10-8 Performance

Every 1911 that Hilton Yam built by hand for his own duty use during his career on the FBI's Miami SWAT team taught him something a catalog never could: which parts held up to round counts in the thousands, and which ones didn't. That accumulated, unglamorous knowledge, not a business plan, is what became 10-8 Performance.

Yam joined the FBI in 1998 and spent the next 21 years in the Miami Field Office, one of the Bureau's busiest. He started on a violent-crimes and fugitive task force, moved into bank-robbery investigations, and eventually became the division's principal firearms instructor. He spent 19 of those years on the SWAT team, where he taught firearms, close-quarters battle, and tactics, and he is also certified as a defensive tactics instructor, rappel master, and ALERRT active shooter response instructor. His competitive background predates his FBI career: in the early 1990s, he was among the first shooters in his region to run a pistol-mounted optical sight in USPSA, years before red dots became common on duty or competition handguns.

The FBI's Miami office carried the Springfield Professional Model 1911 for the length of that contract, and Yam's SWAT assignment ran alongside nearly its entire service life. That gave him an unusually long look at how one specific gun performed and failed in real use, and he started machining his own fixes: sights that held zero, triggers that didn't loosen, and slide stops built to tighter tolerances. He built more than 60 full custom 1911s this way before deciding that a well-made part could help more shooters than one gun built at a time, and 10-8 Performance grew out of that shift from custom builder to parts and component designer.

Glock sights became the company's second flagship line, sized to co-witness with the Trijicon RMR and later the Holosun 507 and 509 series. Yam was one of the original beta testers for the RMR in 2012, putting him ahead of most of the market on slide-mounted optics geometry. He also worked directly with Larry Vickers on a 1911 flat trigger, a solid-shoe design with a fixed overtravel stop meant to eliminate the loose-screw problems common to earlier trigger designs. Sight and magazine components for the Smith & Wesson M&P line followed the same logic: identify a specific mechanical shortcoming, then machine a fix for it.

Between 2019 and 2020, Yam worked as a contractor for STI, then rebranded as Staccato, standing up the company's law enforcement armorer program for the 2011 platform. That relationship pulled 10-8 into double-stack 1911 parts early, ahead of the broader market's adoption of the format, and the company's current lineup extends the same sight-and-small-parts approach to Springfield Armory's Prodigy and EMP lines as those platforms picked up their own followings.

Yam retired from the FBI in 2019 and no longer teaches in-person courses, instead moving his training content to Patreon. The company remains a small, single-location operation; it does not offer gunsmithing services itself and refers customers elsewhere for fitting work. In January 2026, 10-8 Performance introduced the Master Class 1911, a collaboration with Springfield Armory, sold exclusively through Lipsey's, and the company's first complete, factory-built pistol. Built on Springfield's TRP platform in 9mm or .45 ACP, it carries 10-8's reverse spring plug, slide stop, flat trigger, and magazine catch alongside Yam's signature G10 grips and an integrated optics cut, a specification sheet drawn directly from the same duty and competition experience that started the company's parts business decades earlier. That same month, the company also stopped shipping orders to California, citing an inability to comply with the state's new real-time age- and identity-verification requirements for age-restricted purchases.