Building a Multi-Caliber, One-of-a-Kind 1911

Law school does strange things to people. One of my classmates took up drumming as a hobby; another caromed around the country in his Cessna on the weekends. Hamilton Bowen found himself daydreaming about English double rifles, and I did the same, only mine were of 1911s. I had a permit, and my carry gun (off campus, of course) was a blue Officer’s Model .45. Short, stubby and menacing, even the ebony grips were flat black. It was pure business but lacked a certain … je ne sais quoi. Then, in the earliest stages of my gunwriting career and starting to see things I’d never seen before, my reveries spread farther from what I had built, to what I could build, to what I couldn’t but wanted to. And that’s where the Lazy 8 started.

There was no question about the starting point; my ultimate 1911 would be a compact, with a short Officer’s-size frame and a Commander-length slide. Partially inspired by some of the cool multi-caliber Randall LeMay compact 1911s, of course my pistol would have to shoot more than one caliber. Better yet, it should shoot .22 as well. All from one slide. Or at least two looking identical.

Hot Swapping

Enter SVI/Infinity, who had just released their brilliant interchangeable breechface slide. Using a breechface cleverly locked into place by a screw inside the firing pin channel, swapping calibers was as easy as switching the breechface, extractor and ejector, and swapping barrels and mags. All of a sudden, you could shoot anything off one slide — well, almost. I ordered one, then, after realizing the modifications required to make it shoot .22 were likely not compatible with centerfire chamberings, I ordered a second slide, near identical to the first.

Groovy, Man

Clearly, something this exotic needed an equally interesting receiver, and nothing breaks the cookie cutter like having a finger groove on your front strap. I also thought it would spare me the perpetual “Is that a Kimber?” query uttered in those days by anyone seeing a custom 1911 of any stripe. I turned out to be wrong about that, but it still feels good in the hand.

Finger-groove receivers were then cataloged by Caspian, who had to shorten one to create an Officer’s size gun. Enthusiastically embracing the infinite possibilities offered by the SVI/Infinity slides, I requested the serial number LAZY 8, the name of the infinity symbol. A short-lived mishearing when I ordered the frame almost led to my FFL opening up a package to find a 1911 frame engraved LADY 8, which would have been as perplexing to me as it doubtless was to the folks at Caspian, but we got that sorted out. Finger-groove frames typically came with two grooves: one each on the front strap and the triggerguard, since it was close to the time that finger-forward shooting was still a thing. Only wanting one, I ground the triggerguard smooth and shaped the front strap to fit my hand, then sent the receiver to master metalsmith Pete Single for some touchup welding.

Making A Multi-Caliber

By this time I had settled on calibers: In addition to a .22 conversion — which, let me hasten to point out, SVI did not make — the gun should shoot .38 Super, .45 ACP, and .41 Avenger, and the J.D. Jones wildcat that necked down a .45 ACP casing to fire a .41 revolver bullet. Bar-Sto made the barrels, even going so far as to correctly mark that one with “.41 AVG” and J.D. Jones himself was kind enough to chamber it for me. Since there’s a big difference between 0.354″, 0.410″ and 0.451″, the barrels are all ramped so each caliber rides on its own sized feed ramp instead of trying to modify a single frame ramp to work for all of them.

Needless to say, this took time: six months, a year at a hit for some parts, most of which I had in hand by the time I graduated law school and headed up to Novak’s .45 Shop for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend some weeks in the shop under Wayne’s tutelage. He demonstrated how to fit the centerfire barrels, and I stumbled my way through the slide/frame fits and trigger job, which was assembled with a Videki trigger and that rarest of all original Swenson ambi safeties, one that’s internally marked (they’re usually stamped on the outside in one of three different varieties of stampings). For the hammer, I selected a particularly aggressive-looking STI hybrid of a rowel and spur, which the trigger drops crisply at an average of 4 lbs., 2 oz. on my Lyman trigger scale.

I had bought Bo-Mar adjustable rear sights since the gun would shoot multiple calibers but did not like the front dovetails the slides came with, so off they went to Pete Single to be welded up and recut for Novak front dovetails, which I filled with gold bead front sights on both slides. On one of the gun’s trips to Single, I had him replace the material at the bottom rear corner of the receiver, which is usually beveled, so the line of the frame would flow smoothly into the S&A magwell, without an unsightly notch.

Beastly Bullseyes

How accurate is this beast? I don’t know; I’ve never had it in the Ransom Rest, but I did put three rounds in 3″ at 50 yards with it, handheld. While I usually prefer 230-grain bullets in .45 ACP, Hornady’s 200-grain +P XTP was so accurate at 25 yards that if you drew a line where the top of the front sight was, the bullet would split it. I’ll give up 30 grains for that kind of pinpoint accuracy.

Ruminations

I had originally planned to hard chrome the gun and have my coat of arms engraved in the smooth panel just forward of the cocking serrations, but life has a way of getting away from you. Once the gun was functional, I shot the Q course, and it became my carry gun with little further ceremony. The carbon steel slides wound up blued and unadorned, and the receiver stayed stainless, with a pair of unremarkable wood grips. After several years those were replaced with ivory, back when ivory grips were only a matter of writing a check.

Between the gun being built and earning its ivory, I shot it frequently, carried it incessantly, and competed with it in the local pistol matches. While I usually carried it in a Galco Fletch on a Ken Null gunbelt, around the time I upgraded the grips it found a new leather home, also from Galco, in the form of a gorgeous Stingray gunbelt, with which it pairs in striking fashion.

The Lazy 8 saw me through my early days as a prosecuting attorney, which, in retrospect, was probably among the most dangerous periods of my life. Its aggressive appearance was duly noted — such as the day a gun-savvy attorney wandered into the room where I was working, and, seeing it, stopped in his tracks and exclaimed “Dear God, what a heater!”

He has since gone on to meet his Maker, and now knows exactly whether or not He felt that was an appropriate use of His name. But to your point, Jim, yes, it’s quite a pistol.

It was ambitious when conceived, but now, some 20 years later, the Lazy 8 is literally the gun you can’t have; the major components are unavailable and many of the men that made them are dead. Videki, Bo-Mar, Swenson — none remain on the market. Even the receiver is unavailable: The tooling to create the finger groove ones was altered beyond use. Of course, I got one of the last ones made, a government-sized frame. Wonder what I should do with that one?

For more info: CaspianArms.com, Barsto.com, GalcoGunLeather.com, SVIGuns.com

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