Bushing to Bushingless barrel

[BRL]

I am not a big fan of cleaning my .45 due to the pain of disassembling the bushing/barrel. Is there a way to make a bushingless barrel from barrel with a bushing?

Thanks

[screwman]

Why is the bushing a pain? Turn it and it comes apart.

Mike

[Savage]

Find a friend with a bushingless barrel and let them walk you thru the dissassembly process. Some of the bushingless pistols require you to insert a tool into the guide rod to trap the recoil spring to dissassemble the pistol. This is not necessarly difficult, but if you find removal of the barrel bushing troublesome, you'll hate this! My Pro Carry is an example of this. Get yourself a bushing wrench and appreciate how easy field stripping a 1911 really is! Good luck!
Savage

[jhm]

not trying to be funny but if the bushing on a 1911 is a problem do yourself a favor and never attempt to disassemble a Ruger 22 pistol they are a pain the 1st. time around, back to the bushing as stated go to a qualified gunsmith or experienced shooter of a 1911 and have them demonstrate the process rather easy after a time or two.    JIM

[Questor]

It takes some practice to disassemble the top end so the spring doesn't fly all over the place. But with a little practice it becomes second nature. The first few times I did it I really fumbled badly. Now it's second nature. Get a plastic bushing wrench to do the work, they only cost 4 or 5 dollars and last for years. Wilson makes a good one, but I have another that is just as good. You can find them in steel, but that will mar the finish of the gun, so plastic is the way to go.

[Mikey]

I too am at a loss to understand why removing a barrel bushing is such a pain.  Some are very tight in the slide and fit the barrel very tightly but this is easy to deal with using a bushing wrench.  Some tricks I use when dealing with a tight bushing are to use the bottom lip of a magazine to depress the spring retainer which allows you to rotate the bushing to the side to remove the retainer and the spring.  With the tension gone you can  retract the slide a bit and that should allow easy removal of the bushing. 

I do not believe you can go from a bushing set-up to a non-bushing set-up on the 1911/A1 slides.  Those without bushings are machined to close tolerances so the slide fucntions as a bushing and I don't believe you can get there with the usual 1911/A1 slide that uses a bushing.  HTH.  Mikey.

[Questor]

I should have mentioned that more modern designs like the SIGs are trivial to disassemble and reassemble compared to the 1911. At least in the sense that they don't need a tool for the job.

[BRL]

Thanks for all the input. I have had 2 semi auto pistols for about the last 15 years. Learned to shoot with them and am very used to them. They are bushingless. I find it very easy to take down. It's just a push of a button (pin) to release the slide and slide it off and remove the recoil spring and rod from the barrel. I recently bought a Para P-12. It's not that I can't take it down to clean it. It just seems a lot more to go through and I sometimes have trouble getting it back together. I eventually get it though. I have never used a bushing tool before. To be honest, didn't know they existed. Maybe I'm doing something wrong and should take the advice mentioned here and watch someone do it and then try that myself.

Thanks