My first 3-gun match was put on by the Coast Guard Academy in Hartford, Conn., and I wasn’t sure what to expect. In such cases, I always err on the side of “bring everything.” My son and I loaded the truck with guns and ammunition until the springs bent backward, but we found out that we still didn’t have the right stuff.
I shot the match with an M1911 with 10-round magazines and 230-grain hardball factory ammunition. I quickly figured out that the gun didn’t hold enough rounds and had too much recoil to be competitive. The M1911 with a different magazine capacity has a home in 3-gun’s Heavy Metal division, but I wanted to shoot in Tactical Optics (TO). So, I started looking for another pistol. I shot the next season with a .40 S&W, but found that was a mistake as well. Bruce Piatt had told me to get a 9 mm Luger pistol and be done with it, but I didn’t listen. As I got to know more of the top shooters, I realized that they were almost all shooting 9 mm handguns in TO class.
I chose the .40 S&W because, at the time, I was also shooting a few USPSA handgun and Multi-Gun matches with power-factor rules, in which the 9 mm was limited to a minor classification and scoring. I thought the .40 S&W made sense as a compromise. The .40 S&W has more magazine capacity and less recoil than a .45 ACP, but unlike the 9 mm it is powerful enough to make major classification for scoring. It seemed like the perfect compromise, but I was wrong. The .40 S&W cost more than it gave because of more recoil and lower magazine capacity than the 9 mm. For every 3-gun match I shot in which the 9 mm was scored as minor, there were several others using the IMG rules in which the 9 mm competed with all other cartridges.
I didn’t want to be held back in those matches in which the 9 mm was considered a minor scoring cartridge, but I also didn’t want to be handicapped by the stiffer recoil and reduced magazine capacity of the .40 S&W in the majority of 3-gun matches that use the IMG rules.
The answer was pretty clear for a gun guy: Just buy two guns. Any excuse for another pistol, right? But, I wanted to do something a little more unusual. I started thinking; I have multiple uppers for my AR-15 rifle. I use the same lower with different uppers chambered for .223 Rem., 6.8 SPC, 6.5 Grendel, .50 Beowulf and other cartridges. So why not create one handgun with two different uppers? One would be in 9 mm Luger for shooting most 3-gun matches, and the other would be in .40 S&W for those USPSA matches in which a major power-factor cartridge is important.
I called my buddy Larry Weeks at Brownells to see if this was possible. I wanted to build the gun myself in my shop. It was going to be based on the STI 2011 handgun, and Brownells sells the slides and frames in a set that are fitted so that most of the precision fitting of the two is already done. The Kart barrels we were going to use can be fitted with hand tools, so the project was well-within my capabilities and tooling—except I wanted the “switch-slide” capability so that I could shoot both 9 mm and .40 S&W with the same gun. That meant that two slides had to be precision fitted to a single frame. In this case the slides would be unfinished and would need a lot of work. I realized that I lacked the experience and equipment for that, because I didn’t have a milling machine or a lathe at the time.
Weeks introduced me to another Brownells employee, Tony Barnes, who builds competition handguns as a sideline, and that’s how my 3-gun pistol was conceived. Barnes had built a gun for Weeks to compete with, and I decided to have him do the same for me.
I traveled to Brownells’ headquarters in Iowa to watch Barnes do the initial work. For a gun guy who loves to tinker and do hobby gunsmithing projects, this was the ultimate journey. Brownells has been my go-to place for anything gunsmith-related. It operates with small-town values where honesty, integrity and quality are still important concepts. The company’s horizontal-format catalog is as much a part of gun culture as the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9.
