Reeder Custom Guns - Colt

Gary, with all the talk about Colt quality,
is there a time period or an era where
you feel like they live up to their reputation?
I know the single actions take a lot of heat
about springs and bore sizes, etc., but how
was the build quality for the time?
As someone who grew up in the golden age of
the TV western, I still want one.
The only Colts I have are the Realtree Anaconda,
a Pony pocketlite, and a Defender, all
of which have been excellent.
But you see so many examples of all of them,
I just wondered what you thought.

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.

Thanks, Gary!

If I wanted to be flippant I would say Colt started going downhill when they quit using JMB designs, but I think it goes back even further than that. When you look at the history of the company it seems that bankruptcy is a feature, not a bug; I believe Sam C. hisself went bankrupt at least twice.

The Colt 1971 is so obscure I had to look it up: https://www.forgottenweapons.com/colt-tries-to-make-a-service-pistol-the-model-1971/

I picked up an All American 2000 for under $300 last year brand new in the box, just because. Have yet to shoot it; weep for me in advance. Quality aside, I still regret not picking up a new Anaconda in the mid-'90s for the $300-$400 they were going for then.

Great advertising/marketing/iconography. The prancing pony and "Cobra C" are classics. I have the t-shirts.

Hope that's not all America is about any more.

Specifically, a 7.5" gun suitable for hunting.

Took a while, but found one NIB Gen 3 for a fair price.

When it arrived, it was pretty good, but had tremendous play in the cylinder. Turned out to be the base pin was undersized. I mean terribly undersized.

Measured the holes in bith the frame and cylinder and found the cylinder hole was only .0005" under the frame.

Kelye at Belt Mountain supplied a custom #5 Keith Style Base Pin (correctly fit) and that solved the problem.

I got off lucky and ended up with a pretty nice gun. I've since added a second 44 Special Cylinder and Two 44-40 Cylinders.

I've certainly heard worse stories from gunsmiths specializing in Colts and consider myself blessed...

is tight all around but the trigger is TERRIBLE.

1911s--ALL WERE EXCELLENT AND I BOUGHT THEM ALL. THE LADY IN CHARGE AT THAT TIME WAS VERY EASY TO DEAL WITH AND CALLED ME AT HOME IN THE EVENINGS. THEN HER HUSBAND WAS TRANSFERRED................

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Glad to hear this positive anecdote from JT, but, being a cynic, I think his closing line, "then her husband was transferred," says it all.

Point being that quality control in bureaucratic organizations tends to be inversely proportionate to the numbers of people/levels in the organization and the consequent number of rice bowls that need filling. My personal experience in such calamities says that a small number of people actually care about the quality of the product and run around all day driving themselves crazy trying to fix things while a vaster number of people sit around doing as little as possible, waiting for their paycheck.

I've had crummy Rugers too. That's what Gary is here to fix. As he typically says; "Just my opinion."

Where people can discuss these things. Clearly, I don't buy into all internet reviews. But, same for the gun publication online or paper.

The pubs are paid to praise guns and most definitely do just that.

The information releases is usually very biased and edited by those paid to do so.

We don't always agree, but I enjoy hearing others opinions and experiences.

people get transferred all the time from many many companies and the spouse moves with them. Pretty common today. The way manufacturing is done today is everyone along the entire spectrum of production does some form of quality control so you don't need an entire department of QA techs...and you can correct the problem before further processing. It's called Lean Manufacturing and if you aren't doing it you are behind the curve and adding cost to the product and will find it hard to compete.

JT's post certainly doesn't imply the husband worked for Colt. The point I was trying to make was that there was somebody at the company who cared about her job and did right by the customer, and then she went away due to extrinsic factors. Sorry if it didn't come across the way I meant it.

My comment -- which is mine alone -- was meant to articulate my lived experience with Colt products, which hasn't lived up to the "dream vision" of Colt which their highly successful advertising campaigns, going back for the better part of 200 years, implanted in my brain when I was just a little guy.

I really don't mean to single out Colt in particular -- it's my experience as a consumer (not as an engineer or professional gunsmith) that many companies coast on the reputation of past glories and/or clever advertising campaigns as opposed to the quality of their product. It's also my experience that the smoke and mirrors tend to dissipate in the harsh light of reality once people actually use the product and it has to stand on its own merits. Everyone else's mileage may vary.

To criticize only myself, trying to compare 1873 or 1913 Colt when "they" were at the top of their game to 1973 Colt or 2023 Colt is almost certainly a worthless endeavor. No doubt manufacturing methods and economic incentives have changed. I guess I expect too much out of corporate America . . . businesses exist first and foremost to make a profit, sure, but I am old-fashioned enough to think that it makes business sense to manufacture the best quality product possible at a price the average working person can pay. That was Henry Ford's ideology (he didn't see any point in making cars that the workers who were making them couldn't afford). Ford and Colt are both old, iconic American brands that have history and emotional freight for nearly everybody living in this country. That's why it bothers me when the marketing takes precedence over the product and the product doesn't live up to the marketing.

fine weapons of the past, be it a Colt Python or a Colt SAA or a Colt Gold Cup etc etc, had hours of hand-fitting to make them the quality products that they were. To get that same quality today can be done, but at a cost MOST people will not pay. So, to make the products people can afford you have to keep the hand-fitting to a minimum or eliminate it altogether. Its all about the affordability of a product. That is largely why most everything is made somewhere else with much lower labor costs. As we know, a Reeder gun is a super fine quality gun due to the amount of hand-fitting etc etc, but maybe 1% of the working class will spend the money required and the rest settle for a plain Ruger..not that there is anything wrong with that. I don't expect the new Pythons to have the same smooth action as the older ones for the same reason...not hand-fitted for 1500.00 for sure.

I haven't tried any of the new Colt products from the last year plus; they may in fact be fantastic value for money. The new Python and new King Cobra are both "Out of Stock" at the Colt website, which I take as a good sign.

https://www.colt.com/series/PYTHON_SERIES
https://www.colt.com/series/KING_COBRA_SERIES

My Rossi 971 will have to do in the interim.

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