amt hardballer 1911 any good?

G

glock17luver

New member
I looked at one of these today and it seemed to be decent fit and finish it was surprisingly smooth also my question is are these guns decent self defense guns for someone on a budget? I know hence the name its best used with hardball ammo which is what i plan to do anyways and I have a few wilson mags I could use in it also.

The guy at the shop said that all the parts where interchangable with a colt or any other 1911 when I asked him is this true? From what I could tell by looking at it it seems it is. I don't know much about these guns except I think they are made in california if I'am not mistaken. I haven't heard anything bad about them either and for a price of $350 out the door I was thinking I should get for the heck of it. what do you guys think is this a decent gun and is this a fair price for it? thanks in advance for your help guys.
 
My one experience was a bad one

Bought a new AMT Hardballer about 1980 and it was a nightmare. Accuracy was so-so but reliability was truly pathetic. As for parts being interchangeable, well, some were and some weren't. It has been too long for me to remember exactly what parts I tried to interchange.

BTW, mine was a stainless model. Some of the earlier stainless materials were not too good. Good luck to you with whatever you decide to do.

Jack
 
AMT Skipper

I picked up a Commander sized Hardballer many years ago for cheap. Fit, finish and accuracy are actually decent. Luck of the draw. Try to run a box thru it before purchase. Mine only reliable with hardball, but my mags are factory.
 
I've owned two through the years, both are gone. Accuracy was OK, but reliability was lousy. For a gun called "Hardballer", you'd think they would stand up to hardball ammo without breaking.
 
I had one when they first came out (1977). Very good looking handgun. The fit and finish was quite good.

It was without a doubt, the true definition of a POS! :barf:

It would not feed anything including 230gr. FMJ's. Sent it back to AMT, they kept it for a month or longer, still would not feed and then would not eject reliably.

I finally got rid of it, at a loss, but I was rid of it! :mad:
 
Had a Longslide. As with others here, numerous functioning problems. Now use it for parts for my Omega and will use the frame as a platform for a single shot .22-250.

I have read of good results from the Hardballer but the bad ones seem to always outnumber the good.

In short, hit or miss, but mostly miss.
 
Any brand of 1911 can give problems. It could be a POS Charles Daley or a $1,000 Kimber. It is the nature of their design.

If you do not have enough experience with the 1911 to complety understand the design and be able to work on them yourself sometimes an AMT will cost you a few dollars for gun smithing.

You may get one that is perfect or it may need a lot of work.

The last one I worked on was perfect in every way except the slide was too tight. Even the trigger was perfect.

After I spent about 15 minutes fixing that problem it was 100% reliable and as accurate as any high dollar Kimber or Springfield.
 
Quite frankly, just about ANY AMT product is a crapshoot.

I had a lot of experience with AMTs over the years, about 99.9% of it was bad.

For as much as these guns cost new, AMT should have been prosecuted for grand theft.
 
I've been lucky with my AMT Govt. Model; I bought it before I heard all the horror stories. I wouldn't buy another one. My dad has two AMT's and has had good luck with his as well. Based on everything I've heard since purchasing my AMT, you're chances are less than 50% that you'll end up with a functional firearm. I think you can do much better for a little more money.
 
Is AMT still around?

I've seen lots of used AMT hardballers out there
in pawn shops and in the used gun aisle.

a gunsmith friend of mine sasid he wouldn't touch one with a 10ft pole.

Since I believe AMT is defunct it might be difficult to get some parts for it.

J Salcedo
 
Any brand of 1911 can give problems. It could be a POS Charles Daley or a $1,000 Kimber. It is the nature of their design

END

I disagree with this. A lot of them are junk because its been copied so much. On the other hand if you pay good money you will get a good gun.
PAT
 
I agree that AMT quality control must have been bad because over the years I have heard numerous complaints. However I have owned two AMTs, a hardballer and a .22 rifle that is an all stainless copy of the Ruger 10/22. Both appeared to be quality made and both functioned fine. I don't recall the accuracy of the hardballer, but the guy I sold it to still has it. I still have the .22; it was many years ahead of it's time. Actually Ruger never did make an all stainless 10/22. I used mine for small bore silhouette and actually won a few local matches with it.
With all the bad things I have heard about AMT, I wouldn't buy another one, I obviously got lucky. Although if I had a chance to buy one of those handguns in .30 Carbine I might have to take another chance.
 
355sigfan

The nature of the design of the 1911 makes it a hard pistol to mass produce.

A few years ago before the CNC machines a whole lot of the parts on a 1911 had to be hand fitted at the factory to assure a reliable gun. If this was not done correctly at the factory then the owner or a gunsmith had to tune the gun.

Now days they are made so much better. The CNC machines hold much tighter tolerances on the parts making hand fitting not as important.

Still some of the good high dollar 1911s such as Kimber or Springfield still has some lemons mixed in with every lot they build.

These are not as common as they used to be but it is a fact that they do show up.

You are much more likely to buy a bad 1911 than some more modern designs. You will very seldom see a Glock, Sig,Beretta or some others that will not work 100% right out of the box.

Some of the very best 1911s I have ever owned were AMTs that just needed a little work. Mostly now days every thing is too tight on them. Sometimes they need more break in than other guns and sometimes they need a little work.

As I said before if you don't know how to do this yourself it could cost you a little to get them to work.
 
Cornbread2,

This is what I had to say about the AMT Hardballer.

It would not feed anything including 230gr. FMJ's. Sent it back to AMT, they kept it for a month or longer, still would not feed and then would not eject reliably.

Let's qualify this answer a little further. The workmanship at AMT on a warranty repair was terrible. It came back with more troubles than it went there with. This makes the gun and the customer service/warranty work even more undesireable.

Austin Behlert of Behlert Custom Guns at the time would not even work on my AMT because of their many known problems and poor workmanship. :eek: A 1911 platform, brand new, that can not be expected to feed ball ammo is a POS gun! :mad:

As I recall, I tried many different magazines of various manufacturers with the same poor results. :barf:

To answer the original question: amt hardballer 1911 any good?

In a word, being polite, NO.
 
I don`t know of any top Pistolsmith`s who will work on the gun,I would get a used Colt or Springfield ,they can be had in that price range if you do a little searching for some nice used ones !
 
My best friend had a longslide Hardballer he shot for many many many years. The gun fed hollowpoints as well as hardball, and low and behold it was 100 percent accurate, something I cant say about my Colt Combat Commander. It was a lot more accurate than my Smith 645 too.
Buying any 1911 can be a crapshoot. I know of horror stories regarding every manufacturer, and oddly enough I know of some of the "worst" guns out there in that design that I never had problems with when I worked at a gunshop. I saw a lot more problems with top of the line 1911s from the big boys than I ever did with Auto Ordnance or Norinco. I also had a lot more of the lower priced units go out the store too, which leads me to really question "quality control" up in Hartford.
 
Any manufacturer can put out a POS - look up the word "Jammamatic" in the dictionary, and you'll find a picture of my Colt Mk IV Series '70 Government Model.

But AMT's seem to generally epitomize the term "POS."

I remember my dealer field-stripping a new one he'd just received - it had a few flaws, among them the fact that AMT had forgotten to bore the chamber in the barrel! (A round of factory hardball would only slip in about a quarter inch.)
 
To answer the question: probably not. Most AMT guns are junk.

And to go off on a tangent: there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the design of the 1911 pistol that makes it prone to being unreliable. Ignorant statement. The problems you see with mass-produced weapons are quality control and defect prevention problems... guns are made out of specification and don't work. If you take ANY design and make it out of spec it is just as prone to failure. The 1911 design is not particularly strange or tricky... it only has a few dozen parts.

I suspect that if a firm like SigSauer, Heckler & Koch or even Glock were to produce a 1911 pistol made to their specs and using their QC methods, we wouldn't be talking about the alleged unreliability of the design.
 
The 1911 is the most feild tested and field proven design of all time. It may not be perfect, but it is better than 99 percent of what followed it. The problem is more with the manufacturers at times than it is the design.
 
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