My Delta Elite

 

So in my return from the hinterlands of elk hunting, I was catching up on my reading and saw that Rob Allen had finished his write-up on the Colt Delta Elite.  Good read, and very informative.

 

I was tempted to respond to both the article on Gun Nuts and his site, but I think I'm going to do it here.



 

 

I went about my thing with the 10mm 180 degrees different than he did.  My first 10 was the Delta Elite.

It started out kind of by accident.  3 yrs ago this month, I was looking for a 1911 in a different caliber.  One day, while perusing Gun Broker, I happened across an auction for LNIB Colt Delta Elite 10mm 1911 for the unheard of asking price of $800.  The pistol itself was one of the early ones (low 4-digit DE serial number and all) and came with the old Colt cardboard box instead of the new plastic ones.  So I snatched it up and went about making it comfy for me to use.

What I did was replace the trigger, main spring housing, fire control group, barrel, grip safety, operating rod/spring, and manual safety.  With the exception of the barrel (Clarks Custom), grips (Night Hawk), and trigger (STI), I used Ed Brown parts.

Some would ask why?  Well, being a southpaw, the single manual safety doesn't work for me.  At all.  I have to use an ambi-safety.  Everything else was creature comfort on my part.  Since I shoot with such a high grip, I had to replace the original grip safety with something that wouldn't bite me.  And as Rob pointed out in his review, the stock trigger ain't nothing to write home about.

The barrel was replaced with a Clarks Custom match barrel due to the fact the factory one wouldn't feed hollow points worth a hoot. That, and I tried to make it work and screwed it up. 

Of all the mods I made to this pistol, the only thing I had to send it out for was the barrel.  Everything else you see was done by me, including mounting the beavertail grip safety.

One side note of interest here.  When it was all said and done, I got really good at taking apart a Series 80 pistol and putting it back together again.  When I started, it would take me about 45 minutes to take it down and back.  When I finished, matter of a couple of minutes.  What would always trip me up was the firing pin safety parts in the frame. Gad, what a PITA.