After 12 years of service...
As for the HP being too heavy, ah shucks. Do some weight training. It's a combat weapon, not an item of dress.
Its not an item of dress, and yet it has to be worn, on the body, in a holster, typically on a leg. Put an extra lb in a 80 lb ruck sack and you barely notice the difference. Put a lb on your leg and go for a long walk and it makes a world of difference. There is a reason why boot manufacturers make a lot of fuss over a few individual grams of mass. Because weight loads on the lower body have a disproportionately exaggerated effect on performance. Particularly when running, jumping and climbing is involved.
I know many soldiers who made the choice to simply not take their pistol on patrol because in their opinion the weight wasn't worth having a back up gun if their primary failed. That's a pretty sad state of affairs. A lighter, more reliable pistol will increase combat power and therefore inevitably save lives.
PS, when the browning first entered service, your average infanteer was carrying less than 25lbs of equipment. Nowadays is a rare thing for a riflemen to walk out of the gate with less than 60.
In WW2 rifle companies were rarely more than 500m-1km away from the nearest resupply echelon. Today its not uncommon for solders to be operating 50km or more away from their nearest supported unit.
With all due respect, your weight training recommendation doesn't hold up. Get it?
On my commercial model, I removed the mag safety which greatly improves the trigger pull. Can't get caught doing that on a military model and not get your pee-pee slapped.
Fixed. Honestly sir, I don't know how that epoxy got in there. I've tried for hours and CLP just can't seem to get it out.
the problem is what manufacturer will let Colt Canada service and work on there product.
Its actually worse than that. The last time Canada ran a pistol procurement, about 8 or 9 years ago, the contract actually specified that the successful bidder would surrender all of their IP and technical data to colt who would actually manufacture the pistols for them. Further, there was no guarantee in place that the tech data would stay in Canada, and colt Canada would have been free to transfer that data to the parent company colt international.
What pistol manufacturer in their right mind would give all their IP to a competitor, just to win a tender where they wouldn't even have the privilege of manufacturing their own pistols, but would have their reputation on the line if the resulting pistol didn't meet expectations? Unsurprisingly, there were no bidders.
I find it interesting that my experience with both commercial and Inglis HPs is so different from that of others.
The HP continues to highly regarded around the world so you have to wonder about the dissatisfaction with our Inglis HPs.
And while your experience is certainly valid and valuable, so too is everyone else's.
First, while the BHP design might be good, that says nothing about individual pistols.
The BHP is sensitive to weak grips, which is a common source of stoppages. A modern combat pistol should not be sensitive. PS Women deserve a good pistol too.
Second, a privately owned well maintained pistol used exclusively for competition is a very different affair than a service pistol which can see a hundred different users in a year, and spends far more time getting smashed around, manhandled, dragged over obstacles and in and out of vehicles then it does being shot, and still needs function 100% of the time.
In a modern gun fight, the only time a pistol gets used is when the shooter is staring at an enemy target at max pistol range or less (think 25 meters or less) AND their primary weapon has already failed. This is not a time to concern yourself with a good grip or the precise alignment of tiny little sights, or the smooth press of a heavy and jerky trigger.
Its time to personify your will to survive at all costs through your pistol towards your target and finger bang the trigger until they go down.
I am not down on the BHPs. I own a belgian made pre WW2 browning, and it routinely sees trips to the range. There was a time when it was one of the best combat pistols available. 70 years later that is clearly no longer the case.
