This is a Colt that was sent to us by a customer who wasn't happy with its condition. He had sent it to two seperate gunsmiths before we recieved it and he was not happy with the results. He asked us to do what we could to get it up to his expectations.
Initially he just wanted a few things done, but once he realized how much of the previous work we could actually correct the project sort of snowballed into a full build.
Because this gun had previous work performed on it there are areas where we had to work within the constraints of what has already been performed. Overall, I think the gun is now much closer to what he had initially envisioned.
The gun came to us with crooked checkering, crooked sight dovetails, a poorly fitted beavertail, several options that he wanted changed (ie arched ms housing, large mag release button, etc), and a general lack of cosmetic finess...
We used an EGW checkered insert to fix the crooked frontstrap checkering which limited us to 20lpi, although I believe that was what he had originally designated anyway.
We welded up the front sight dovetail and re-cut it. The rear dovetail was recut to straighten it out a bit.
The Chen MS housing was hand checkered at 20lpi to match the frontstrap and an EGW magwell was paired with it and blended to the gun.
We performed our hardtail conversion with our preferred starting point of a Chip McCormick beavertail (these tend to provide a cleaner installation than the Ed Brown parts due to a slightly different radius).
The gun was outfitted with new barstock parts where appropriate and a Barsto barrel was fitted along with a MGW bushing.
French borders and ball cuts and general line straightening helped to dress up the appearance.
We sent the gun for a salt bath nitride finish. The finish usually comes back a very deep black, for this gun I went ahead and re-blued everything after the refinishing in Oxynate #7 to give it a more classic looking blue finish instead of the dead black appearance. The gun of course still retains all the excellent properties of the nitride finish.
Finally it was fitted with Esmeralda grips.
Here is a link showing photos of the build step-by-step, along with photos of its condition before we started the work.
Before and during pics
If I'm not supposed to link to other forums just let me know.
Here it is:
Of course, the most important thing, does it actually shoot?
I think so
Bruce shot this group standing, offhand at about 13yds (approx .361" center to center) with some old ammo we had around (old military ball I think). We didnt get a chance to shoot it off a bag at 25yds but I expect that it would still perform well enough.
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