The external would have been good too if you got a good one. Problem with them is that Kimber went thru at least 3 different iterations trying to fix the problems people were having with them and ended up going back to the internal setup. They actually replaced many external slides with internal ones to make their customers finally happy. It took them about two years to figure out what needed to be done and that was to scrap the external.
Some peeps have the external ones still today and are quite happy with them. I personally had two of them myself. One was a Eclipse Pro II and I never had any problem with it at all. The other was a 3" model and I had a lot of problems with it. Instead of sending it back to Kimber at the time when no one was getting any real satisfaction from them, I decided to tweak it myself. I filed a bit off from the bend at the hook (thereby making the hook a slight bit longer) and never had another problem with it. I sold both of those guns later on to a friend of mine (5111 on this forum) and he has never had any problems.
I like the internal ones though as it is smoother looking and the way that JMB designed the 1911. I figure if it needed an external extractor, then JMB would have designed it that way.
That being said, he put an external on the later Browning Hi-Power, but his protege made sure it worked before selling it.
And, if you think that 1911 is "slim",............you should pick up a Browning Hi-Power someday and compare. I suspect that it could easily be your next purchase!
