Pinecone said:
Too short a link does not allow for proper solid lock-up. To say that 99% of all G.I. .45's locked up on the link, is simply an uninformed, moronic statement! There would have been a lot more soldiers brought back in body bags and the ,45 auto would have went the way of the dinosaur if that were true.
First off, you need to knock off the personal attacks if you don't want to get a reminder about your manners from the mods.
Your explanation of the workings, and the lockup, are correct (with one small exception--it isn't necessary for the barrel hood to "lock up" at the breech face and some gunsmiths actually relieve the barrel here to prevent any contact, which could become nonuniform). In a perfectly fitted, "zero tolerance" gun, it will all be working just as you said.
Such guns are rare, as they require careful hand-fitting, even in the modern CNC world. MOST 1911s, and virtually all rack-grade GI ones, have barrel lugs that are a bit "short," allowing a little play. You can instantly tell such a gun because when it's closed normally, you can push on the barrel hood and feel (or even hear) it go down a tiny little bit. This is because the barrel lugs are NOT contacting the slide stop pin on their underside. The back legs of the lugs, of course, contact the slide stop pin at the rear, stopping the forward movement of the top half, but the vertical positioning of the barrel is being accomplished by the link. Such a gun is said to be "link locking" and it's not a bad thing as long as the link is not too long.
If the link's too long, it can force the barrel too high and/or too soon, which can cause damage ranging from peening of the locking lugs on the barrel and/or slide, to wear or breakage of the slide stop, to breakage of the link, to (theoretically) cracking of the frame at the slide stop hole, depending on a number of factors.
There's a certain amount of tolerance or "play" built into the workings of all these parts, which leads to the gun's reliability. When you go for maximum accuracy, you seek to remove these tolerances and this play to minimums, and one of the things you do is carefully fit the lugs of THAT barrel/slide combination to that slide stop so that everything comes to rest exactly as it should--and solidly, as I've boldfaced in your quote above. That's the ideal, and I assure you that very, very few 1911s have that happening. If the locking lugs are resting on the slide stop in a typical, rack-grade 1911, it's only because of tolerances and gravity, not because it's been properly fitted up.
"Link locking" isn't a big deal unless the link is
so long that parts become damaged.