George A. Wilson was a designer for the High Standard company, and also a competitive bullseye pistol shooter. Formal bullseye shooting requires the use of a .45 caliber pistol, and the 1911 really isn’t an ideal design for that sort of shooting – so Wilson decided to make his own pistol. Patented in 1961, the design he came up with is an outstanding competition piece. Instead of using a traditional slide, Wilson kept all the reciprocating parts out in the front half of the gun, allowing him to bring the grip very high up to minimize muzzle flip.
Mechanically, the pistol uses a pivoting wedge to lock, somewhat like a Walther P38. It has a long sight radius, good sight design, and an excellent competition trigger (wide and smooth, with no creep and a light, crisp letoff). The machine work on the pistol is top notch – it is really a work of art. Only three of these guns were made by Wilson, and we are privileged to have been able to examine, disassemble, and shoot one of them.
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That’s a beautiful weapon.
This is a very interesting pistol but it is not related to the George A Wilson of High Standard
Wow, interesting weapon! It’s like a 1911 and a P38 had a baby!
I like this gun but cannot find any pictures on Google. Could anyone upload some high res. photos?
Ian
I used to own GW3 & GW1…….bought them over 20 years ago. They also included the original blue-prints to manufacture the pistol. I used to have a file on it…..hopefully I can find it. I shot….and loved the gun. I sold GW3 first…….and kept GW1 for a few more years. The quality of workmanship was unbelievable. GW1…I shot about 500 rounds through, and is was an X ring gun, if I did my part. George tried to get manufacture’s interested in it….and only had one, in Europe. But that fell through….and the rest is history. The only difference that I could see between the two….was the wood stocks. I thought it was a comfortable pistol to shoot, and would have kept it forever…..but, alas….someone offered me too much $$ for it, and it went down the highway. I never was able to find out about the demise of George….he lived on the East Coast. With a little Internet time……I’m sure could be learned more about him today. True & correct….no related to the George Wilson at High Standard.
David Buehn
David, i would be very interested in the blue prints, if you still have them?
The design is far to elegant and promising to have it just die and with modern manufacturing one could revisit the project.
Regards
Wolf.
I agree if you ever find that file it would be priceless. This is an amazing price of engineering and I would be very interested if you ever found those blueprints