the sides of the frame if you remove the plunger tube first.
Thank you, one and all. You advice simplifies things. I'll be able to buy the trigger and fiddle with it this pay period, and take the bigger plunge (pun intended) the following pay period for the hammer/sear/disco.
I read the Brownell's build articles (and viewed Wilson's 4-disk set) prior to ripping into this perfectly good Springer, but its sometimes too busy inside my brain, and I tend to over-complicate things.
Be forewarned that that series of articles from Brownells assumes that you already know what you're doing. It omits several very important steps, which caused me quite a lot of confusion and wasted effort (as well as a couple of trashed parts) when I attempted my first build.
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Do you remember where the Brownell's articles led you astray?
Dave, I'm sorry, I do not. It was several years ago.
There were more than one omission. One that comes to mind was the firing pin stop. I don't think the articles discussed fitting it to the slide. The one that came with my parts kit was oversized - which it should have been. Nothing told me about fitting it, so I put the firing pin and spring in the slide and pressed the stop in. Then, when it was time to remember that I had not put in the extractor... I had a devil of a time getting the stop out of the slide. I got it without ruining the stop or the slide, but I ruined a steel punch in the process. If the article had bothered to explain that firing pin stops are usually oversized to allow for fitting, it would have saved me a couple of lost hours and a lot of anguish.
It was little stuff like that. The articles were obviously written by someone who has been working on 1911s for so long that he had forgotten how much a first-time builder does NOT know.
I would have to go through the articles again to see if I can pick out other omissions. I'll see if I can make some time to do that.