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The STI Hi-Cap 1911 and IPSC Competition
Categories:: Custom Guns • Handguns
Patrick Sweeney | Mar 04, 2011 | Comments 0
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Dave Skinner has a quirky sense of humor. I mean, a bayonet adapted to fit on a light rail of your STI? Stand by to repel boarders!
For a while, Bar-Sto Precision, the barrel makers, manufactured a California-complaint STI. They could; they were based in Twenty-Nine Palms, California. The law only covered firearms being “imported” into California (as if California was its own country, with its own immigration, border patrol, customs and so on). However, the situation wouldn’t remain that way for long. The business climate in California became so onerous that like many other companies, Bar-Sto moved out. So there are a bunch of California owners who have collector’s items: Bar-Sto marked STI pistols.
After leaving, Sandy Strayer built the kind of company he wanted: a full-custom gun maker. Now run by his son Brandon, Infinity does not make standard items. Oh, they’ll show what they’ve done, and what other customers have had built, but you can’t order up “standard pistol number three” at Infinity. Instead, you use the web page, or fill out an order form, and you specify everything. Length, caliber, details like checkering pattern and spacing, grooves on top of the slide or not, frame color, size and type of safeties, etc. And it can get pretty wild, since the crew there is pretty imaginative.
If you want to have something that will be for a particular competition, be sure and let them know. They’ll tell you if the extras you’ve ordered will be USPSA, IPSC or IDPA-compliant, and in which Divisions.
Infinity makes hi-cap guns you have to see to believe, and we’ll go into them in more detail in the custom makers chapter.
This article is an excerpt from 1911: the First 100 Years. To order your copy of this fascinating look at the 1911 click here.
Click here to learn more about STI International 1911s
Recommended 1911 Resources
Massad Ayoob’s Greatest Handguns of the World
1911 Series Disassembly-Reassembly DVD
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About the Author: Patrick Sweeney is the author of many of Gun Digest books' best-selling titles, including Gun Digest Book of the 1911, Vols. I & II; Gun Digest Big Fat Book of the .45 ACP, Gun Digest Book of the AR-15, Gun Digest Book of the AK and SKS, Gun Digest Book of the Glock and Gunsmithing: Pistols and Revolvers, among other titles. A master gunsmith, Patrick is also Handguns Editor for Guns & Ammo magazine.
