KSC M1911A1 Review

By Brandon
March 19, 2009

Introduction

So, for consideration today, we have something about as bland as can be; a 1911.  This time, we’re checking out the KSC variety, which looks pretty much like any other 1911.  Usually I have more to say here, but I’m honestly lost for words.  While a few years ago, our only option for single stack 1911s was expensive and finicky Western Arms guns, the release of the TM 1911A1 prompted a relative deluge of good, appropriately priced single stack 1911s.  Models  in the $100 range were released from the likes of KJW, KSC, Marushin, and even a humbled Western Arms variant. WE showed that clone companies could make a decent 1911 with their $100 metal version (which came complete with a spare mag!), and other Chinese clone companies like Tercel, Army, and Bell followed suit.  It was really quite interesting to watch airsoft community go from being starved of single stack 1911s to being drowned in them.

So with all of these models floating around, is the KSC any good?  We’ll dig in after the usual opening items.

Real Steel History

Action: Single
Caliber: .45 ACP
Capacity: 7 Rounds
Barrel Length: 125 mm
Weight: 1080 g
Overall Length: 216 mm

The history of the Colt Gov’t / M1911 Pistol began in early 1900s, when famous designer John M. Browning began to develop semi-automatic pistols for Colt company. In the 1906-1907 U.S. Army announced trials to replace its service revolvers with new, semi-automatic pistol. Army required the new pistol to have the caliber of .45 inch, so Browning designed its own cartridge that fired a 230 grains (15.64 grams) bullet, and then designed a new pistol. In 1911 after extensive testing the new pistol and its cartridge, designed by Browning and manufactured by Colt, were adopted for U.S. military service as M1911. Prior to and during World War One, more than one million of these guns were manufactured by Colt and Springfield Armory, as well as by Remington-UMC, Burroughs, Savage and others. The rights to manufacture the Colt/Browning design were sold to some foreign countries, such as Norway and Argentina.

In 1926, original design was improved, following the recommendations of the US Army Ordnance Dept. These changes incorporate the following items (see picture above):
1. Wider front sight
2. Longer hammer spur
3. Shorter trigger
4. Curved spring housing
5. Simplified grip panels checkering
6. Index finger reliefs behind the trigger
7. Longer grip-safety spur

The improved design was adopted by US Military as M1911A1 pistol, and served with distinction until the mid-1980s, when it was officially replaced in service with M9 pistol (US-made Beretta 92FS).

From worldguns

Movie Appearances

The 1911 has been used in just about every movie, so I’ve selected a few recent favorites to simplify things.

Clint Eastwood holds his 1911 on some gangbangers in Gran Torino… Or does he?

Dennis Quaid as Captain Townes and a few other ancillary characters use a 1911A1 in a particularly cool scene in Flight of the Phoenix.

Bruce Willis as Goodkat in Lucky Number Slevin uses a 1911 in a flashback

There are about as many more appearances of this gun in movies as anyone could hope for.  If anyone has a movie they think should especially be here, email me and I’ll throw it in.

Initial Impressions

After receiving the gun from a good friend of mine, I settled down to have a look.  The box comes in a particularly green box, which at least is better than their attempts at stylish black and white, as seen with many of their other models.  It is one of the newer folding lid boxes, and is simply emblazoned “M1911A1 .45 A.C.P.” on the box with a few specifications and a tiny illustration of the pistol on the right hand side.

Ok, so one can’t escape the black and white forever. A little plastic baggie contains the manual, and all the pertinent papers to the gun.  This one is mostly in Japanese so it is not entirely useful to us westerners.

Brushing the manual aside, we are greeted with the gun.  Note the glare on the slide from the soft incandescent light at the desk.  This shows the relatively reflective material that the slide is made of.  The slide has some matte characteristics, but its still inevitably ABS, and shines proudly in direct light.

Taking the replica out of the box, you are greeted with a bog-standard plasic 1911.  The plastic on this one is of a darker tone than most of the 1911A1 replicas, which go for the parkerized grey look.  The reason for this is that the KSC 1911A1 replicates the National Match model of the 1911A1 rather than the government model.  The only particular differences are the markings and the color of the gun.  I personally like the change.

Here you can (somewhat) see the different trademarks that come on this gun.  Note that the slide is missing the typical prancing horse colt logo.  The slide reads “COLT’s PT FA MFG HARTFORD C.T. U.S.A.” with the patent info below it.  This shot also gives you a better idea of the look of the material used on the gun.  Not bad, just shiny.  Note that the mark above the trades came from removing the plastic trademark covering that this gun came with.

On the left side of the frame, we see the G.H.D. and P proofmarks.  Good attention to detail here.  Also, the slide lock and safety are visible, and I have to say that these potmetal controls are at least decently colorfast.  Some potmetal parts of KSC’s have the propensity to lose their color rapidly (the KSC CZ-75 comes to mind…).  The grips are simple brown plastic, and are altogether unremarkable.

Heres a good shot of the back of the gun. The mainspring housing is the correct curved version, and the checkering is nicely done.  The grip safety works well, so no qualms there.  The hammer is the longer spurred version, which again, is accurate.  The manual safety positively engages with a nice click as well.  All the moving bits on this gun are quite well executed.

Here is a shot of the opposite side of the gun. Note since this is a vanilla 1911. there is no ambidextrous safety.  Also note the black chamber, where most 1911A1s have a chrome chamber.  This difference stems from this being the National Match style.

The slide’s somewhat shiny texture can probably be illustrated best here.  The COLT logo just foreward of the ejector port is also shown, though somewhat hard to see.  The trademarks are somewhat shallow on this replica, and removing the plastic tab over the Colt Prancing Horse on this side essentially destroyed that mark.  Also note the proofmark on the triggerguard.

Here, one can closely see the detail on the back left side of the frame.  The markings read “United States Property No 862347″.  The Springfield Armory cannon proofing stamp can be seen on the back of the frame.

Here you can see the M1911A1 U.S. Army mark on the front of the dust cover.  Also check out the axle for the slide lock, which protrudes a fair amount more than other makes of 1911s.  One thing I like about KSC’s iteration of the 1911 is that all the lines are nice and sharp, which looks good with the black.  Without the trademark covering aftermath, this thing would look quite good in its own right.

Here is a shot of the site picture on the gun.  This model has regular old 1911 blade sights, which are well replicated, but have limited usefulness to the skirmisher.  Players may want to break out the white paint and highlight the edges of the sights to make them stand out better.

Here is a shot with the slide locked back.  In terms of functionality, the slide lock worked well, only failing to lock a handful of times over the gun’s duration with me.  Some wear on the slide lock occurred, as with most plastic slided guns, so a metal slide is probably a smart investment on this one.

Here is a shot of the mag, with noting particularly interesting to note.

The mag holds 14 BBs, and usually can shoot one and a half loads of BBs on one fill of gas.  Its hard to get much gas into such a skinny magazine.

Field stripping the gun is relatively simple; Pull the slide back to the point where the slide lock can be pushed through the frame, pull the slide off, remove the recoil spring, twist off the barrel bushing, and pull the barrel through the front of the slide.  It sounds like a mouthful, but really once you do it yourself a few times its quite easy.  After stripping, you’re left with this;

All of the parts are nicely fit, and the gun is overall quite solid with no noticeable rattles.  Do note the somewhat deformed recoil spring, which does not look too professional.

The hammer mechanism is relatively hidden by a slide rail that covers the worky bits, but its pretty standard single-action-only sear and leaf spring fare.

Here is the blow back unit, which is just a standard KSC style blow back chamber.  Its held in the slide with one Allen screw and the two metal arms clinging to the slide’s interior.

So there you have it.  Another 1911.   Plastic, not terribly bad looking, and very slight differences to distinguish it from the other 1911s with which it vies for attention.  Not a bad gun, but nothing super special either.

Now lets get an idea for the shooting aspect.

Shooting Impressions

This is where the gun finally gets some room to differentiate itself.  While no examples of 1911s I’ve happened upon have been terrible, some are more average than others.

Shooting the KSC 1911A1 puts it on the average side of the curve.  Gas efficiency is alright, but nothing special.  Feedback is nothing special, as the gun reports relatively quietly, the slide action is slower than some of KSC’s offerings, and the recoil felt is weak due to the light weight slide.  The sound made by the plastic parts clicking and clacking is unflattering too.

In terms of performance, the gun is a straight shooter, with a nice hop-up and tight groupings, which is to be expected from the majority of KSCs offerings.  In fact this gun gets so zealous to hit the target that sometimes shooting its BBs isn’t enough, which brings me to one of my less favorite sections of the reviews.

Durability Alert!

After not too much use, this pistol began to shoot both its barrel bushing and recoil spring housing in addition to BBs.  Needless to say it was amusing to watch the pistol vomit its internals out into the field of fire, but what wasn’t amusing was when this would happen in an uncontrolled environment.  Looking around the forest dirt for missing small black parts is never how you want to spend skirmish time.

I isolated the cause to the barrel lug rotating too easily.  It could work its way over the recoil spring housing(pictured below), which would continue to push it counterclockwise until it could fly free.

My temporary fix on this issue was to use a bit of electrical tape to shim the bushing to a tighter fit.  This wasn’t a bad fix, but potential buyers should surely be aware of the fact that the gun occasionally blows its front off in a hilarious spectacle, leaving the skirmisher blankly staring at his slide blown back, and the recoil spring waggling daftly out the front of the gun.  The whole thing paints a pretty pathetic picture for your aggressor to survey before he ruthlessly executes you, laughing at the grotesque failure of you and your gun.

All this can be prevented with a tiny piece of electrical tape, so no huge deal.

Conclusion

In all, we’re presented with a plastic 1911 that shoots well, but has teething issues.  Its not all that fun to shoot relative to other GBBs.  It looks nice, but doesn’t represent the ever pursued government model (which can be either good or bad), and sometimes explodes.  How did it stack up?

Performance: 3.5/5
The gun fires well, and has good groupings and range.  The raspy, slow action and the gun’s propensity to explode without a little preventative work hurt it here.

External Design: 4/5
The external design of this gun is well executed for a plastic pistol.  Trades are nice and of an uncommon model, and the entire package is sharp looking.  The factory metal version of the gun seems like the obvious way to go here however.

Value: 2/5
This gun was $130.00 at WGC when it was still in production.  It was phased out with the Series 7 releases, but I think $130.00 is a bit steep for what you get here.  If the plastic was nicer than ABS, or the shooting experience was more pleasant, I’d say it would be better worth its price tag.

Overall: 3/5
This is a 1911 that works, and looks like a 1911.  It is nice, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The Final Word

I haven’t gotten to shoot a PTP or Series 7 1911 yet from KSC/KWA’s model line refresh, but I’d suggest skipping this older model if you come across one in your shopping possibilities.  I feel WE guns and clones provide better value to the skirmisher, and collectors can go spend bazillions on a nice WA.  Even in the mid-range big name market, I feel the TM trumps the KSC with superior build quality and polish.  I sold mine, and so far I don’t miss it.

As usual, please comment or email me with any questions.  Thanks for reading!