My .45-caliber automatic Service Pistol for EIC (Excellence-in-Competition) matches started life as a blued Colt MKIV/Series 70 Government Model that I bought new in 1982. Unfired, I brought it to the legendary late Mr. Floyd Aikman, former New Jersey pistolsmith extraordinaire, for the gun to be ‘accurized’ and morphed into a CMP-approved .45-caliber match service pistol (CMP was called DCM back then). Floyd was not only a superb pistolsmith, but he was a champion shooter as well. His accomplishments included Open wins at Camp Perry, including the Citizens’ Service Pistol Trophy, the U.S. Military Police Corps Trophy and National Trophy Individual (twice). As a pistolsmith, he is credited with designing and building his own Free Pistol, whose design was arguably superior to the European Free Pistol designs of the mid 1980s.

Prior to buying my Colt Government Model, I had shot only one EIC match and it was with a borrowed pistol. That first EIC match was unnerving to say the least. At that time only full-power military 230-grain ‘ball’ ammo was permitted, which was issued on the firing line just before the start of a Leg match. “Leg match” is synonymous with “EIC match”. If you have ever fired a ball gun (or ‘hardball gun’ as it is commonly called) with full-power military ammo, then you can imagine my surprise when I fired one for my very first time. Recoil is wicked for the uninitiated, not to mention that the gun’s heavy trigger pull just adds to the difficulty. But after that Leg match I had the crazy notion that I would like to try to become Distinguished in Service Pistol, so I had a ball gun built for me. Floyd’s turnaround time was four to six months then and I picked up my newly accurized EIC ball gun from him about five months later. Floyd advised me to not have him replace many parts because the pistol was new then. Why not get service out of these new parts, he said. He replaced the barrel bushing with an oversized one and hand lapped and fitted it to the barrel. The only other part that was replaced was the arched mainspring housing in favor of a checkered straight housing. The work included tightening the slide fit to the frame, custom fitting the barrel, a trigger job, and lowering the ejection port, plus Floyd stippled my gun’s front-strap by hand for a right-hand shooter (the idea of checking front-straps was not born yet). I have never gripped a 1911 with a checkered front-strap that gave a firmer grasp than my stippled front-strap gun does. When you firmly grip a 1911 with stippling, there is no way that gun is going to slip or twist in your hand from the effect of recoil. Floyd installed a new rear sight, a standard Bo-Mar fully adjustable target sight. The front sight was a high blade undercut partridge type that Floyd made in 1/8th inch width, single post, staked-on and silver soldered. Trigger let-off was a crisp 4¼ pounds.

The gun was wonderful, but shooting it, I was not. Nonetheless, in 1983 and in 1986 or 1987, I was able to earn a total of 14 EIC Leg points toward becoming Distinguished.

I shot 2700s and Leg matches from the late 1970s to 1990. Then I had a long lay off from shooting until 2004. Coming back in 2004, I earned enough Leg points over two or three weekends to go over 30 Leg points and was awarded the Distinguished Pistol Shot badge from the CMP, a goal that I thought I would never reach.

In 2007 I had Mr. Nick Abrishamian PhD, pistolsmith extraordinaire http://www.mountaincompetitionpistols.com/ (an NRA Master class bullseye shooter, a Distinguished Rifleman, and host of All States National Pistol Championship), rebuild my service pistol and .45-caliber bullseye wadcutter gun. Nick, or “Doc” as many shooters call him, is now the exclusive custom pistol builder for eight-time national Camp Perry pistol champion Brian Zins. When Floyd originally accurized my ball gun, he did much of the work by hand with the help of a lathe and a milling machine. That was how most gunsmiths worked back then, because CNC was in its infancy. Today, even though there are many gunsmiths who still do the majority of the work by hand, CNC-controlled machines rule the day. Walking through Doc Nick’s shop you see expensive lathes, CNC-programmed digital Mills, band-saws, and much more.

“To build pistols to bullseye match grade standards it is imperative to build them to the high level of precision required…and only a CNC process can provide that…with tolerances as low as only a few thousandths of an inch...a few thousands that you can tell the machine to do. But a certain amount of hand-work and hand-fitting will always be required.” he says. "Furthermore, today there are machinists who are lousy at building guns. And there are gunsmiths who are lousy machinists, or they’re not machinists at all. The key is to find someone who does both well. Now that's a good gunsmith, but it's very hard to find someone like that.”

My slide and frame were squared and trued by Nick’s CNC Mill. His Mill is set for the X, Y, Z axes. In plain English, the slide to frame fit is made perfectly true with tight tolerances in three different directions by a CNC program. When the slide cycles over the frame it is moving along with an exactness of slide-to-frame fit that is not achievable with hand fitting. Additionally, Doc Nick has developed his own proprietary slide/frame rail system where, once the rails are installed into the frame’s ‘tongue’, the slide can no longer touch the frame; the slide can only ride along on the rails and not against the frame itself. This rail system design is only possible if the XYZ axes of the slide/frame are perfectly square and true. What is the advantage of having rails: precise slide/frame fit with low drag from metal rubbing against metal. Another benefit is that after several thousand rounds are fired through the gun, the rails are simply replaced with minor fitting required. When you have rails, the rails wear, not the slide and frame. Regarding felt recoil from a ‘rail gun’, the effect is reduced, plus the shooter experiences a sensation of the slide cycling on the frame in a more rearward smooth motion as opposed to the expected harsh muzzle up-flip. As you probably know, commercially produced Colt Government Models’ slides and frames were not symmetrically mated before leaving the factory, far from it. Being that is the case and that my gun’s slide to frame tightening via “squeezing” and “peen’ing” the frame’s rails to achieve slide/frame tightness done earlier by Floyd, only added more off-square’ness of these two main components. Therefore, my gun’s frame and slide could not be trued and squared by Nick’s Mill to the degree needed to implement his rail system. Therefore, as an alternative, once Nick “trued” my frame and slide the best he could, he sent slide and frame to Bob Krieger for Bob’s Acc-U-Rail system to be installed. If we think of the frame engaging the slide in terms of tongue-and-groove, Nick’s rails are installed into the tongues of the frame whereas Bob’s rails are installed into the frame’s grooves. With rails installed into the grooves, the XYZ axes are not critical, whereas in Nick’s system they are (with Acc-U-Rail the slide does not exclusively ride on the rails only as does Nick’s design).

About five weeks later my frame and slide came back to Nick complete with Acc-U-Rail installed. The gun now only retains its original slide, frame, trigger, thumb safety, grip safety, and magazine release. Everything else has been replaced and fitted: stainless steel Nowlin match barrel and bushing; Ed Brown sear, disconnector, extended ejector, and titanium firing pin; Wilson Combat match grade extractor; STI hammer and titanium hammer strut; EGW titanium 1911 mainspring cap; Wolf springs; Springfield Armory Bo-Mar type fully adjustable target rear sight; Les Baer front sight blank fabricated by Nick into a high undercut partridge type and dove-tail mounted via band-saw and by hand; and complete polishing and re-bluing by Baron Technologies Inc. (Baron currently does bluing for all new Smith & Wesson handguns; see http://www.barontechnology.com/).

My gun’s accuracy is remarkable. Doc Nick has designed and patented his own pistol barrel tester. It is a simple devise made of steel and is mounted to a concrete podium. He uses various barrels from different top barrel manufacturers like Nowlin, Kart and BarSto just to name a few. He tests all his barrels for accuracy before installing them. He does not install a barrel unless it is proven capable of one-inch or less 10-shot size groups at 50 yards out of his barrel tester. See Nick’s explanation of barrel testing on his website http://www.mountaincompetitionpistols.com/BARRELtest570.688.1020.html.

Besides wanting to rebuild my ball gun for accuracy, obviously I also wanted to make it into a modest presentation 1911 in honor of my earning the coveted Distinguished Pistol Shot badge. So I searched the web for genuine ivory grips and learned that genuine ivory is rare and prohibitively expensive. So I decided to look for a high quality pair of imitation ivory grips and found a beautiful pair of White Corian grips from GripCrafter (http://gripcrafter.ecrater.com/product.php?pid=2730386) for $59 plus shipping. According to Gene at GripCrafter, gripcrafter@gmail.com many of the imitation ivory sets on the market are marred or off-standard. But not Corian, as you can see from the photos. “The two best imitation ivories are made from Corian and Micarta. That's what they make fake ivory jewelry from.” Gene told me.

In 2004 I went to Perry and bought a couple of beautiful blue with gold lettering CMP medallion lapel pins. I installed one into the right Corian grip panel and my Distinguished lapel pin into the left grip panel. I used a Dremel rotary tool to mill out the grips by hand so I could install the pins and used epoxy to glue them in place. It wasn’t an easy job and it didn’t come out perfect, but they look pretty nice.

So there you have it, my Colt Government .45 EIC pistol dressed up nice and pretty. Baron Technologies did a first-rate polish and re-blue job. Contrasted with the bright ivory-like white smooth grips, complete with CMP and Distinguished medallions, this is a pistol to be proud of. When I bought my gun new way back in 1982 it was a commercial off-the-shelf plain vanilla Government Model. It even had some ugly machine marks on the left side of the slide, a defect from the factory. Now this pistol is a silk purse made out of a sow’s ear that has earned me the honor of receiving Distinguished Pistol Shot badge number 1323.

The pictures were photographed and edited by my son, Lance Corporal Charles R. Fletcher, USMC. He is one of nineteen veterans accepted to Columbia University this semester. The photos were shot with his Nikon D300 using studio lighting softboxes and edited on his Mac G5 workstation with Adobe PhotoShop. Charles completed two Tours of Duty in Iraq. The day before he left for overseas, I wanted to give him something to take along with him for luck. Since I was not privileged to have served in our armed forces, I had nothing to give him of military significance. So I gave him something that represents something very dear to me: the Distinguished pistol badge lapel pin that I received from the CMP. (I bought a second pin and that is what is installed in my Corian grip.) Charles wore the distinguished pin on his marine uniform every day that he was in Iraq and during the Battle of Fallujah. His fellow marines admired the prestigious pin and had an enormous respect for what it represents. The EIC program and being Distinguished means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To me it means reaching a shooting achievement that I thought I would never attain. And additionally, in some small way I would like to think it helped keep my son safe while overseas defending our country.

The CMP has been around since 1916, that’s almost 100 years, promoting marksmanship skills training for military and civilians alike with particular emphasis on youths. Let us all support the CMP so that its programs will continue for the next 100 years to come and beyond.

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