View Single Post
Old April 21, 2010, 05:40 PM   #7
Grady
Member
 
Join Date: April 20, 2010
Posts: 15
Thanks again for the interest and help. I have been trying to post pictures without success, is there a feature on the Forum as to how to do this ? I don't think pictures would help a great deal though, they look exactly like the scores I know you all have seen countless times. I was finally able to contact a retired employee of the Dealer that my Brother bought his guns from (among them were a pair of sequentially numbered Colt (genuine) .22 Derringers). He remembered well the times all this was going on, but did not recall anyone ever complaining about the guns not being Colt. He laughed and said he would be glad to buy them back for the same price my Brother paid! He suggested getting a good magnifying glass and a strong light and look under the loading lever. Viola! I have a "plastic" lens in my right eye and bad cataracts in the left, but, if one rubs talcum powder in the proper area, rubs it off, uses a very strong light at the proper angle, and a strong magnifying glass, again at the proper angle, one can barely make out,very faint,

on the Navy (?)
ARMI SAN MARCO- GARDONE VT under that is
BLACK POWDER ONLY CAL .44 MADE IN ITALY

on the Walker
ARMI SAN MARCO - GARDONE VT under that is
BLACK POWDER ONLY CAL. 44 MADE IN ITALY

I called him back this AM with my results. He was apologetic, even though he had no connection any longer with the store, selling out long ago. He vaguely remembered that perhaps ASM perhaps made guns for Colt at the same time others were, he vaguely remembered perhaps a law suit (?) but thought the guns had been sold in good faith, and that they had sold "a slew of them". He still offered to buy them back !

So, after a bit of Detective work, and help from you folks, I think what I have here are "clones" of the era of Colt's re-entry into the black powder field, which, through any set of circumstances were bought by my Brother, never the wiser and going to his grave thinking he had really done something for his family, and so it goes. Why they were stamped so faintly one can only guess, but with a bit of elbow grease and a piece of emery cloth, one could do wonders. I wonder now at the Colt literature originally in the boxes.

It would appear that the Navy (?) is .44 caliber, I thought that they were .36, but that opens up another can of worms. If I can figure out posting pictures, I will send pictures of the pair, to ascertain if it is an Army or Navy and year.
Grady is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.02076 seconds with 8 queries