He cleaned up the edges with a fine line that he called a French border. The term stuck and years later pistolsmiths such as Richard Heinie and Steve Nastoff accented their slides with what they, too, called a French border.

Combat Special
Carrying on through the late ’60s, Swenson, Hoag and Capone were soon joined on the East Coast by two more talented pistolsmiths who saw the writing on the wall: Austin Behlert and Al Dinan. Both of these ’smiths had developed solid reputations as bullseye specialists, tuning the Colt .45 for target work.

But the next major advance in the custom combat M1911 came once more from California in the shop of a German immigrant named Frank Pachmayr. Already well known for his custom hunting rifles and shotguns—Pachmayr-customized Model 21s are still stunningly beautiful—Pachmayr employed two talented gunsmiths named Tom Dornhaus and Craig Wetstein in his Monrovia shop. (A decade later, Dornhaus went on to partner with Mike Dixon to form the ill-fated Bren Ten company.) It was these two talents, Dornhaus and Wetstein, who together produced the next major evolution of the custom combat .45, the Pachmayr Combat Special.

The year was 1972. The gun featured a two-tone finish of hard chrome on the frame and a mirror-polished blue slide. Swenson’s trademark S&W K-sight was upgraded to a “melted” Bo-Mar adjustable sight, the installation so perfectly blended into the slide that it looked as if the metals had melted together.

Pachmayr’s new pistol included Swenson’s stainless steel ambidextrous thumb safety and a beavertail grip safety patterned after the style made by Jim Hoag. The top of the slide was serrated longitudinally, an aesthetic touch evolved from Swenson’s stippling. Another striking feature: a set of matte-black rubberized grips that would go on to make Pachmayr’s name synonymous with “grips.”

By 1976, Jeff Cooper’s original combat shooting club, the South West Combat Pistol League, had formulated a book’s worth of rules, and the discipline had spread internationally. A conference was held in Columbia, Mo., to form the Int’l Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC). Cooper was elected the chairman, giving rise to his derisive nickname, Chairman Jeff, for his penchant to issue unilateral decisions and enforce them with draconian intransigence.

The year prior, 1975, a “world championship” combat shooting match had been held in Switzerland that was won by Chapman, an athletic American who had competed in Cooper’s early combat matches. At the time, IPSC did not exist, but at the Columbia Conference the match was retroactively designated as the IPSC World Championship, and Chapman thereby found himself its first world champion.

Cooper appealed to Frank Pachmayr to donate a Combat Special as the winner’s prize. Pachmayr agreed and went on to sponsor Chapman as a competitive shooter; however, Chapman actually won his world title with a Jim Hoag Master Grade pistol, not a Pachmayr Combat Special as some sources erroneously indicate. It was only after he received his prize and subsequent sponsorship that he shot a Combat Special in matches.

Another Cooper protégé, however, did win an IPSC World Championship with a Pachmayr Combat Special. In 1979 a man, about whom it was jokingly said “makes once-fired brass for a living,” won the world championship in South Africa with his Pachmayr-tuned Colt: Ross Seyfried.

The Torch Passes
By the late ’70s and early ’80s, the custom combat Government Model had evolved into what I call its Second Generation. The pioneering work of Swenson, King’s Gun Works, Hoag and Pachmayr constitute the First Generation, but a whole new breed of enterprising pistolsmiths-cum-businessmen took up the torch.

The foremost of the Second Generation was an Arkansas watchmaker who took to tuning M1911s first as a hobby, then as a part-time business and finally as the most successful producer of aftermarket parts and customized pistols. His name was Bill Wilson. The formal moniker of Wilson’s business and the name that was stamped on his guns was “Wilson Combat,” a sign that the genre had a national following.

Wilson took what the First Generation had started and applied solid marketing and brand development, building custom pistols as “house guns” like Pachmayr’s and King’s, but also manufacturing parts, magazines, barrels and accessories. Wilson guns were—and still are—renowned for their value and quality.

In 1981, John Shaw won the Second Chance Bowling Pin Shoot with a specially modified Colt called the Bowling Pin Model, built by Jim Clark of Louisiana. The gun featured a steel cone slipped over the barrel with a large block on the end, machined to the same shape as the slide. The “pin gun,” as it became known, led to other attempts to control the recoil of full-house .45 ACP handloads with various recoil-dampening devices (bowling pin shooters had to knock pins from a 4-foot wide table, requiring very stout handloads). This led to ported barrel extensions called compensators.

The first compensator to gain prominence was made by Charlie Kelsey of Devel Corp., arguably the greatest visionary of the Second Generation pistolsmiths. The Devel Gammon was the first .38 Super made for combat shooting and Devel’s combat conversions of the Government Model remain classics of the genre.

With the introduction of Clark’s pin gun and the compensator, an arms race began in combat shooting circles. The M1911 became more and more exotic with various compensator designs. No longer could the gunsmithing work be considered “combat customizing,” because the guns had evolved to be far too cumbersome, finicky and downright odd to ever be functional in a steamy jungle, a wind-blown desert or any other far-off land where war might pop up. The Second Generation had run its course.

Third Generation
The pendulum swung back to the classic form of the custom combat .45, like that of the Swenson era. A backlash arose against the ever-more expensive and exotic “raceguns” found at IPSC matches, an abomination Cooper dismissed as “Rooney guns.” If a shooter didn’t own a high-capacity M1911 on an STI frame with an Aimpoint or C-More sight, he simply wasn’t competitive.

In 1994, Illinois pistolsmith Richard Heinie—whose immaculately hand-built custom .45s resemble pristine Hoag Master Grades—initiated a match called the Single-Stack Classic as a sort of Tea Party revolt against the excesses of raceguns found in IPSC competition. In 1996, Bill Wilson founded the Int’l Defensive Pistol Ass’n (IDPA). The custom combat M1911 was back in vogue.

The trend was accelerated by federal legislation that prohibited the manufacture of magazines holding more than 10 rounds. Suddenly eight rounds of .45 ACP in an M1911 made sense again. Those of us who had continuously carried John Browning’s immortal design wagged told-you-so fingers.

We can pinpoint the beginning of the Third Generation of combat M1911s to the day Kimber introduced its “custom quality” line of pistols. The year was 1995, and the place was the SHOT Show. The prototype Kimbers were actually built by a custom pistolsmith on sourced slides and frames, then stamped Kimber. Production didn’t begin until a year later in March 1996.