Savage 1911 Gov't Style Two-Tone

What’s so special about yet another 1911 pistol? How is it possible to differentiate it from the pack? Plenty, in the case of the new Savage 1911!

The 1911 platform is so popular you can pick your favorite from scores of brands at whatever price point you can afford but, naturally, not all are created equal. Fortunately, in the case of the Savage 1911 Government Style Two-Tone with Rail, I’ve found a gun that delivers a lot more than expected for the price. This pistol is the nicest production 1911 I’ve seen in a while.

Line of Savages

Savage tells me this gun is representative of their whole new 1911 pistol line, the details of which I’ll delve into shortly. As a point of reference, the MSRP of the gun I tested is $1,429. This would put it in the high end of mid-range 1911s. A quick internet search suggests its street price falls between $900 and $1,200, in the upper-middle of the mid-range 1911 pack.

Value is a relative thing determined by what a product delivers versus its cost. You can get a lot of value from a crappy $5 umbrella if you’re caught on a city street in a downpour. The mid-range priced Savage 1911 is a great value because it turns out to be a lot more like a high-quality custom 1911 than its mid-range peers.

Right out of the sturdy Savage plastic carrying case, the pistol exhibited excellent fit and finish. Except for frame style and metal finishes, all the Savage 1911 models share the same features. The full-size frames and slides are made of forged stainless steel, finished in black nitride, matte stainless or, as in my case, a mix of both. The frames have either a standard government-style dust cover or a Picatinny rail. The 5″ barrels are stainless steel and rebated slightly behind the barrel bushing contact area for smooth cycling. They have 1:16 right-hand rifling protected at the muzzle with an 11-degree target crown. The trigger is aluminum and on this gun, it broke crisply at 4.5 lbs.

The Savage slide diverges distinctively from the traditional 1911 aesthetic. It is enhanced with deep, broad, forward-angled grasping grooves in the front and rear. The upper front sides are shaved back slightly. Along the line of sighting, the metal surface is subtly lowered and matted with a balanced pattern of softened diamond-shaped scoops. The ejection port is lowered and features a shallow-radiused relief cut at the front, right hand, edge and a single deep scoop on the outside surface of the back edge to prevent live rounds from getting hung up when clearing the chamber.

The frames have a slight undercut at the rear of the trigger guard to move your grip slightly higher for better control. On the tactical rail model, the dust cover area is slightly wider than the frame and its rail section widens slightly again. The grips are VZ G10 laminate carved with a dual-directional pattern that isn’t too aggressive for concealed carry but gives the flesh lots of cavities to press into when you need to hang on.

The left panel is cut with a deep thumb rest behind the traditionally checkered magazine release button. An extended beavertail grip safety, thinned at the top to better accommodate smaller hands, is enlarged at the bottom for more positive engagement. Below it, the flat mainspring housing is textured with long oval scoops providing — like the grips — plenty of contact surface to engage the heel of your palm without scratching up everything else it comes in contact with. The overall combination of layered straight lines and sculpted organic curves gives this pistol a fast, futuristic look. I think it is a very handsome pistol — practical with an understated elegance.

The pistol felt broken-in right out of the box. Its ambidextrous extended safety levers, slide lock release, and magazine ejection button all worked smoothly with the thumb alone. The two 8-round magazines provided have extended polymer floorplates and drop freely from the magazine well when the release button is pressed. I noticed the mouth of the magazine well was beveled just shy of half the thickness of the grip frame, which helped guide fresh magazines home during reloads.

Drawing A Bead

Pistols come from the factory with Novak Night Fision sights standard. Made of steel with tritium inserts for night use and dovetailed into the slide, they’re hard to improve upon for general and defensive shooting. The rear is a snag proof Novak Lo-Mount with a tritium insert that appears as a horizontal bar directly beneath the notch. It is screwdriver-adjustable for elevation and drift adjustable for windage, and secured in place with an Allen head screw.

The rectangular post front sight has a round tritium insert encircled by a green plastic ring which, in bright daylight, gives you a big dot to focus on for quick defensive shooting and a nice glowing green dot to work with in the dark. I found these sights worked great for target shooting and quick tactical drills. In the dark, the simplified glowing bar and ball sight picture may offer some advantage over three-dot night sights simply because it’s simpler.

As I examined this pistol, it became apparent Savage had gone all-in on old-school quality. Their use of forgings for the slide and frame was what initially got my attention. There are three ways you can make a 1911 frame and slide. You can machine it from a block of steel, cast it in a mold from molten steel and machine it a little less, or you can hammer a red-hot hunk of steel to shape between dies under tons of force in a drop forge. You still have lots of machining to do afterward. The forging method is the most expensive and when properly done, produces parts of superior strength.

There are no Metal Injection Molding (MIM) parts used in the Savage 1911, all parts are machined like what you see in Nighthawk, Ed Brown and other top tier 1911s! In addition, Savage used tool steel to make the sear and disconnector for added toughness.

But …

Features in the new Savage that might cause some contention are its dual recoil spring system (one inside the other, wound in opposite directions, on a GI style steel guide rod) intended to smooth out the recoil impulse; and its lightweight, nitride-coated, titanium firing pin. The latter improves drop safety and, in theory because of its increased speed, slightly reduces the amount of time between the hammer striking the pin and the pin striking the primer. The Savage has a stainless steel hammer that can be counted on to give the pin a solid, unyielding blow to help diminish whatever danger of light primer strikes a titanium pin might potentially cause. No problems related to this appeared during my testing.

Savage told me they spent a good amount of time with their engineering and machining teams to produce a very consistent and tight 1911. My test gun showed tighter than average tolerances overall. So much so I initially had some failures to feed where a round stopped halfway in the chamber, but going fully into battery when I touched the rear of the slide. Realizing the gun was dry, I added a drop of oil to the barrel and bushing, barrel locking lugs and each frame rail. After that the pistol worked flawlessly.

The barrel-to-bushing and bushing-to-slide fit are important to accuracy. The fit of these critical parts was notably tight on the Savage, much like a Colt Gold Cup. I actually needed a bushing wrench to turn the bushing and even then it took more force than I can ever recall using on a 1911. This is good because a tight gun will break-in as the parts wear together, but a loose gun just gets looser with use.

Range Time

On the range, this gun was a pleasure to shoot with less recoil and muzzle flip than I expected, perhaps the work of the dual recoil springs. At 25 yards I shot several five-shot test strings with a 185-, 200- and 230-grain bullet loads from the bench using a Caldwell Pistolero rest. The most accurate of the three was Fiocchi Defense Dynamics 200-grain JHP with groups averaging 1.94″ and 897 feet-per-second velocity. Hornady Critical Defense 185-grain FTX JHP averaged 3.07″ groups at 1,021 feet per second.

Many groups with this load had four shots tightly clustered within an inch or two of each other with a single shot “spoiling” what would have otherwise been an amazingly tight group. Winchester WIN3GUN Competition Ready 230-grain truncated cone loads averaged 4.5″ groups at 780 fps and proved to be the only load of the three this pistol could not bend to its will. Was this due to its velocity being almost 10% lower than standard 230-grain ball? Who knows? Some loads shoot better than others, even in guns of the same brand. However, any 1911 that can consistently corral some loads into 2″ to 3″ groups at 25 yards is a good-shooting 1911.

In conclusion, Savage — a company that last produced a .45 ACP in 1907 — hit a home run on the first pitch with their new 1911.

SavageArms.com

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