For about $75 (the price varies, and you save if you do several requests at once) the fine folks over there will burn lean muscle and wade through the papercuts and mothballs to pull an individual gun's original shipping details, including information on its original configuration, shipping date, and the original destination. Lots of longstanding companies offer such letters, but Colt kind of sets the bar. My interest piqued, I hemmed and hawed about emailing the Colt Archives for a letter but eventually fired and took the plunge. 45 ACP Colt design as its standard sidearm, a call that would endure for the next 75 years. 32 Automatic was on the list, made approximately in 1911. A momentous year for Colts!īesides being during the administration of William Howard Taft – a leviathan Republican who was Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of War and later became the only president to become a Supreme Court justice – 1911 was also of course the year that the Army selected Browning's. A simple query with my new 1903's serial (116902) finds that Colt has used that number no less than 17 times between 1856 – first on a Model 1849 Pocket – and 1954, with the last being a Super 38. The asking price of the Colt 1903, when introduced, was $26, or about $700 today.Ī neat thing about Colt is that the company maintains a fairly accurate online search tool for serial numbers. It compares well even today, for instance against a more modern 21st century Glock 43. One neat little pistol I recently came across on our site (yes, we can buy a limited amount of guns from each year, no, employees don't get "first crack" at them as they all have to be listed on the site first, and, yes, still makes sure they make a profit on employee purchases) fell into my basket and arrived at my local FFL in Pascagoula on the Gulf Coast.Īn orphaned hog leg put into the pipeline via the We Buy Guns service had a new home. This brings me to a vintage Colt I recently came across.īesides antique store browsing, I haunt gun stores, estate sales, and the used gun listings online, pulling the metaphorical trigger when I can. "Yes, honey, Vaseline glass is neat, but did you see that old craft paper Colt box over there?" The kinda guy who agrees to go antiquing with my wife on the slim hope that I might find a rusting can of Hoppe's on a forgotten shelf boasting a handwritten $5 sticker.
An old fart, even, when it comes to collectible guns. To go ahead and clear the air, I am an unreformed gun guy. You often hear, when talking about old firearms, "if only they could talk." Well, they can't, but sometimes their hidden history tells a story.
0 kommentar(er)
