The large opening allows empty cases to be thrown clear without any chance of hitting the port’s edges on the way out. Sport shooters will appreciate the lowered and flared ejection port. The Thompson bullet logo is engraved on the left slide flat. The Thompson Custom’s slide is machined from stainless billet and features cocking serrations fore and aft. Auto-Ordnance outfits the pistol with a lightweight aluminum trigger that is adjustable for overtravel. The magazine well is beveled for speedy reloads, and the magazine release is slightly extended to make engagement more positive. The beavertail grip safety is well fit and has a hump to make sure the safety is disengaged even when shooting with the thumb on top of the thumb safety. I like my safeties to disengage as crisply as a trigger, and this problem was easily solved by stretching the plunger spring. Though it blocks the sear securely, my test sample’s safety disengages too easily. The left-side-only thumb safety is extended for easy disengagement and engagement. The frame boasts 20-lines-per-inch, machine-cut checkering to provide the shooter with a secure firing grip. Nearly all available 1911 aftermarket parts and accessories will work with the Thompson Custom 1911. Despite its budget price, the Auto-Ordnance Thompson Custom 1911 is not a budget-quality gun! Its price makes it one of the more attractive 1911s on the market today, and makes it perfect for entry-level action pistol shooting sports. Nearly as dense as machined parts, the MIM parts require much less time to produce, have precise dimensions and require no hand-fitting.ĭon’t get the wrong impression, though. Parts like the extended thumb safety, beavertail, slide stop and magazine release are manufactured using the MIM process rather than machining, and this resulted in significant cost savings. Switching to metal-injection molded (MIM) parts for the Custom helped considerably in getting its suggested retail price down to just $813. “It was an incredibly expensive gun for us to produce, and we had to devote some time to study outside sources to see how we could get the price down to a more manageable figure.” “We machined every part in that gun originally,” said Frank Harris, Kahr’s vice president of sales and marketing. It wasn’t until just recently that the folks at Kahr started work in earnest on this venture. It was discovered they were too expensive to manufacture and Kahr, Auto-Ordnance’s parent company, put the project on hold while it worked on manufacturing other in-demand guns already in its lineup. Auto-Ordnance introduced this gun in 2008 but only made about 100 of them. The subject of my recollection was the stainless steel Thompson Custom 1911.
It was de ja vu all over again when I stopped by the Kahr Arms/Auto-Ordnance booth at the 2013 NRA Show in Houston, Texas.
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