Money Well Spent: Nighthawk and Wilson Combat 1911s

The Kestrel from Nighthawk and Wilson’s Tactical Carry Professional might nearly double the value of my car when I lock them in the trunk for a range trip, but they aren’t intended as safe queens.

 » “OH, MAN,” SAID MY FRIEND at the counter of my local gun store as I picked up the second of these pistols, “you’ve got the coolest job!”

“Say that again,” I countered, “when you have to console me on the day I have to ship these back.”

It’s hard not to be excited about a look at two unapologetically high-end custom 1911s that were designed not to sit prettily in a safe somewhere but to be carried a lot and fired often. The Kestrel from Nighthawk and Wilson’s Tactical Carry Professional might nearly double the value of my car when I lock them in the trunk for a range trip, but they aren’t intended as safe queens. Not at all.

Nighthawk Kestrel

The Nighthawk Kestrel, despite being from the newer of the two custom houses, is the more conventional of the two designs. In the world of the 1911, that’s no insult.

The Kestrel starts on the basic Commander-style platform, with a traditional 4.25-inch barrel. The guide rod is the classic, stubby G.I. pattern that allows for takedown of the pistol using no tools, although a bushing wrench is provided for when the gun is still snug and new. The thumb safety is of the slim, tactical variety and single-sided.

The sights are Heinies, with the uncluttered, plain black of the rear sight featuring serrations to kill glare and the front sight sporting a simple gold bead. The rear sight’s anti-glare serrations are echoed all the way down the rear face of the slide. The top of the slide is serrated between the sights as well.

The frame has been slightly reduced in circumference fore and aft and sports thin-profile Alumagrips with the Nighthawk logo that only add about .3 inches of width to the bare frame at their widest. The frontstrap and mainspring housing are textured with pistolsmith Richard Heinie’s trademark “scallops,” which are sort of elongated golf ball dimples that give the same grippiness as checkering without shredding clothes as quickly.

The magwell opening is smoothly beveled; the bottom rear corner of the gripframe and mainspring housing is too. The end of the slide stop pin is shortened and countersunk to keep it from being inadvertently pressed out by a trigger finger hard-indexed along the frame. The test pistol featured stainless small parts that stood out against the black nitride finish of the frame and slide.

Wilson Combat Tactical Carry Professional

Wilson Combat is the oldest of the big-name 1911 custom houses, but the Tactical Carry Professional tested here is a departure from a lot of Government Model norms. For starters, it’s a 9mm, using 10-round single-stack magazines in its full-length grip frame.

An evolution of the 4-inch-barreled Compact Carry, the Tactical Carry Professional features a “bobtail” grip contour mated to a compact and expertly blended magwell to assist in fast, positive magazine changes. The frontstrap is checkered 30 lines per inch and this is matched by similar checkering on the top half of the bobtail mainspring housing.

The Tactical Carry Pro has a beavertail grip safety and ambidextrous thumb safeties, but these pieces are cleverly shrunken and rounded in a way that makes them as small and unobtrusive as possible while still serving their intended functions. Like the Kestrel’s, the tip of the Wilson’s slide stop pin is shortened and countersunk.

On the slide, the top is not just serrated but actually beveled flat and then serrated 30 lines per inch between the sights, which are a fiber optic up front and a Wilson Battlesight in the rear. The Battlesight features a wide U-shaped notch that lets a lot of daylight around the front blade, making for a fast sight picture. Unlike a lot of traditional 1911 “no-snag” rear sights, it also has a healthy shelf scooped out of the front of it so that one-handed manipulations can be more easily performed by catching the sight against a belt or holster mount.

The unconventional looks of the pistol are enhanced by the “carry bevel” treatment on the front of the slide (Wilson catalog-speak for “Hi Power cuts”) and the fluted barrel. It’s here I should mention that said fluted barrel is a full-diameter bull barrel, deeply crowned on the muzzle, which uses a full-length guide rod and no barrel bushing.

Bench Stats

Using a cloth measuring tape, both pistols turned out to be 6.75 inches around with the circumference measured at the trigger. The Wilson was barely the heavier of the two, at 39.5 ounces empty, as measured on my postal scale. With a 10-round load of 147-grain Federal HSTs, that went up to 44.4 ounces. Lacking the full-length guide rod or bull barrel, the Nighthawk weighed in about 2 ounces lighter, at 37.1 empty, and grossed 43.2 ounces with eight 230-grain Winchester Ranger Ts aboard.

Both pistols have excellent triggers, bordering on thought-controlled. Minimal takeup, a crisp break and only enough overtravel to be functional. My RCBS fish scale claims they both broke at 3.25 pounds on the nose.

Enough technical argle-bargle though. What we all want to know is how they shoot.

Gun Range Test

On the initial shakedown gun range trip, I was experiencing a bit of trepidation. Like driving someone else’s expensive sports car, you’re afraid the thing’s going to choke while you’re driving it and you’ll feel responsible. Especially with the Wilson, since a 4-inch, bull-barreled 9x19mm is pretty far away from John Moses Browning’s original recipe for his masterpiece. I even went ahead and ordered a case of Winchester Q4318 124-grain NATO, in order to make sure it would have enough steam to run a snugly-fitted custom 1911.

As it turns out, from the time I took it out of the box up through the time I am sitting here typing this, the Wilson Tactical Carry Professional has fired 810 rounds of that Q4318, as well as another 100 rounds of Speer Gold Dot +P and Federal HST ammo and has yet to experience a stoppage of any kind. To put it bluntly, this pistol has taken a lifetime of prejudice I’ve had against 9mm 1911s and knocked it into a cocked hat.

Instead, on that same inaugural trip, it was the initial magazines fired from the Kestrel that didn’t bode so well. A total of 66 rounds of 230-grain FMJ ammunition were fired: A full box of 50 SIG Sauer Elite Performance and another two magazines of assorted factory ball. Out of those rounds, the pistol probably had six or eight failures to feed. “Uh-oh,” I thought to myself.

I needn’t have worried about that either. Starting with the very next range trip, the pistol has fired 520 rounds of assorted FMJ and hollow-point rounds without a stoppage of any sort.

“But, Tam!” you say, “You’ve fired nearly twice as much ammo through the Wilson as the Nighthawk!”

Indeed I have. And this is influenced by two factors.

First, there’s the economic reality that 9×19 ammo is barely over half the price of .45 ACP. You can simply bust a lot more caps for the same amount of dough using the smaller round.

Some people definitely prefer the reassurance of the .45’s fat bullets and are willing to put up with a bit of extra recoil to get them.

The second is that a steel-framed 1911-pattern pistol in 9mm with a “go button” for a trigger is just so amazingly easy to shoot. You could blaze away with this thing all day without feeling a bit of fatigue, whereas more than a couple hundred rounds of .45 through the Kestrel in one range session can start to feel like work.

But these aren’t target guns; they’re meant for carry. Some people definitely prefer the reassurance of the .45’s fat bullets and are willing to put up with a bit of extra recoil to get them, and, for those shooters, the choice between a 9mm and a .45 is a foregone conclusion.

The Kestrel was impressive in other ways too.

At the first range session, where I attempted to get some chrono work done and shoot for groups, I loaded the Kestrel with five rounds of cheap Federal RTP 230-grain ball and handed it to my friend Mike Grasso, a retired LAPD cop.

“Hey, can you bench this at 25?” I asked. “Let’s see what it’ll do.”

The very first five-shot group he fired had four rounds into a 1.75-inch group, with a called flyer opening it up to 2.5 inches.

“You want me to re-shoot that?” he asked.

“Nah, I think that was dandy.”

If it’ll do that with junk FMJ range fodder, it’ll probably stack up good quality match semi-wadcutters in a tiny, ragged hole.

Firearm Specs:

The Wilson was a little more work. The Tactical Carry Professional comes with Wilson’s well-known 1.5-inch-at-25-yards guarantee, but 9mm 1911s can be more ammo sensitive. That, and the fat, bright dot of the fiber-optic sight can be distracting when trying to shoot for groups at distance on a sunny day. We had a hard time getting any groups with Speer Gold Dot 124-grain +P below the 3-inch mark. At my next range session, I managed a 2.5-inch group with Winchester Q4318, and I’m sure that I could put the gun and some good 147-grain ammo in the hands of the right shooter and shave off that last inch, but I haven’t yet.

This isn’t really a comparison test, since people are unlikely to be shopping 9x19s with racegun influences against traditionally-configured .45 Commanders. It is, however, a look at what you find when you go swimming in the deep end of the 1911 pool.

It had been years since I hung up my own custom 1911s and started carrying plastic. It was lighter, I told myself, and it held more BBs in the gas tank. I mean, to do a 10-shot chronograph string with a classic .45 ACP 1911, you have to do a mag change in the middle of the string. How primitive!

And yet when I un-boxed these things and felt how they fit the hand, how perfect the trigger pulls were and how easy it was to make shots that would be a struggle with a plastic service pistol, I was reminded why I carried high-end 1911s in the first place. They’re like shooting in easy mode. I’m not saying I’ve pulled my old Milt Sparks VersaMax II out of the attic, but I’m not saying I haven’t either…

SOURCES

Wilson Combat: wilsoncombat.com
Nighthawk: nighthawkcustom.com