Killer pistols!! And awesome write up. Thx!

 

Man I picked up an lpws chiraq ported and damn that guns nice, really really nice

 

Great review comparing them all, I'm kinda wanting hte apollo next..

 

.

 

After a 12 month wait was able to finally pick up my Apollo with a rmr HD. Put in 500 rounds today with no malfunctions. I decided to just go big on my first 2011 so I don’t have much to compare it too but the Apollo is a screamer. Fit and finish are excellent and the trigger is also fantastic at just under 2 pounds. One nit pick is a trigger does move a lil more up and down than I’d like but that’s being picky. Like others have said the Apollo is all about speed, the dot just sprints back to the target. I’ll give a more detailed update after 5,000 rounds or so but overall I’m very happy with my first 2011.

 

Dang you entered the 2011 with such a banger, hard to “upgrade” from there lol. Possible, but definitely not a cheap feat

 

Great write up per usual sir! I always enjoy reading your take on anything 2011 related, thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge

 

Hardest part about the Hayes is the 2 year wait time

 

My friend BCT got a V-ported Hayes 1st then I got the island barrel now he has both and I have a V-port on order great guns!!!

 

Fantastic review! You Peaked my interest on a ported Hayes.

 

Great write up,I love my island barrel Hayes it's one of my favorite guns and most accurate.I recently did ignis style ports on my Athena after watching AJP,s video what an Amazing shooter now!! I was thinking about purchasing an Apollo and adding some top slide porting, think it would be Crazy flat!! I believe you shot my Erebus while in Az.

 

Great comparison and writeup!

 

Trying to be like you my brother

 

I am on the hunt for a Cobra PIB… and you’ve only made me more motivated lol. Thanks for the write-up

 

They are solid guns. Good luck with the hunt.

 

View attachment 1617488

I’ve had the Atlas Apollo for a few months, and shot it several times head-to-head with Erebus. (and shared the results here:https://www.1911addicts.com/posts/3418752/). While I’ve accumulated a number of comp’d guns and more recently some ported island barrels, until this week Apollo remained my only regular bull barrel with ports. That changed when Modern Warriors surprised me with a Hayes Custom Cobra ported bull barrel in stock the other day…

I’ve now shot the Hayes a couple of times, and a couple of range buddies have similarly been able to shoot the Hayes along side several of my other guns. Yesterday four of us spent several hundred rounds shooting the Apollo and Hayes Cobra back-to-back (and compared to Erebus and a 4.5” and 5.4” Infinity ported sight tracker). We did some light competitive shooting and had a great time.

However, specifically leading to this post, we all had enough shots with the Apollo and Cobra to gather a few comparative thoughts. First, as there often is, a large caveat here…this was all paper hole punching. My experience with Apollo has taught me that these ported guns are meant for speed - red dot return speed, fast transitions and accuracy in dynamic type drills. We did a bit of speed work in the indoor range yesterday, but clearly we could not run plates or shoot USPSA type scenarios. I will find some time to get the two ported guns out together for some of that in the next couple of weeks...

Okay, so what did paper-hole-punching and initial-general takes on the two guns show us?

Here goes…

The guns
Apollo is a 4.6 inch dual slot port bull barrel, with aluminum grips (supplemented by brass inserts on both sides on my gun) and a full length dust cover. Hayes Cobra is a 5.0 inch “V4” ported bull barrel, with an aluminum grip and a full length dust cover. They both weigh 42 ounces as configured yesterday with an SRO, but no mag inserted.

Fit, finish and build quality
Atlas guns, while clearly going for a simple robo-gun aesthetic, are certainly nice looking in their own way. They have great DLC finishes and upper-end fit and finish (blending, lock-up, frame/slide fitment, etc). This Apollo is a solid build and is par for the course of that high Atlas standard.

The Hayes, otoh, is a beauty. This is a good-looking gun with polished flats that evoke hard chrome (if anyone knows what the silver finish is, please post). The fit and finish are first rate. Its picking nits to call one of these guns better than the other on this factor, but I will say the Hayes seems to be a bit more solid in the slide/frame fitment. Its rock solid and doesn’t move. Its up there with Chambers CC and AX Dark Fighter and Infinity Zooties in tight, rock-solid frame to slide fit among my collection. Slight Advantage Hayes

Controls and Trigger
Let’s keep this simple. I’d call it all a tie. They both have Atlas medium flat triggers. The Hayes trigger uses Atlas parts and feels just like the Atlas. Crisp and, well, you likely know all about Atlas triggers. The Hayes is 2.5lb whereas the Apollo comes in at 2lb, but that 0.5lb delta is surprisingly imperceptible in practice. Great triggers on both guns. The safeties are similarly similar. And so it goes. Tie

Grip
The Atlas Alpha is – imho – while not the most comfortable grip, it is the most business like and flexible and therefore the go-to if I have to shoot a match. The texture is aggressive but not overly so. I run it with the left step and right swell grips and it fits my hands very well. The Hayes (I have the aluminum aggressive grip offering) is very aggressive indeed, drawing comments from the other 3 shooters that it was too aggressive for them (to be sure they are all plastic/striker gun owners/shooters, so I’d wager they haven’t held a full aggressive metal grip before yesterday). The grip ergos are comfortable, but not flexible and purpose built for maximum grip in competition like the Atlas Alpha grip system. Advantage Atlas

How do they shoot?
Right up front, I’ll say this was very surprising to me. The Hayes is far softer. As in noticeably softer. I have to digress for a minute to cover the other guns present for the session – Erebus, and a pair of all-steel Infinity ported sight trackers. Those 3 guns are about as soft of 9mm pistols as any existent. And so, these two ported bull barrel pistols stood apart from those in their muzzle rise and recoil impulse. This is the difficult part for the other shooters to grasp yesterday. I should have brought along a Staccato P to compare, because they all found the Apollo downright blaster worthy.

And, it was jumpy relatively speaking yesterday. So context matters. I have shot the Apollo in all sorts of mixed company and its recoil impulse is not particularly strong and its muzzle rise isn’t that much. But in this company yesterday it felt like a dessert eagle 44.

That leaves the Hayes. This part is the really surprising part to me. The Hayes was noticeably softer and flatter than the Apollo. The extra 4/10th of an inch seems, perhaps together with the port design, to result in a much easier recoil impulse.

In addition to myself, I had the best shooter of the group run bullseye targets with all five of the guns present and we noted/measured the groups. Erebus and the 5.4” Infinity consistently posted the smallest groups. The 4.5” Infinity was next. The final tier was the Apollo and Hayes…and…the Apollo finished last in the group of 5, posting the largest groups. In the few months I’ve had Apollo and Erebus together, I have consistently shot tighter groups on paper with the Erebus. That isn’t surprising. Whereas, Apollo runs plates as fast, or faster, than Erebus.

I would say the Hayes Cobra was halfway between the Apollo and the Erebus. Its got a bunch less recoil and can group tighter at middling speeds than Apollo, but cannot stay on target as well as Erebus. To wrap on this shooting dynamic write-up, I’ll repeat a caveat I have written many times when I post my shooting results. That is, my belief is that better shooters, with stronger grips, will control Apollo better than I (and my friends yesterday) and thus benefit from its speed to a higher degree, without sacrificing accuracy.

Put simply, the Hayes was more accurate and easier to shoot well for the four shooters present yesterday. Advantage Hayes

Price
Before attempting to net this all out, we gotta talk price. Apollo is $6925 in Silver PVD with a hard case, and $6525 in DLC with a hard case. Hayes Custom is $5149 with a hard case. That’s between $1376 and $1776, or 27% to 34% more. (Hayes has a lead time of ~8 months these days, Atlas says 16 months for an Apollo if you go direct.) Advantage Hayes

The Choice
I love the Apollo. It was my first Atlas, and among my first high-end guns, and one that really turned me on to dynamic drills and match type shooting. I thought of Hayes as more of a “collectible” piece – if I gave it any thought before owning it. I clearly was thinking wrongly about Hayes. Ben is a competitive shooter and his business has grown from that passion. The Cobra is a work of art, but its highly, highly functional. Atlas – imho – is top of the heap for performance guns. And…this early take says that the Hayes Cobra just knocked Atlas’ newest gun off the pedestal. Winner Hayes Custom

I like what im hearing. Great write up !!!!! If i can ask how’d you go about getting your Hayes Custom?

 

The Hayes guns show up at a handful of retailers. My PBB was from Modern Warriors, the PIB I got from a guy that ordered it via Kovert and decided not to keep it when it arrived 6 months later. (Their waits are much longer now)

 

Another great review! How long until there’s an option to watch them on YouTube?

 

Thanks Dave! I appreciate these reports very much. It sounds like these all stack up quite similarly. I’ll go back to staring at photos of Apollo vs Hayes and trying to decide on one based on aesthetic's 🤣

 

I'd also consider what role you have planned for the gun and what other guns you have around it...

If you want an "all rounder" and don't have a full government length gun, the Hayes is hard to beat.

If you have a number of other guns and want one gun to rule steel plate challenges and other speed oriented events, the Apollo might be the cheat code to winning there...

If you have always wanted an Atlas and are only going to get one, then Apollo is a great play.

If you value owning something a bit more exclusive, then the Hayes is going to be significantly more rare than an Atlas.

The quality of both guns is there, the triggers are the same, the build quality is similar (and very high). They are both great guns.

The value play is the Hayes as its ~30% lower priced than the Apollo.

Put simply, there is no disappointing answer between these two guns imho...

 

Range Report Time...

Today was a lesson/reminder that its the Indian, not the arrow…

While most of us accept this old saying as a truism, I’ve also learned over the last several months that its not entirely true, all the time (few things are). For example, anyone that has shot an Erebus early in their journey from total novice shooter, has experienced the large step up in their shooting just by having one heck of an arrow.

So what changed today? Well, I brought four guns to the range that are each so very good, that distilling out differences in the guns requires a significantly better Indian. Usually, when I bring out several guns, I can see better results with one over another. With these four guns, they are all so good, that the differences are small. Very small. These guns are just so capable. And only in the hands of a better shooter than me will the minute differences truly come out (well, I suspect they also can with a lot more training/experience with them than the couple of range sessions I've had thus far)

Today we had these four guns:

Atlas Erebus – 4.6” barrel, with a comp bringing the oal to 5.3”, 43 oz with brass grip panels, 2lb trigger

Atlas Apollo – 4.6” ported bull barrel, with light and brass grip panels 46 oz, 2lb trigger

Hayes Cobra – 5.0” ported bull barrel, with light 47 oz, 2.5lb trigger

Infinity Zooties 5.4” ported island barrel, steel grip, 51 ounces, 1.8lb trigger

(I brought along 31 mags loaded with over 600 rounds of 124 grain fmj ammo with a power factor of 130.)

At the Range

Today was focused on speed drills and dynamic drills with transitions. It was raining off and on so I didn’t set up a bunch of cardboard targets, instead I had to make do with the pre-set-out 6-plate racks and bill drill plate.

All the guns ran flawlessly, no malfunctions. The ammo is faily soft, and doesn’t drive the slide particularly fast, this was noticeable on the longer guns, especially the Infinity.

Speed (splits and trigger)

My splits, keep in mind I’m a beginner, ranged from 17 to 27, with an average of 22. I did not see any difference between the guns. I got similar splits and similar spreads with each of the four guns. I expected the Apollo to run the fastest, but I was just as fast with the long slide Infinity. In fact, the only surprise was that I had a few trigger freezes running the Erebus. I didn’t really have any notable freezes with the other guns.

Which brings me to the triggers. These guns all have fantastic triggers. Dry firing them (and live firing) they all have great feel, clear but easy-to-break walls, and reset nicely. I can ride the reset as much or as little as I want. To be sure, I am not an experienced trigger slapper. I was happy that I didn’t get any freezes with the other 3 guns, and I didn’t find any particular reason for the 3 freezes I had with Erebus. In prior range days, Erebus shot as quickly as the Apollo, so I know it was me and not the gun.

Felt recoil, softness and flatness

The guns do feel fairly different in their recoil impulse and felt recoil.

As you would expect, the long and heavy infinity has very, very little recoil impulse. What recoil there is can only be described as muted. The order from there is similarly as you would expect; Erebus was next softest, followed by the 5” Hayes and finally the Apollo.

Since the last range session, someone suggested I add a light to the Apollo and I also added one to the Hayes. Unsurprisingly it did make the Apollo have less muzzle rise under recoil, while actually making the gun feel more solid and improving the balance a bit forward, since I run the brass grip panels my Apollo was actually a bit too rearward biased. The Hayes still had its impeccable balance even with the x300 attached, although it didn’t feel as light and maneuverable as it did before.

With the above felt recoil ranking laid out, keep in mind these are all fairly heavy, long, ported or comp’d guns running 130 power factor ammo. Said simply, they are all soft and flat. So we are talking merely degrees here.

Dot return speed and accuracy

Plate racks (ours is a 6 plate horizontal run of 6” plates) highlight both overall speed, but also red dot return speed, and accuracy of the return. I ran a bunch of sets of plates, and I was not having my best day. Actually, it was my worst day yet in terms of running clean and fast. That bad news aside, I actually had similar times and misses with all of the guns. I didn’t run any one of them better than another.

The usual learning was there for me – grip pressure is paramount. The stronger grip I can get, the more accurate I can be and thus can move on to the next plate and improve my speed. I also suspect that having too many guns is a factor in my poor shooting today. When I started running plate racks a couple of months ago, I only had Apollo and Erebus with me and ran them both fairly well. Now that I’m changing guns every mag, my performance fell off. Next time I will try to get back to only one gun and work on getting better with that gun, rather than attempting to compare and contrast a set of guns.

Moving on to Bill Drills, I find that I can get the best sense of the dot movement and return when shooting these drills. I can really see the dot jumping around (or not) on this drill. Today, there was a clear pecking order here. And it wasn’t the same as the felt recoil ranking might imply it would be. The Atlas guns are superior at this. Apollo continues to be the best gun I have shot for the speed and accuracy of the dot return. The dot goes straight up and comes back to the right spot on its own. Its magical. There is something to the engineering in my opinion based on my observations of Apollo and several other 2011s. The design of the ports, the overall formula of barrel length, slide weight, grip capabilities, springing and tuning and likely more, contribute to a fantastic dot return.

Erebus is next best for fast/accurate dot return. Then the Infinity and Hayes had a relatively speaking helter skelter dot – jumping all over. I’ve written this before here, but it really does stand out when you shoot other guns – even of this quality – just how great Apollo is when it comes to the dot return speed/accuracy.

Summary

Today, I shot all four of these guns similarly. While the recoil impulses are a bit different, the triggers are very similar, and the accuracy of all of these guns is well beyond the demands of the drills I ran. So, in my hands today, these guns were fairly, unremarkably different from one another in shooting outcomes (speed, accuracy).

The Apollo feels a bit jumpier than the others, but then that same impulse is behind its very fast and accurate dot return that enables faster drill times.

For bullseye shooting at medium speed, its fairly clear the long, heavy Infinity is hard to top, and Erebus is, well, Erebus.

The Hayes is simply a fantastic, very well balanced, comfortable and capable 2011. Its isn’t out of place in this company, despite coming in at a meaningfully lower price. I would be confident running it for matches provided I trained with it alone for a good amount of time (same as any of the others really, although Erebus is so forgiving that its an easy gun to grab and go so to speak).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

 

I wonder why these high high end guns have only 2-4 hole ports altogether, while most of the mid tier guns has 6-8 hole ports altogether

 

look forward to the range report!

 

Great writeup and update!
Now throw an option'd out Priest into the mix!

 

Dave, thanks for the update. Have you ever considered throwing a light on the Apollo to make it flatter/softer? I’m considering throwing an x300 turbo on mine when it arrives to make it flatter while keeping that crazy slide speed up.

 

thanks to your suggestion I just put an x300 on the Hayes Cobra and a TLR1 on the Apollo (I have a thing for flush mounted lights, so that's why they each got that size). Taking 600+ rounds and 4 pistols to the outdoor range tomorrow...

 

Great writeup.

I was close to ordering an Atlas Apollo (likely still will) but Hayes has my interest now. A few things I’m liking more on their pistols.

 

Dave, thanks for the update. I'm surprised the Cobra was slowest for you in most categories. Seems like the Infinity holds its weight. Looking forward to my test run when my Infinity Calvins Cherry, Chambers Custom CC and Rafferty Custom Lucky Devil come in soon.

 

Dang, what a sick lineup

 

Update:

Back to the indoor range, this time focused on running the guns fast to see what we learn.

I also did some grouping at medium speed again, as well as wrapped up with some bullseye accuracy at slower speeds.

Oh, and this time I brought along a 3rd ported gun - the 4.5" Island Barrel dual-ported Infinity Bonehead. I thought it would be interesting to try the three different types of ports side-by-side (see pic below that highlights the different porting approaches).

Here are the quick summaries of the three guns:

Atlas Apollo: 4.6" dual slot-ports, aluminum grip with brass panels, weighs 42 ounces w SRO no mag, trigger pull of 2.0lb

Hayes Custom Cobra: 5.0" V-4 ports, aluminum grip, weighs 42 ounces w SRO no mag, trigger pull of 2.5lb

Infinity Bonehead: 4.5" Island Barrel with dual square ports, steel grip with skater tape overlay, weighs 46 ounces w SRO no mag, trigger pull of 1.75lb

Today's caveat - if I had a dollar for every time I have stated that I'm a beginner/novice shooter and not very skilled, I could purchase an Infinity pistol (hey, wait). In other words, I always give that caveat because it is what it is and that's why I train and get lessons weekly. So, take it easy on my shooting reports please...and realize you won't get everything you may want from reading about a novice's range sessions...

Okay, with that out of the way, I started running balloon shots at medium speed trying to group in the white (I still haven't measured the target centers in these balloons, but my guess is the center colored bit is 1" diameter and the entire white area is perhaps 3-4" across). From 10 yards at medium speed (for me) of perhaps 30-50 hundredths splits, I was getting comparable groups out of each of the guns, with 4 out of 5 shots in the white bit and 1 stray.

The infinity shot the softest, likely down to the overall weight and weightier front end due to the island barrel. The Apollo cycled faster than the other guns, and it also requires the most grip pressure to control. Hayes slots in-between those two guns in this regard. I did several runs of these 5-shot groups and really didn't see much noteworthy in terms of performance differentials. They feel different and get to their results differently, but the results at my level of skill were comparable.

Next I moved to quasi "bill drills" from low ready (no holster draws allowed in my indoor range). I have not practiced my draw and presentation much lately, let alone with these three guns (I do that training with my defense guns), so my dot acquisition sucked today. So I'm not going to mention my overall times, except to say they were in the high 2's and even 3's, with a best of 1.89 (with the Infinity fwiw). I was focused on the split times and running clean (and to be sure I wasn't clean all the time, I had 4's and 5's in the alpha range on most 6-shot draws, and likely averaged somewhere in the 4.5 out of 6 alpha range).

At that point, I'd only done perhaps 30 bill drills in my life cumulatively, so my skill is not there yet of course and that shows up in lack of consistency. One run I'd have some splits in the 30's, others I got some 10s! (I was doubting those to be honest, but I actually had a number of 10's, along with a healthy number of 12 to 16's. Thinking about it, it was picking up echos as it counted 8 shots sometimes, so I doubt those splits are accurate. There were runs with only 6 shots counted too.) The Infinity ran fast more often than the others. My best overall times were with that gun, and about half of my splits were sub 20 with that gun. Apollo had the next fastest runs and the next most sub 20 splits. The Hayes ran the slowest for me.

Given that it was indoors and the shot timer was picking up echos, I wouldn’t put too much weight onto the raw times I had. Honestly, I think all of these guns are as fast as you are. For me, that means 20s splits most of the time, with a few in the mid teens.

I had a hard time picking up the dot movement today. I was shooting the bill drills much faster than I have on previous range trips, and thus I just couldn't track the dot as well as I recall from those earlier trips. On those earlier trips, Apollo had muzzle rise and lightening fast return to the exact right spot. It was uncanny. Today, in this company, I gave a slight nod to Apollo on keeping the dot in front of me, but all three were very good at it. None felt other-worldly, and I attribute that to me not being used to working with a dot moving as fast as I had it going today.

I didn't really have any trigger freeze episodes, which actually surprised me because in prior bill drills I have had a few hang-ups. Today, my splits were fairly even. Looking at the times I was getting, and then at the trigger pull weights of the guns, I can't help but notice the correlation of faster splits with lower trigger pull weight. Also, while the triggers are all damn fine and not really worth attempting to rank their quality of pull, if I had to rank them in terms of feel, I would rank them in the same order of my fastest split times - Infinity best trigger/fastest splits, Apollo next best/next fastest, Hayes next/next speeds. Coincidence that the bill drill splits purely correlated with the trigger weight and feel? Hmmm...

Finally, I did some bullseye shooting out to 12 yards and then 25 yards (end of the range). All three guns (and me) actually did okay with. I was able to hit the little 1cm center dot on my targets I was using fairly regularly. Once again, Infinity was most accurate and felt easiest to shoot well. Apollo and Hayes were fairly similar in results here.

Overall takeaways? I guess unsurprisingly, the Infinity was the easiest to shoot well, and the fastest and most accurate in my hands. The other two guns were very comparable, but today I came out favoring the Apollo over the Hayes. It was just a bit faster (shorter slide, perhaps too the port design and springing) and the dot returned a bit more quickly and accurately. After my first two sessions shooting the Hayes, I was beginning to think that keeping Apollo in the collection wasn't needed - it could potentially be replaced by the Hayes. After this third session, I have more mixed takeaways in that regard. I won't be kicking Apollo out just yet, I think there is much more testing to do with these two guns to see how they ultimately rank and if they are distinct enough to keep both, or purely redundant. (the other takeaway is that if one is willing to treat their Infinity firearms as guns and shoot the piss out of them and not as safe trophies, then they are serious contenders for any range role. Erebus better watch out too in that regard...)

 

That infinity is a work of art, absolutely beautiful

 

Great review Dave! I have an Atlas EOS on order and I am looking to add a Hayes Cobra to the collection. After watching 1911 syndicate and testing your review, I am looking forward to getting one.