Originally Posted by WR Moore

You'll have to convice someone there's a market that will justify the expense of determining the materials and dimensions of the slide plus the cost of the necessary tooling and machine programming. In addition, he has the cost of losing the production of whatever he regularly makes while setting up and making the run of slides. This is all assuming there's no patents involved.

Outside of 1911 slides, the only independentlly produced slides I'm aware of off the top of my head are for various .22 conversion units and the reinforced slide (in the locking block area) for the Beretta 92. Whoever did those initially, did so on some type of developmental contract (allegedly with military roots), unsure of funding source. Beretta did adopt the slide on some of their pistols.

Unless you can find someone with a machine shop who likes a challenge or you can pony up for say, 5K slides, I do believe you need to see S&W for a slide.