As we’ve covered recently, Stike Industries releases new products faster than we can keep up (which is a good thing). An innovating product released to little fanfare is their Grip Actuated Lower Sear Lever, which despite the long name is an excellent short solution for those shooting Series 80 1911’s.

The Series 80, released in 1983 as the “MK IV Series 80” series of handguns incorporated a new firing pin block safety system. The “Series 80” and the various “clones’ then typically used the travel of the trigger to actuate the firing pin block safety system, which to the chagrin of 1911 users had the potential to mess with their beloved short single action pulls. While a good smithing, polishing, and trigger job can largely alleviate this, there still is an extra camming movement during the trigger pull that cannot be completely removed.

The SI Grip Actuated Lower Sear Lever works to fix this by taking advantage of the grip safety to disengage the firing pin block safety system instead of the trigger. The gross motor movement of gripping the handgun is easier to hide the camming movement and nearly as safe (which the Series 70 guys will say it was safe enough for the military for over 100 years).

The Grip Actuated Lower Sear Lever is not compatible with all handguns, it requires a certain type of grip safety, but those are typically very easy to come by. The widget is only $39.95 and available directly from Strike Industries. 

My question – why wasn’t this the original design? To me, its a much better solution.