A long, long time ago, when I was flat-bellied and wide-eyed and had more hair than brains, a much older, more sophisticated friend took me to a rare gun store in his hometown. It was in an old part of his historic town, where the buildings all dated back to the 1800s, and walking into the store was also very much like stepping back in time. The walls were lined with racks of dreams, dreams with names like Boss and Purdey, Westley-Richards and Holland & Holland, Parker and Griffen & Howe. I had never seen anything like it, or even known such stores existed. The two men were old friends, and they enjoyed themselves encouraging me, watching me shoulder work of art after work of art and getting more and more breathless. When we left, my friend asked what I thought of what I had seen and been allowed to handle. I was still dizzy with excitement, and I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“They all felt as if they were almost alive!”
So does a Nighthawk.
Nighthawk, whose motto is “One Gun, One Gunsmith,” recently sent me one of its custom Nighthawk Classic Commanders. When I went down to my local gun store/shooting range to pick it up, there were several other men ahead of me, filling out paperwork for purchases, and the owner told me it would be a while before he could get to me. I told him I would go into the range and do a little shooting and, if necessary, I would come back after the weekend to fill out the paperwork and take possession. But he knew how much I had been looking forward to getting my hands on this pistol and he got it out of the safe for me to ogle. Ogle I did. And when I lifted it out of its case it was as if I had gone back in time all those decades to that fine gun store in an historic Eastern town, as if what I lifted out of the custom case was alive in my hands. When I came out of the range, I stood in line and waited my turn.
Nighthawk Custom was founded in 2004 in Berryville, Arkansas. It started off with four people, total, devoted to the 1911 platform and offering two highly refined and customized models. Things have progressed a bit. Today, nearly 100 employees and two dogs offer “unique and custom versions of the 1911.”
Unique and custom. Rather like the Mona Lisa.
One gun, one gunsmith means precisely that. One individual gunsmith starts out with oversized parts machined from bar stock billet steel and then painstakingly handcrafts each separate part to make that unique and custom 1911.
This is different from the traditional British method of making classic shotguns where specialists work as a team and one man makes the barrels, another the action, a third does the finishing, someone else the stock, yet another does the engraving, and so on. I’m in no position to judge which system is best, but I do know that when a Nighthawk gunsmith finishes a pistol, test firing it, smoothing, sanding, de-burring and hand-beveling any 90-degree angles, and finally stamps his initials under the left grip panel, he is stamping the gun with his reputation and his justifiable pride in his own skills.
Those skills come with a lifetime guarantee. That’s the lifetime of the gun, not the purchaser or even any later owner such as a son or grandson, because Nighthawk regards its pistols as heirlooms to be passed on from generation to generation, much as those Boss and Westley Richards, Purdey and Holland & Holland shotguns were intended to be passed on. Nighthawk claims, with justifiable pride, that it has had more gunsmiths inducted into the American Pistolsmith Guild than any other company in the world. I can believe it.
The downside to anything custom, be it Boss or Nighthawk, is that in the highly unlikely event some part does finally wear out, your grandson won’t be able to just drive it down to Bubba’s Transmission Repair, Gunsmithing, & Sushi to get it fixed but, like a Boss, by the time that happens, your grandson will probably be ready to pass it on to his son to worry about.
Nighthawk also offers German-made Korth revolvers, handmade by individual gunsmiths, and Italian-made break-open, semi-automatic Cosmi shotguns, described as “the only luxury semi-automatic” in the world. I never thought to use the words “break-open” and “semi-automatic” in a single sentence, but apparently that’s what a Cosmi is.
If you need a holster for your 1911, Nighthawk’s leatherwork is every bit as beautiful as its guns, with leather offerings from alligator to shark to elephant. Want a knife to match? Hunter or fighter? Folder or kitchen knife? Damascus? Mammoth ivory handle or Peruvian opal?
You get the picture. If you want the best of the best, go to Nighthawk.
But how does that Classic Custom shoot?
The great Duke Ellington once said there were only two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind. I used to believe that maxim applied to triggers, but I’ve changed my mind. Now I know there also are great triggers.
As I’m not a gunsmith, I’m not entirely precisely sure what it is about the Nighthawk Custom Classic trigger that makes it so exceptional, but it is quite the best trigger I’ve ever felt on a handgun, beautifully smooth and with minimal uptake. Nighthawk states its pull is set between 3.5 to 3.75 pounds; my Timney gauge varied between 3.6 and 3.8, which is close enough to qualify as truth in advertising.
In theory, that is lighter than I feel comfortable with, yet for reasons I can’t explain, there was a preciseness to the trigger press that gave me confidence. My friend R…, who is a 1911 aficionado (or freak—your choice) wanted very much to play with the Nighthawk and brought his (another company) custom to the range for me to try by way of comparison. His (another company) also had a trigger pull of 3.8, yet twice that gun’s trigger got away from me. (By “get away,” I mean that during defensive speed-shooting drills, shooting against a timer, while I was in the silhouette, I was not yet in the precise 6-inch circle designating center mass.) Why his and not the Nighthawk? I can’t really explain it, other than to say the Nighthawk felt firmer, for want of a better word, and never, in several hundred rounds, did it get away from me. It is a great trigger. I think the only reason R… didn’t immediately order a Nighthawk himself was because his wife, who was shooting with us, kept looking at her hands in a meaningful way and mentioning that she really needed a larger diamond ring.
Another famous quote, this one by Colonel Townsend Whelen about “only accurate rifles [being] interesting,” can also be applied to all firearms, and using it as a standard, I would describe the Nighthawk as fascinating.
Accuracy in hunting rifles and defensive handguns is both measurable and immeasurable.
It is measurable because it can be gauged and modified precisely at the range by using a variety of ammo with different bullet weights, different bullet construction and bullet shape. If you are a good and serious reloader, you can fine tune your accuracy by varying any one of, or any combination of, the four components of a cartridge: projectile, propellent, primer or case.
It is immeasurable in a hunting rifle because when the buck of a lifetime explodes from the brush, offering less than a second to assess, decide and shoot, you won’t be thinking about the primer or propellent you used or the cartridge overall length, or the cartridge base-to-bullet ogive. You’ll be praying you survive the heart attack you’re about to have so you can live to see that rack hanging on your wall.
It is immeasurable in a defensive handgun for the same reasons. When your front door is kicked in at 3 a.m. and adrenaline is squirting out of your ears, you won’t be thinking about anything except praying you survive this ordeal long enough to finally replace your wife’s Pomeranian with a Rottweiler.
But the benefit of extraordinary accuracy is that it gives you the confidence to shoot under extraordinary circumstances. And trust me on this: you will never be able to live up to the accuracy of a Nighthawk.
Two targets were included in the case, both shot by the gun’s builder, Mr. Hunter Dotts, at 12 yards. One group was shot when the gun still had iron sights, the other with Trijicon red dot optics, which brings me to one of the best features of the Nighthawk 1911. The Classic comes with a black Heinie Ledge rear sight and a gold bead front sight, but Nighthawk offers what it calls its Interchangeable Optics System. It consists, essentially, of a customized plate that fits precisely into a dovetail cut into the slide. This allows the owner to switch quickly and easily back and forth from the Heinie rear sight to a Trijicon red dot optic, depending on need. I would point out that the Trijicon mounted on my try gun allowed me to clearly see both the iron rear sight and the gold dot front sight through the screen. Being able to see the iron sights is very desirable when the battery in your optics sight dies at a most inopportune time, which will almost certainly happen, Murphy’s Law being what it is.
The photo of the wrinkled yellow target (I got caught in a rainstorm) is a 3-shot group I fired at 25 yards. Younger eyes and stronger hands doubtless could have improved on my shooting, but I can live with that group.
But this is a defensive pistol and, as such, it is intended to be used in an emergency which means you almost certainly won’t be standing still and shooting calmly from a shooting bay under the watchful eye of a range safety officer. I tried shooting while holding the gun at odd angles, including “gangsta style” and as nearly upside down as I could manage. I shot it one-handed. I shot it with my weak, non-dominant hand. Nothing fazed it.
Handmade perfection, be it pistol, side-by-side, Mauser ’98 bolt action, knife, saddle, bit, whatever, comes with a price tag. However, I would point out that living in a time when one has to take out a second mortgage on the family home just to be able to afford a dozen eggs and a gallon of milk, Nighthawk’s works of functional art seem very reasonably priced by comparison. And more: nothing made by machine can offer the indefinable something, that feeling of being almost alive, that creates the emotional attachment of a handmade tool. Companies promote CNC-made guns because they are cheaper, easier and faster to manufacture, all of which results in higher profit margins. That certainly doesn’t mean they are bad, or even less good than a handmade firearm; it just means they don’t have the same magic built into them.
The Classic is offered in either 45 ACP or 9mm, but if you prefer you can also upgrade to 38 Super or 10mm, which brings me to the other custom options offered.
Any extraordinary handmade tool consists of carefully thought-out and carefully coordinated pieces that have been refined to work together with maximum efficiency. Nighthawk knows its business far better than I, and I’m sure none of its offered options could possibly have any effect on function but, from an aesthetic point of view, take a moment to look at a photograph of the Classic Commander. The spare, clean lines are Mr. Browning’s, but look at that simple, highly polished finish and the cocobolo grips, the 25-lines to the inch front strap and mainspring housing, the arrow serrations on the top of the slide. There is a perfection to that simplicity that reminds me of those racks of dreams I was allowed to play with so many decades ago. Personally, I would never try to improve on that. It would be like throwing soup on the Mona Lisa.