Back in the old days, it was the consensus to not run Shok-Buffs in working guns. The logic being should the buff come apart, it could lock up the gun at a most unfortunate time.
These days it appears Wilson Combat ships their guns with Shok-Buffs from the factory. Since that is OEM, that is what we will run.
Wilson recommends Buffs be looked at every 500 rounds or so. And specifically says these buffs are guaranteed for 1000 rounds. I know that since I just went to their website and read it. After putting 3090 rounds though the buff!
Oops.
Or maybe not. Looking at this Shok-Buff, it appears to be going strong at over 3000 rounds. I’ll keep it in for another 1000 and then evaluate.
No…I am not recommending YOU do this. Also we are not gear reviewers, so I have zero interest in performing destructive testing that is quite popular among the “I review gear but can’t shoot well” crowd.
So…then why?
Simple. We are performance based shooters. Getting back into the 1911 game gets me back to all the scheduled maintenance we would do to keep a typical series 70, 45 ACP gun running.
I think changing out buffs every 1000 rounds is a bit much for a working / social gun. I want to see if I can get the buff change schedule in line with changing the FP spring. That I would do usually around 3000 rounds.
I didn’t mean to to greatly overrun the published buff specs. But I also theorize those specs are VERY conservative. If I can get these buffs to reliably exceed 3000 rounds, I am safe scheduling that swap at 3000 and not dancing on the knife edge of disaster.
Make sense?
Sincerely,
Marky
www.John1911.com
“Shooting Guns & Having Fun”
Areas of focus: Defense and National Security, Modern Light Weapons, Small Arms, Weapons Training.
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