Springfield Armory
By James Nicholas

Springfield made their official release of the new XDS 4.0. The 4.0 is a 4 inch barreled XDS as we reported a couple weeks ago. This new pistol is supposed to be sort of a service model like the classic XD line only single stack. I talked to Springfield about a 5 inch version and they have heard that people wanted this. What they need is just a little bit more input from customers on forums to also say they would like this as an option. Springfield does look at forums like XDTALK and while they might not be able to directly answer they do intact take that as a form of customer input. I will admit that I was wrong on one aspect of the 4.0 XDS. I had reported earlier that the slide was the same weight as the 3.3 version of the XDS. And that Springfield might have used cutouts on the slide to make it match the smaller slide. I was told by Rob Leatham that they did not do that and the larger slide does intact weight slightly more than the smaller brother. In all honesty I could not really tell when the pistol was assembled. And the added weight and length did not make it front heavy or any harder to use. I got the opportunity to compare the two guns field striped. What I found is that from the ejection port back the slides are identical, just the nose is different. The recoil springs are the same and the lager slide employs a ridge that captures the shorter recoil assembly so you do not need long springs for it. There are no cutouts on the longer slide and even though it weigh a few ounces more I could not tell any difference in slide reciprocation when shooting. While field strip and no one was looking I threw the longer 4 inch barrel in the 3.3 slide and guess what it seemed to hand cycle just fine. The lock up of the barrel looked all right and I would actually give it a try to shoot the combination my self. Of course I could not do this live fire, in front of Springfield so that will have to wait. I also found out that we will have to wait for a 40sw version in any XDS. In-fact we may get a 45acp 4.0 before any 40 version. I was told that the recoil and slide velocity is so great with a 40SW that it is harder to make that combination work in such a small package, so they are working on other projects first. I was also able to get my hands on a 9mm Range officer 1911. The 9mm in such a package is a great and pleasant shooter. Any one should be able to enjoy shooting this pistol all day long. The 9mm range office is still based on the 45acp full size 1911 frame, not the EMP sized frame. If you look at the picture of the range office magazine notice the crease on the front of the magazine, this allows you to use the shorter 9mm cartridge in the full size frame.