I have a Springfield Armory 1911 (my only 1911, in fact) that I bought used many years ago….I’m talking back in the late 80’s or very early 90’s. It has a Baughman ramp front, target rear, full length recoil guide, extended beavertail, adjustable trigger, and at least another half dozen modifications. The previous owner had all this work done because when SA made this thing you couldn’t buy the gun with all those options. Back when this gun was born your only real choices were if you wanted a parkerized or blued copy of a GI 1911. Maybe there were one or two options available like different sights but that was about it. If you wanted all those other bells and whistles…well…you had a trip to the gunsmith in front of you.
Nowadays you can just pull a SKU out of SA’s catalog and get a pistol with even more and better options right off the shelf.
I mention this because I was re-reading an old blog post of Tam’s about the cost of custom guns. The things that she put into a custom .300 Blackout rifle are things that are, to a degree, now available ‘off the rack’ from several different makers. Notably, my Ruger .300 Blackout comes with a threaded barrel, an adjustable trigger, can take detachable magazines, has a good stock, a solid attachment point for optics, optics-ready bolt handle, and a few other features that, for the time period she as doing this in, were ‘custom’.( Her .300, though, is much prettier than my .300 . I wonder if she still has it.)
But what those two guns have in common is that the features we wanted, insisted on actually, eventually wound up becoming ‘standard features’. Other good examples would be pistols from the factory now coming with optic cuts already done. The sudden craze of every rifle barrel from a manufacturer being threaded. Adjustable triggers on everything. It goes on and on.
It used to be that a bespoke boomtoy was so personal and unique an item that it was practically a persons ‘signature’. Elmer Keith’s No. 5, Patton’s Ivory handled SAA, Diaz’ Winchesters, etc. And now, someone somewhere is making exact copies or at least guns that have all those features. Even my BBQ gun isn;t really unique since its a cataloged item with machine engraving…rare, yes. Custom? Absolutely not.
I have one bespoke gun and it’s story is very similar to Tam’s – I bought a bunch of clapped out Mausers from Sarco back in the late 80’s, threw away the stocks and barrels, and cleaned up the actions. I bought a brand new 29″ stepped military barrel in 7×57, put it in, added some Williams receiver sights, blued the whole mess, dropped it into an old commercial Mauser stock of ancient vintage, and made an ugly rifle that I thought was perfect. It doesn’t win any beauty contests but I love shooting it.
I’m not sure you can call anything made of drop-in parts custom, but the most recent might-be-custom gun I have is the Glock I put together a few months back. There isn’t a single thing thats ‘custom’ about it except for the combination of parts which is probably not terribly unusual. But, it’s certainly custom to me.
Custom guns never really ‘pay off’ in the long run. You’ll never get your money out of them, but you do get a higher degree of satisfaction and pleasure, I think, than you would have gotten out of the plain Jane version that was ‘off the rack’.
But it is interesting to note that what used to be considered custom years ago is now, to a degree, mainstream…or at least avaialble on a non-custom basis.