Les Baer Custom
A Les Baer leaves the shop so tight the slide barely wants to move. That is the point: you shoot it loose yourself, a few hundred rounds at a time.
THE MAKER
Les Baer Sr. learned the trade at Springfield Armory, where he was running the custom shop by 1989, and founded Les Baer Custom in 1991. In 2007 he moved the company about twenty miles — from Illinois to LeClaire, Iowa, just across the Mississippi. As the story is told in the gun press, the short move had a long motive: getting his company out from under Illinois firearms laws. The shop has built in LeClaire ever since, making its own National Match frames, slides and bushings in-house.
Baer's other public life explains the poster in our photograph: he is a drag racer of genuine seriousness, and his cars have shared his display space at more than one show. Speed, it turns out, is a transferable obsession — it just changes vehicles.
THE MACHINE
The flagship is the Premier II, the full-size 1911 the company's reputation rides on, and the specification it is sold with is a guarantee: Baer promises 3-inch groups at 50 yards, with a 1.5-inch guarantee available as an option. Fifty yards is rifle conversation for most pistol shooters; Baer prints it on the order form.
But the defining Baer characteristic is not accuracy. It is tightness. Baer fits slides and frames so closely that a new gun can be genuinely difficult to rack, and the company's standing counsel to owners runs against every instinct: shoot it first — a break-in of several hundred rounds, commonly quoted to owners as around 500 — and do not field-strip the gun before the break-in is done. The parts are meant to lap themselves into their final fit under recoil, with the oil and the shooting doing the last thousandth of the fitting.
