DAN DREAMS FAB 1911 WRENCH

Dan Dreams Fabrication dreams big, and they dream of 1911s.  We knew this would be a great fit for us, so we snapped up their 1911 wrench, in a couple colours we’d be able to find on our perpetually cluttered workbench.

The 1911 Autowrench is pretty straightforward - it’s a soft enough aluminum that the wrench will scratch instead of the gun, and you can have it anodized in a bunch of colours.  We’ve got a lot of 1911s here, and we couldn’t find one it wouldn’t fit, from Government down to Officer’s models.

Where things get really interesting is the Gripwrench.  Specially designed for pulling tight bushings, the Gripwrench lets you twist the bushing to its removal slot, then, by flipping the wrench around, you can slide a gripping arm over the back of the bushing, pulling it out without using the gun itself as a slide hammer.  If you’ve got tightly fitted 1911s, this thing is pure genius.

With enough testing, we did manage to find a gun that we couldn’t quite fit the Gripwrench on without relieving a tiny section of the rotating grip arm; that was a Baer UTC with a heavy slide.  Relieving the 1911 wrench to work on the one oddball gun took about a minute, and it’s probably just two items at the edge of their own tolerances.  It wouldn’t hold us back from getting one at all, simply because after using the Gripwrench, pulling tight bushings the old way just seems…uncivilized.