Details
The Black Baer is standard with a national match frame, slide and supported chamber barrel, hand checkering, modestly extended safety, beveled mag well, top quality action parts with a 4-pound trigger pull, lowered and flared ejection port, flat mainspring housing and rounded edges. The finish is called “Dupont S” coating offering corrosion resistance and the gun comes standard with Black Recon grips. There are other custom touches and if you want a list, visit their website. Suffice to say it has anything and everything you’d likely need — and nothing you don’t. Take away everything not a 1911 and this is what would remain.
I like the business-like finish and grips and all-steel heft causing it to sit solidly in your grip. The sights are highly visible and have tritium inserts. Like all of Baer’s guns, it has a distinctive “feel” in the hand, one of solidarity and functional efficiency. It reminds me of a 230-pound, 10-year veteran police beat partner I used to know. We all loved to see him show up when we called for a cover unit.
“You rang?” he’d say quietly, grinning.
Yeah, I rang.
There’s a quiet confidence seeming to ooze from the tight seams of this gun. Speaking of that, there’s no movement, as in none, zero, zip, nada, between the slide, frame and barrel. You can push, pull, twist and frustrate yourself trying, but nothing will move. That certainly explains why it shoots 3″ at 50 yards (or 7/8″ at 25 in our tests), yet it does it all reliably and without fanfare.
I have to tell you, after about 500 or so rounds of all sorts the Black Baer is not only just plain delightful to shoot but it truly is one of those “point your finger and slay at a distance” guns. You bring it up, it hangs solidly, you aim it, press that crisp trigger (it just breaks, with no roll-off) and a hole appears wherever you need it to appear, as far away as you can reliably see.
I have a torso-shaped target at 50 yards outside my office door. From my bench I could ring the head virtually every shot. Bang, clang, bang, clang, bang, clang, etc. Repeat as required. The only time it missed was when the idiot on the trigger (me) messed up the press.
While it ate anything fed, including that ultra-high velocity, feathery lightweight ammo popular these days, it really sang with American Eagle and Black Hills 124-grain and Federal 147-grain sub-sonic. The 7/8″ group I mentioned was the Federal, but I’ll bet any good quality ammo will out-perform the ability of most mortals to shoot it. At least in this gun.
If I did the Mas Ayoob thing where he deletes the two worst bullet holes from a 5-shot group and then measures the remaining three — it really does show essentially what a gun would deliver from a machine rest — some groups would have been in the .5″ range and even a tad smaller. Hard to believe and amazing, I know, but simply the truth. Try it yourself. Or, as the Packard ads used to say, “Ask the man who owns one.”
I called Les and told him, expecting him to say, “Wow, that’s amazing!” or “Hey, great shooting for an editor.”
Instead he laughed, “I know that, I told you, didn’t I? What … you doubted me or sumthin’? Geez.”
Geez is right.
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