Micro Compact Springfields: plain and fancy; Springfield Armory's Micro Compact .45 offers not only a new choice in size, but a new choice in grade

Guns Magazine, August, 2002 by Massad Ayoob

For most of the latter half of the 20th century, somebody somewhere was chopping down 1911 .45 automatics and making them smaller.

Army Ordnance Units did so to create the General Officers' Pistol. And for the public, work was done by legendary gunsmiths Armand Swenson, George Sheldon, Lyn "Trapper" Alexiou and Austin Behlert. By the '80s, Colt caught on and started manufacturing their own baby .45 called the Officers' ACP, complete with a 3.5 inch barrel.

But even this was not enough. Bill Laughridge at Cylinder & Slide Shop created his Adventurer pistol, its tube chopped all the way back to 3 inches with the magazine proportionally shortened. Wonder of wonders, it worked. Colt, in a flash of brilliance, hired Laughridge as a consultant. Thus was born the Colt Defender, the best small .45 auto the company ever made.

Broken barrel bushings had been a curse of the Officers' ACP. Laughridge's bushingless barrel eliminated this. The Officers had never been particularly accurate. The Defender could deliver 2 inch groups at 25 yards with the ammo it liked best. Most Officers pistols needed to be throated out to feed reliably with anything but hardball or Remington hollowpoint. The Defender was omnivorous.

Not every effort at producing a sub-3.5 inch barreled .45 was so successful. ParaOrdnance, which had earned a reputation for extreme reliability with its P-12 3.5 inch barreled .45, created a jam-amatic in the first runs of their P-10, cut down to 3 inches.

We fool Mother Nature at our peril. The 1911 built its reputation for reliability with a 5 inch barrel and proportional slide. When things were shortened, the slide mass/spring compression rate changed dramatically, as did the slide velocity and cyclic rate. A shortened 1911 had to literally be a re-invented 1911, re-invented yet again for each incremental reduction in barrel length.

Enter the Springfield Micro Compact

Springfield introduced their Micro .45 auto in 2001. This was a 3 inch barrel concealed carry piece that, like the Colt Defender, had been left with an Officer's length grip-frame instead of being commensurately shortened at the butt.

This was done for two reasons. First, it was thought that availability of aftermarket Officers length magazines would be a selling point. Second, the Officers size frame has already proven itself amply concealable. And shortening it any further made the gun distinctly more difficult to grasp.

The purchaser profile in the compact .45 market is much different from, say, that of the .25 auto market. The buyer of the pocket pistol often runs a couple of mags through it and then proceeds to carry it, with further practice sessions few and far between.

But the person who pays good money for a chopped and channeled 1911 .45 tends to be a serious shooter who visits the practice range constantly. Such a buyer appreciates a gun whose shooting characteristics are as good as its concealability characteristics.

The Micro Compact can be had in two formats. The plain Mil-Spec is parkerized and comes with Novak night sights as SKU (stock-keeping unit) PX9808L. with a suggested retail price of $749. It has a steel frame.

The fancy Bi-Tone has a hard chrome slide with the same good Novak sights with Trijicon glow in the dark ampoules. Otherwise known as the SKU PX98OIL, it carries a manufacturer's suggested retail tag of $1,060. Its frame is lightweight alloy. And we tested both pistols. Albeit separately.

Safety Features

The Micro Compact guns are beneficiaries of two safety devices standard on Springfield Armory's 191Is since approximately February of 2001.

One is a titanium firing pin with extra-strong spring. It had long been the custom gunsmith's answer to the danger of an inertia discharge, when the pistol is dropped or struck at one end propelling the standard firing pin against the standard spring hard enough for it to reach a primer.

Dave Williams of Springfield made S.A. the first company to manufacture all its 1911 pistols this way. It's an effective resolution to the problem, and is S.A.'s answer to the Series '80 firing pin safety of Colt and ParaOrdnance, and to the Swartz type safety of the "II" Kimber series.

The other feature is the ILS, an integral locking system, and also a Williams brainchild. A locking bolt built into the mainspring housing blocks the mainspring cap from moving. When the hammer is down on an empty chamber, the shooter inserts a key and twists it a quarter turn. The rigidly locked mainspring now prevents the, hammer from rising and therefore from' falling, and also prevents the slide from being retracted to chamber a round.

There is no way it can lock by itself. Those who don't like the idea can simply leave it unlocked, throw away the key, and pretend it isn't there. The shooter can also remove the ILS mainspring housing and replace it with a standard one, just as the ILS can be retrofitted to most existing 1911 pistols, either. a Springfield or another make. The ILS unit can be had in either a flat or arched mainspring housing format. We tested one of each with the Micro Compact guns.