Restoring 1st Generation Caspian Hi-Capacity Frame

Through a few different sources I found out Caspian had 3 of their original 1st Generation Hi-Capacity frames laying around that they were never able to sell. My guess is these were produced in the early 1990's. I called Caspian and was put in touch with Gary Smith. The right side ambi-safety hole is 0.147" oversized. Not a big deal, I can figure out some way to made a sleeve or bushing to get it to work. I told him I'd take all of them.

When they arrived at the FFL and I opened the boxes, I was initially disappointed. They had obviously been in storage all that time and had some serious surface rust. The funny part was they were all labeled "SCRAP- NO WARRANTY- SOLD AS PAPERWEIGHT"

I got home and started thinking about what I was going to do about all the rust. My roommate, also a mechanical engineering student, pointed out we could use electrolysis to strip the rust off the surface. We got to work. Below is the progress.


This is one of the frames before we hooked it up. Notice the heavy rust on the frame.


This is the setup to perform the electrolysis. It's a 5 gallon bucket filled with a solution of water and sodium-carbonate (washing powder). I had a couple of 12 volt / 1 amp power supplies lying around from other projects so those would suffice to provide the electrical current. To save you all the boring nonsense, the negative lead is hooked up to the frame (the cathode), and the positive is hooked up to the rebar (the anode). Only one power supply is hooked up, we added the second later to give it more power.


After about 6 hours, the rust had changed form and turned black. At this point it could be stripped completely off with a brush, but we wanted to see what would happen if we left it in longer.


After 2 days in the process, we pulled the frame out to find the rust could be rubbed off with your fingers. It's worth pointing out that we could have used a wire brush and stripped the majority of the rust off without ever doing this, but it would never be this clean. The frames are investment cast to begin with so the slight pitting you see would be present on any frame like that. Do not be fooled, even though the frames are cast there are/were frames of this generation with 50,000+ rounds of 9x21mm through them with light recoil springs that were just fine.



My next move is to send the frame to Bobby Keigans at Freedom Gunworks and have him build me a sweet 9mm Steel Challenge Open division gun.

Paying attention in chemistry finally paid off.

Looks like your off to a good start on a fine weapon.

Don't let all the caspian haters here get you down.. I wouldn't mind getting my hands one of those frames

I don't see why anyone could NOT like a Caspian.

Looks like a very good start. Are the most parts you need now "off the shelf" or do they have to be fabricated? What are you going to plate it with? Don't care what the price was, you did well!

sidroski wrote:Looks like a very good start. Are the most parts you need now "off the shelf" or do they have to be fabricated? What are you going to plate it with? Don't care what the price was, you did well!

The price was unbelievable. $35 each before shipping. That's not a typo.

sidroski wrote:
Might I ask what you are doing with the other two frames?

One has been sold to my roommate and the other I'm holding on to for a rainy day.

By the before pic's, them had seen enough rainy days. $35? Hard to believe but no one lies on this forum. JK, great deal.

As far as the parts, the mag catch, mainspring housing, grip safety, thumb-safety, and trigger are all Caspian specific and can be ordered through them. Other than that, everything else is standard 1911 parts.

Good job man! You gotta post a pic of the finished product! If they were labeled as scrap, do they at least have serial numbers?

Edit: I guess I should have payed attention here instead of remembering my chemistry class...I noticed they were shipped to your FFL. Meaning, they have serial numbers, DUH!

They were only labeled as "Scrap" because that one hole is oversized and didn't meet Caspian's quality standards. Otherwise they are exactly like any other frame.

It's really not that big of an issue. The grip safety and the left side of the frame will hold the thumb safety in line. Plus I (or my gunsmith) plan on working up some kind of bushing if it's necessary. I don't think it is.

Baking soda is sodium-bicarbonate. We could have used baking soda and it would have worked, but sodium-bicarbonate is not near as strong a base as sodium-carbonate aka washing soda (pH of 11 vs. 8.1).

We were out in town to pick up the rest of the supplies so we figured it'd be worth the extra few dollars to get the "good stuff."

Wow, I think you definitely got your $35 worth. It looks great.

Electrolysis is the way to go. I use this frequently to restore hand planes to usable condition. I just want to point out to anyone considering using this technique to use Iron rods only for the element. Using stainless steel can result in toxic levels of chromium.

I used one tablespoon per gallon.

Yo, Will, any new updates??? I would like to see these things finished!

It's off to Bobby Keigans at www.freedomgunworks.com to get finished. It will probably be a little while until I get it back, since I'm part of the team and I told him to take care of paying customers first. But when it's done, I will DEFINITELY post some pictures.

Thought about welding up the mag catch holes and redrilling them? Not that I expect you'll be changing out mag catches frequently but it might not be too hard to do and could save you some fitting headaches later on.

Just a thought. Cool buy.