Original subtitles

So this is kind of wild because this is an October 1941 price list. And then it

goes right into a 1946 price list.

That sort of tells a story right there, which is we enter World War II and

basically just stop printing price lists and stop printing catalogs and stop

focusing at all on, you know, these commercial products.

This is super cool.

This is the post -World War II letter that went out with the catalog,

saying, hey, we're back in the commercial business.

For five years, our entire production of guns was delivered to the government in

furtherance of the war effort.

We are indeed happy to announce that we have resumed the production of Colt

pistols and revolvers for civilian use.

Really add to the legacy.

He kind of brings it to life and paints a picture that here we have this company

that's so intertwined with American history.

Wow.

It never leaves you as an artist.

I mean, it comes home with me every night.

The elements of the piece.

4 .15, the alarm goes off.

I have to leave by 5 up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.

That's where I grew up, and so my family is over 100 miles a day, every day.

Sometimes 12 -hour days with a commute.

Mainly on the ride in, I try to refresh my mind on what I'm working on.

The floor is always busy. Usually people are already here working.

Floor workers are here before we get started here in Custom Shop.

I'm in, unload my tools out of my bag.

There's not a lot of them. There's just a few tools, but I do it traditionally.

Chisels and push scravers.

Set things up.

Staring at the work a little bit.

Get my coffee out of my thermos, pour me a cup of coffee, and start getting

focused on the day.

Some of these pieces take hours and hours, weeks and weeks.

Everything as simple as someone's initials on a piece, inscriptions,

that nature, all the way into 24 -karat gold inlay, very exhibition -level

pieces.

I love listening to classical music while I'm working.

It gets me really relaxed and focused on the work itself.

Putting the tools on the steel and getting the feel, that's the biggest

engraving. One of the biggest parts is that feel of the tool and the steel

actually cutting.

Every time I put the chisel down, you want to make the perfect cut.

And it doesn't always happen that way.

Things in the metal can change, and just your position, how you're holding and

things can make things not go as you planned when you first are making the

As you're pushing, there's resistance, and you're putting forward.

If you put too much, you'll slip. It'll fly out, as we call.

Or the tool could break.

There's a lot of different machines out there that can do really tremendous

things these days, but it doesn't have the nuances and all the details that

comes from an artist on the piece. It's just like you could think of a paint -by

-number compared to a really fine piece of art.

Yeah, it's very fulfilling creating these pieces.

You know, there's no bigger name in our industry, handgun -wise, as Colt.

And the history of this place.

and continuing the legacy here has a special place in my heart.

So in 1836, Samuel Colt built the first factory in Patterson, New Jersey.

It was a failure. He opened the factory, and it closed down just a few years

later. But he was just one of those people who figured out a way.

There's a pretty extensive Colt collection that shows the progression of

firearms, starting with the pre -Patterson prototypes.

And then from there, we roll into some of the early Patterson revolvers.

So this is an improved Patterson factory revolver made in 1837, so long ago. But

here they are.

Later on, famously...

was working on different designs for revolvers and got hooked up with the

Rangers. These are cool. These are the Walker Texas Ranger Dragoons.

Colt's first, you know, success after the factory closed in Patterson.

So this was the rebirth of the company after the first failure.

And then that was really where the company took off, and he was able to

that first set of firearms for them. They were designed by Colt and sold

the Hartford factory was created.

When he built the factory in Hartford later on, that was when the company

got going.

These are all kind of tedious to load. You're loading a single cartridge at a

time, but at the time they were incredibly progressive, really.

People forget that first venture was essentially a failure down in Patterson.

We're about to go into the rifle test range, and on the other side of the

test range is my domain, the R &D range. That's where we do all the prototype

testing and any changes to existing models.

This blue piece of equipment here is actually an environmental chamber. We

put farms in there and bring them down to as low as 40, below zero, and as high

as 150 degrees.

And we'll do that for certain tests that the military wants because they want to

know how the guns function in those extreme temperatures.

You'll see on that computer screen an orange or white grid. That's a test

target. Those targets are 100 yards at the end of a two.

Each rifle has certain maximum group size that they have to stay under in

to pass.

And you can see again, he has a nice group.

Puts a safety flag in, he'll take the gun out of the rack, and he'll go to the

next one.

All right.

This is my room, so to speak, where I do my work.

I've been full -time at Colt for nine years. I've been shooting for Colt as a

pro shooter for 16 years. So that's one of the reasons they brought me in is I

know the gun's inside out. I can articulate to engineering what's wrong

gun to make the product better. I got a Colt Commander, which is our

combat elite.

Last year down here, I probably shot 100 ,000 rounds through various guns.

A lot of times, we'll just pick it up a little bit.

Because we want to see how it functions through how people run it. Because we

want the human factor in, does the gun. If I lock this into a rest, it's not the

same as somebody shooting it because everybody has a little bit to give in

they're shooting.

We'll even take them and shoot them just one -handed.

Now, if this gun stopped, we would stop what we were doing, take pictures,

document it, talk to engineering, see what they wanted to do to correct it.

the most important thing is we'd just... Do one change at a time so we can

isolate what was the true fix to that problem.

The nice thing is most of the time I don't have to worry about that. The guns

run.

My first competition gun, I finally retired with 185 ,000 rounds through it.

The only thing I had to change was the barrel because I shot the barrel out.

Other than that, it's all made in Connecticut, American made, American

It's the best.

We build guns like they're airplanes at a quality level that is higher than you

would expect for a commercial firearms manufacturer.

In praise of the polisher, as you pass through these hallways, know that you

in the presence of masters at their trade, the Colt polishers, producing the

finest finishes in the world.

When I first came here, I took that.

and kind of really realized where I was and how much history was behind

everything that we do on a day -to -day basis.

We'll get a frame that's all pretty raw from our machining, polish the side,

give it a nice finish, depending on the material it's made out of, carbon steel

or stainless steel, just that it's raw state directly from manufacturing.

Frame's being blended.

What he's doing now is blending the trigger guard.

to the frame so there's no sharp edges on that trigger guard for that nice

finished product he's blending in the front of the dust cover and the trigger

guard to the frame so that the shape of the gun flows all as one piece these

guys are some of the best in the world this is the blue room as you can

see here i have some single action frames ready to be processed

They'll put a tag on it to let me know what they want done to it. So this right

here has got to go into the blue tank and be turned black.

If they're big stuff like that, then I'll put it in that voice and hoist it

all the way across like that.

I usually just listen to the music.

Oldie.

Back there is Teflon -ing and Nickel -ing.

That's the other thing I do.

Strut. These are magazine catches.

It's to harden them.

Then we have just plain old wash and oil.

So I'll just wash them and just oil them.

If they come out correctly, I'm proud.

I'm proud. And I try to do my best to make sure they come out correctly.

All right.

Assembly.

finish through blue, finish through polishing, one or two steps away from

a final product.

My assemblers here will hand -fit everything to create a good functioning

that will eventually make its way to the range and out the door to our customer.

A lot of fine tweaking when it comes down to hand -fitting a barrel.

Source it down to line up the sight.

Right now, I mean, your father did it the same way.

Forty -six years.

Forty -six years, yeah.

Exactly. Al's been here for, I think, 20 years now. Al, almost 20 years, right?

18.

He's been here for 18 years.

He took over for his dad's spa.

Pretty cool story of America and how it gets passed down from generation to

generation.

If you think back to primitive man, they started inscribing their projectiles

and things of that nature even back then. So they've been embellishing their

armaments and weapons from the beginning of time.

They're works of art themselves.

An extension of the human form, if you will.

And that's how they were designed. They had to be held by, you know, a human

being. So they had to be designed well.

And then the beauty of them came with that.

They were treasured pieces, even to own a weapon that was embellished where they

were treasured.

I'm sure every craftsman and designer and engineer that were doing those,

building those guns and ideas and things felt that same way, to make them not

only functional but beautiful.

My favorite step is probably just laying out all the parts and pieces and...

trying to plan out what the final product will be when it's all done.

So laying out all the parts, picking what we're going to do, and how they're

going to work together to make something that works well together as a finished

product.

So I guess most people would picture a gunsmith as a 50 - or 60 -year -old man

with wire glasses in a dark, dimly lit shop, but that's certainly not the case

for everyone. There are plenty of talent out there proving themselves, proving

what they can do, trying new things.

I've been at Colt for eight years.

I've been involved with gunsmithing for 14.

I started out by going to gunsmithing school, so I spent a year and a half in

Pennsylvania learning machining, stock making, heat treating, finishing, a

little bit of everything.

So this is a spec gun. Spec guns give us a little bit more freedom.

We can take an idea or something we have and just kind of go with it or build it

the way we'd like and see where it takes us.

It's going to be a custom commanding officer.

So it has a commander -length slide on an officer's model frame.

So ending up with one gun that the features and parts work together to

something that works well, looks good, and functions well is different than

making something that necessarily just looks good.

Quality guns always have a feel to them. You can tell how much care was given to

fitting, assembling, building that gun.

When you think about firearms and you say Colt, anybody around the world knows

Colt firearm.

This is a double -action revolver. So what we want to test is the trigger

functions two ways.

I can pull this trigger back, and you see how the cocked hammer rotates the

cylinder and fires. That's double -action.

Single -action is where you can manually cock the hammer.

So when we test the guns, we do a variation of both single action and

action to make sure it's worth in both ways.

Actually, Sam Colt invented the revolver design when he was working on a ship in

the shipping. Back in the old days, they had that turn circle to bring the

anchor up.

As he was looking at this wheel of the ship, he realized this concept of having

a cylinder and then aligning the cylinder with the barrel.

Prior to that point, you had single -shot firearms. It was, you know, you're

sticking a musket ball and a powder charge down a barrel and you're loading

chamber, which is integral to the barrel. But divorcing those two and

revolving cylinder that now has six chambers or five chambers at the time,

changed the world.

That was the moment.

He took really this European style of manufacturing that was new to the United

States and applied it to firearms.

The modern assembly line, as we think of it and know of it now, came from Samuel

Cole.

Most famously, Ford came and looked at the Colt assembly lines and then later

applied that to the Model T.

World War I, World War II era, obviously it was a war machine making all sorts

of different guns for the military.

59, 60, 61, Eugene Stoner designed this unique gas

system that drives what we now call the M -16.

And that becomes really the next large period in Colt's history.

After the range, firearms come to one of our inspectors to check for function,

cosmetic, and overall feel.

and allow it to either pass or fail to get to our customers outside.

Once again, another old -school way we see things around here, we still use

metal stamps to indicate whether or not it has passed inspections.

Every major conflict that the United States has been involved with, all the

from the Civil War until the modern day, has had Colts in them.

Not just as a secondary story, I mean, in most cases.

They were the main story.

When I was 19 years old, there was no way I would have ever pictured myself

working for a firearms company.

I was a music geek in high school, and all I did was really play in bands.

It wasn't until 9 -11 happened...

The whole country sort of collectively just stopped what they were doing and

kind of got grounded in a different way and in a different way of living.

My buddy came to me and was like, hey, you want to get your pistol permit? I

like, absolutely.

But things changed in 2007 when I happened to see a job listed at

Colt in the newspaper that I worked at.

I applied for the job. I ended up getting the job.

I was working out in the plant in a tech capacity, and of course, once you're

here, there's no feeling, there's nothing you can't do.

I went from being the guy over in the plant working on tech stuff to a couple

years later, I'm on the India -Pakistan border working on a military tender, and

I'm the only American within about 100 miles, probably.

The future of cold is really to safeguard the legacy that's been left to

You know, that World War I soldier who's in a trench that he dug by hand over in

Europe and he's holding that 1911 pistol and he's sleeping with it at night.

You know, he hasn't seen his family for God knows how long.

You know, that feeling of safety that was given to him by that firearm, that's

the legacy of Colt.

And I think that's the part that we have to safeguard.

And we're going to do that the best way possible, which is...

continue to modernize what we do here, continue to build good products, and do

more of it.