Gary Reeder
early to mid 3rd generation seems to be the
Friday, January 03, 2020, 13:13

best for the SAAs. The Colt Cowboy was horrible and dropped real quick. Sometime in the mid 80s when Colt went thru another ownership change their quality seemed (to me) to go downhill. And really I never saw it go back to where it was in their heyday. Some of this I may not be exactly right on the dates. Colt has never been my favorite gun company, not that they didn't have good stuff, I am a handgun hunter and I just never had any use for a SAA or any of their other cowboy style guns.But even the handguns for hunting seemed to be a hit or miss proposition. Their Anaconda looked good but was loose and had accuracy problems. We sold several of them in our gun shop as they were promoted as stronger than the S&W Model 629 but unfortunately most of the Colts came back to us with problems.

Even in the early to mid 70s they had some really bad guns. Their model 1971 which was supposed to be the successor to the 1911, but it flopped badly. Later on in the early 90s they came out with a couple of new pistols, they were to me just junk. The Colt All American 2000 was one. We went to a special dealer day for dealers to shoot all the new guns coming out. One of the distributors put it on and Colleen, Kase and I went and shot guns all day. But we never could get the model 2000 to shoot more than 2 or 3 rounds before jammimg. I think it lasted maybe 2 years before Colt dumped it.

Every company can and will have a dud but it seemed that Colt had nothing but duds for a good while there. So exactly when their quality went down the drain, I can't really tell you. Running a gun shop we tend to shy away from guns that have a history of problems. And it seemed that Colt had more than their share pf problems.
You asked me for my opinion so consider it just that.