Hayes Custom Guns

This Hayes is a 5 inch island barrel extra wide body with a ghosted rose PVD finish. Down each side of the slide, forward and rear, the cocking serrations are cut in the angled, staggered pattern he calls rattler cuts and they grip the way they look. Since this gun has the Nighthawk IOS cut it makes it very versatile when changing divisions or matches.

Jim Clark Sr. was a Marine, a National Champion Bullseye shooter, and in 1950 the founder of Clark Custom Guns in Shreveport, Louisiana. He is one of the founding fathers of 1911 gunsmithing in the plainest sense: the ramped 1911 barrel, the six-inch long slide, threaded cone compensators and machine checkering on the front strap all came off his bench, and by 1985 American Handgunner could write that he had done more experimenting on the .45 auto than any other pistolsmith alive. He remains the only person to have been named both Pistolsmith of the Year and Outstanding American Handgunner. His daughter Kay Clark married Jerry Miculek; his son Jim Clark Jr. won the 1992 National 3-Gun Championship and carried the shop forward.

Ben Hayes is Jim Clark Sr.'s grandson. In 2004, at eighteen, he went to work at Clark Custom Guns under his uncle Jim Jr., and in time became the shop's head 1911 builder, the man building the guns that the Clark name was on. In 2012 he and his brother Aaron founded Hayes Custom Guns, now at 300 Highway 183 in Florence, Texas. The motto is "guns that win, built by shooters that win", and the line on their own history is that they built the business on the backs of giants. Both are literally true.

What makes a Hayes a Hayes is that Ben makes it. Not a team, not a cell of CNC machines running a program he wrote. Ben, on a manual mill and a manual lathe and a row of bench grinders, fitting each part to the next by hand and by eye. Every pistol that leaves the shop has been through his hands from the first cut to the last. The horns, the longhorn mark engraved on the slide, go on only when he judges the gun one hundred percent right. A gun he is not satisfied with does not get them, and a gun that does not get them does not leave. Riley's gun has the horns.

The rest of it is character. Riley will tell you that Ben is a good Christian man with strong values, and that this is part of why the gun means what it does: it was built by somebody whose word is worth something, and it was built the way he said it would be.

There are two ways a Hayes reaches a shooter, and they should not be confused. In 2023 the shop introduced the Cobra, a dealer line: a defined gun, still built by hand, sold through a handful of shops: KOVERT, Paulies Pistols, Arnzen Arms, Shooters Connection, Modern Warriors, BattleHawk. The HC1911 Cobra is a 9mm with a five-inch bull barrel crowned flush, a tri-top slide, a full-length railed frame, ambidextrous safety, a two-and-a-half-pound flat trigger, aluminium grip and magwell, forty-four and a half ounces on the scale. Options run to a Nighthawk IOS optic system, an island or sight-tracker barrel, and slide ports with a second ported bull barrel. It ships with two 140mm twenty-round magazines, a hard case, and a Zippo. The lead time, as published, is twenty-five months.

The full customs were the other way. No defined gun: a conversation with Ben, and out of it a pistol that exists once. Riley's is one of those. Every decision was his, made with Ben, from the cuts to the finish to the trigger. Ben has since closed the custom books, which means the one-offs are now a closed set. Whatever number of them exist is the number there will be.

John Browning's 1911 is a single-stack .45 with a single-action trigger that breaks like glass, and for the better part of a century that trigger has been the reason serious pistol shooters put up with the seven-round magazine. The 2011 is the answer to the magazine. In 1993 Virgil Tripp, a custom 1911 builder who had founded Tripp Research in 1987, and the engineer Sandy Strayer designed a modular frame: a steel upper that carries the slide, the trigger and the fire control exactly as a 1911 does, with a separate polymer grip module bolted beneath it that holds a double-stack magazine without the grip growing to match. The patent published in May 1994. The company was Strayer-Tripp International, STI for short, and the gun was called the 2011.

The gun changes shape with the rulebook, and the same 2011 platform is built four or five different ways depending on which line the shooter stands on. Riley's carries no compensator and no porting, and its optic sits on the slide in a Nighthawk IOS cut, which is the whole point of it. Pull the dot and fit the iron-sight plate and it is a Limited gun; put the dot back and it is a Limited Optics gun; nothing about it has to change to walk from one line to the other. A comp or a port would have locked it into Open for good.