Guns: Perils of Buying a Used 1911

I generally dislike buying used guns, if only because in my experience the previous owners have either monkeyed around with or neglected many of the pieces that you see in pawn shops and gun shows. In particular, the Model 1911, because of its design, is often a testbed for amateur would-be pistolsmiths. It seems so easy, and the parts are all available from Brownells, so why not?

The one used 1911 I bought, a customized Norinco, was purchased for the tidy sum of $300. For a Norinco, which is no longer imported and is made to GI specs, that's not a bad price, and the gun seemed to shoot fine, so I bit on it before someone beat me to it. I should have field-stripped the gun, though...

The first warning sign I should have paid attention to was the scratch on the gun near the slidestop. It's been said before: if you can't insert the slidestop properly on a 1911, you have no business making modifications to the gun or even paying someone else to make modifications to the gun. The front of the grip was crudely stippled; it looked awful. Most problematic, though, was the extended link of the barrel, which is usually a sign someone was trying to tighten the barrel-slide lockup in the worst possible way. I ended up selling the gun.