Tag Archives: Colt 38

Colt Fills the Stable with a New Grizzly, Kodiak, and Vipers

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While everyone knows such long-legged wheelguns as the Peacemaker, Python, and Navy ’51/Army ’60 Series guns, Colt has seen dozens of short-lived revolvers in its company history. Handguns that just slipped in and slipped out just as fast.

For instance, in 1993, the Colt Kodiak, a limited-run of no more than 2,000 .44 Magnum that was built by the Colt Custom Shop in 1993 on the Anaconda series frame, hit the shelves and was never seen again.

In 1994 the Colt Custom Shop made a short run of just 999 Colt Grizzly models in .357 Magnum using a King Cobra frame with a Magna-Ported 6-inch Python series barrel.

Even before that, in 1977, the company made an aluminum-framed version of its 4th Model Police Positive– a revolver that itself was headed for cancelation. Using the small D (Detective) frame, it was light and rated for just .38 Special. Dubbed the Viper, it is one of the hardest of Colt’s “snake guns” to capture.

A circa 1977 nickel Viper

Well, for what it is worth, Colt just dropped new versions of all three of these guns on the market.

More in my column at Guns.com.

The Colt Aircrewman Special: The all aluminum .38 caliber

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In the early 1950s, the newly born US Air Force needed a brave new handgun for its atomic
cowboys. The main thing, for better or worse, was that the gun be lightweight. The solution, in classic 1950s style, was aluminum Aircrewman revolver, which, much like a lot of 1950s style was both a success and a failure at the same time.

In World War 1, pilots and aircrew often found themselves lost, crashed, or shot down in areas that were less than friendly. This led to those daring young aviators to begin carrying handguns and in some cases rifles with them for those unexpected stops. Throughout World War 2, US Army Air corps, personnel and glider pilots often carried full sized .38 revolvers of various manufacturers supported by the occasional M-1 carbine.

In 1947, the US Air Force was carved off from the Army and the new brass realized the need for a modern space age handgun for the occasional aircrew emergency, survival situations, and nuclear weapon’s security breach. In a time where every ounce of weight was sliced from huge bombers like the Convair B-36 “Peacemaker” to allow them to carry atomic weapons to the Soviet Union, the watch word was ‘lightweight.’

Colt answered this call for a small and effective, but super lightweight handgun, with a modified version of their then-new Cobra line of snub-nosed revolvers.  It was named the Aircrewman.

Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com

colt aircrewman at Springfield Armory museum