The art of more: Bar-Sto's Hi-Cap shooter

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High-end 1911s, like high performance engines, are known by their components. Of those components, the barrel is perhaps the single most important; and of the aftermarket barrel makers, Bar-Sto is arguably the best known. And for good reason: with some 40 years of business under their belt, and a list of customers that runs the gamut front bullseye shooters to the USMC, they've pretty much been there and done that. What Bar-Sto had not done, until recently, was produce their own 1911 pistol.

Introduced in 2006, their competition-oriented California-legal widebody .40 S&W 1911 first caught my eye at the SHOT Show, where I was suitably impressed with the sample I handled. Since I tend to prefer the biggest bullets I can get, and wasn't looking for a match pistol, I asked Bar-Sto president Irv Stone if they could do something a little more, shall we say--tactical. During the next few weeks, we discussed the project over the phone, and in the due course of time, I got a call from my dealer I had gotten a nondescript aluminum hard case from Twentynine Palms, California.

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The finished pistol was all business. In place of the polished slide flats and massive aluminum magwell of the California .40, the gun was flat black, and Novak night sights took the place of the adjustable Bo-Mars usually found on the .40. Although the three-dot pattern is very popular on tritium night sights, I opted for the bar-dot pattern. The reasoning is simple, when shooting a pistol, you want your eye to focus on the front sight, and not the rear. If you've got twice as much tritium at the rear (read: two dots instead of one), your eye is going to be more quickly drawn there and you've got to stop to refocus on the single dot on the front. The single horizontal bar, while still plenty bright at night, throws off a lot less light than the front sight, keeping your focus where it needs to be.

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The slide itself was slab-sided, without the stirrup cuts usually found at the muzzle of a 1911, and had cocking serrations at both the front and rear of the slide. The controls consisted of an ambi-safety and beavertail, both dehorned and well-blended, along with a smooth, slightly extended magazine release and the customary slide-stop set into a machined recess in the sides of the wide hi-cap frame. The lightweight skeletonized trigger, which had no takeup, came back smoothly in its raceway, and dropped the Cylinder & Slide hammer crisply somewhere in the neighborhood of three pounds.

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Poly Frame

The STI-style polymer receiver, of course, is the gun's biggest departure from the status quo. Instead of being either a machined piece of steel, or a molded piece of plastic, the STI-style receiver (versions of which have also been made by McCormick and SVI/Infinity) mates a machined steel upper containing such things as the slide rails and fire control parts, with a molded polymer lower receiver. The lower, with a squared trigger guard and molded in checkering on the grip panels and frontstrap, reduces both the size and weight you would otherwise expect from a pistol holding a double-stack .45 magazine. Although the feel is definitely different in the hand--it's squarer, and top-heavy when empty--the grip is no wider than your average single-stack .45.

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The steel part of the modular receiver came with a light rail machined into its almost-full-length dustcover, a feature I had requested for this gun. While it's not always possible to have a flashlight mounted on your pistol, and it's not always a good idea to ID something by pointing a gun at it, there are still times when having the light actually on the gun is far superior to trying to hold it in one of your hands. Whether you use the Harries technique, the SureFire, Neck Index, FBI position, or whatever, a gun-mounted light is one less thing to think about (or drop) under stress.

I've become quite fond of SureFire's X-series weapon-mounted lights, and used three different variants of them on the Bar-Sto .45: the X200A and B, and the X300. The original X200 (which is now called the X20OA), has a tight, diamond-shaped beam that's good up to 75 yards or so, making it a good choice for outdoor work, as well as rifle use. The X20OB, on the other hand, casts a broader beam that's more useful in close quarters, such as indoors, while SureFire's recently released X300 is intended to be the best of both worlds. Beware, though; in close quarters, the brilliant center of the X300's beam may affect your vision more dramatically then the softer corona of light offered by the X20OB.

Tough Tests

When Irv and I talked about the gun, he told me to shoot it mercilessly, and that's exactly what I did. In addition to the two mags that came with the gun, I got additional mags from Brownells and Bar-Sto, winding up with five hi-caps and one ten-rounder. With these in hand, and with my Dillon 550 warmed up from loading several hundred 200-grain Hornady XTP JHPs into my handloads, I was ready.