Some time ago, I bought an early Colt Army Special revolver chambered for the 32-20 round. The gun was in pretty good overall condition....... except that someone had filed the front sight almost completely off! Because of the ruined front sight, I wound up getting the piece for the minimum bid which was pretty low. Aside from being a Colt, the main reason that I wanted it was for the deluxe wood grips it was wearing. But, more on them later. Anyway, after thinking about the needed repair to the front sight, I finally decided to tackle the job myself. The first step was to finish filing the sight stub down to the base and then cutting a groove in the soon to be sight base.
The next step was to cut out a piece of steel to form into the sight itself. I first filed a
"keel" on the bottom to fit in the base slot and then cut and filed the piece into the shape of a sight.
The next step was to solder the new piece onto the base using some low silver content solder.
The sight was left tall intentionally so that a trip to the range would tell me how much to file off the top to bring the piece on target. It turned out that I needed to file off about 3/16". So, a trip back to the shop to do the filing, (hopefully) final shaping and some cold bluing is where it sits now.
One more trip to the range to verify the sight height and make any last minute small adjustments and the old Colt (circa 1913) will be back in business!
The grips. The grips that were on this Colt are a set of the deluxe checkered wood grips with the Colt emblems that both face forward. Colt only made this style of grip from about 1910 thru about 1920. And, since they were "optional" were pretty rare. Apparently most buyers in that day simply ordered or bought the guns with the standard black "gutta percha" grips, not being willing to pay an extra $2.50 for the nicer ones. These grips are also found as standard on the Officers Model Target Colt revolvers from that time.
