Hardware Talk: Wilson Combat Lo-Profile Basepads

Make your compact 1911 reloads a breeze with Wilson Combat’s Lo-Profile basepads.

OK, I’ll admit this is a bit niche, but man … it’s cool.

So, there you are carrying an Officer’s Model or other short-framed compact 1911. Using a full-sized magazine as a reload would be nice, but you can’t. If you slam that mag home with the slide locked back (and when else will you need a really fast reload?), the mag will ride up over the mag button and wedge against the ejector. It won’t feed, and it won’t come out.

Training to not do a slam-load is a good idea, but stress will make a mess of that plan.

So, what to do?

Simple. Get the Wilson Combat Lo-Profile basepads. They replace the existing pads on your Wilson or McCormick magazines, and the front lip of the new base pad rides up higher on the front of the tube compared to the originals.

The whole point of it is that the basepad rides up enough to stop the magazine before it can ride up over the magazine button.

Installation is simple: Press in the retention button on the basepad, slide the old one off and slide the new one on. Make sure it locks in place. Then, make sure the mag fits in the pistol and locks in place there.

I encountered the override problem when I was practicing using my custom compact 1911 for The Pin Shoot. The Concealed Carry Main Event calls for a pistol with a barrel no longer than 4 3/4 inches long. (In the early days, it was less than 4 inches.) And, you can’t have more than six rounds in the handgun. I simply pulled regular-sized magazines out of the magazine bin and installed the Wilson Combat basepads, and I was stylin’.

As an added bonus, the steel of the replacements is heavier than the polymer of the originals, and that encourages the magazine to clear the frame sooner on a reload. The longer standard magazines make slamming home the reload even more sure of a thing.

If there’s one shortcoming, I must admit that it, too, is also niche and personal. My hands contact the top edge of the base pad extension, up where it meets the frame. One of these days I’ll set aside an afternoon to carefully dress down that edge, so it isn’t a sharp corner to contact my pinky finger.

The Concealed Carry Event recently changed from a full-power-load event to a 9mm-equivalent one, so I won’t be needing the 230-grainers at 870 fps anymore. I might download my .45 ACP ammo and continue using the existing gun, and I might just switch over to 9mm.

But, in any case, the custom carry 1911 has its own set of reload-safe magazines.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.

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