Ned Christiansen
Ned Christiansen spent two decades engineering plastic injection molds before turning the same mind on the 1911 — his grip texture alone required a cutter that didn't exist.
THE MAKER
Ned Christiansen's shop is Michiguns Ltd., in Three Rivers, Michigan, and his biography is the most unusual in this series: before pistolsmithing, he spent more than twenty years as an engineer in plastic injection molding — designing molds and precision parts for phones, cameras, cars and defense programs, collecting patents along the way, a few of them gun-related. He came to the trade with a competitor's history too: action shooting since the 1970s, IPSC from 1984, and a first place at the 1984 World Shotgun Slug Championship.
The shop runs as a one-man operation — recently joined by an apprentice, Valo — quoting each job individually, because Christiansen's stated position is that package deals disqualify work as truly custom. He is, like Rogers and Chen, a founding member of the Louder Than Words consortium.
THE MACHINE
His signature is the Conamyds: where other smiths cut pyramids — checkering — Christiansen machines cones. Gun Tests counted 119 of them in one Commander's front strap, each flat-topped so it grips without cutting, with a tiny diamond between each cone, all cut with a special tool, fixture and process he built for the purpose because no existing tooling made the shape he wanted. The pattern repeats across the mainspring housing — which he machines from scratch — the slide stop, even the tip of the magazine release.
The engineering shows in the inventions around the texture: the Shield-Driver rear sight, whose ledge is designed to rack the slide one-handed against a belt, holster or door frame; the FallArrest hammer-and-safety part set; and a pistol he built for writer Patrick Sweeney that still gets cited — a Titanium Commander in 9mm, Caspian slide on a titanium frame, wearing all of the above.
