But I want to ask LongWalker about his comment about the Colt NF needing a 6 month wait for repairs before use. What was wrong with it?
It was real pretty, and even came with the factory box. It had the added cachet of having belonged, years ago, to an old friend of mine. Didn't look like it had ever been fired either. But it had issues.
Make a long story short, I'm pretty sure (meaning, I didn't even look at the serial number) that it was made in the early '80s. Every one of those I've seen had problems.
Long story. . . well, the front sight wasn't vertical. Now, I guess a fella could fix that when he set the barrel back to reduce the barrel-cylinder gap to something reasonable, rather than the current loose fit on my driver's license stacked with a business card--well, at least on one side of the cylinder. On the other side, I couldn't quite fit the business card in with my driver's license. (And that was a cylinder issue: I measured on the same side of the barrel.) But a guy could face off the cylinder when he reamed out the cylinder throats so they all matched. . . course, then he'd have to get a set of dies and a mould and a sizing die so's he could load .436" bullets. And fix the timing, which came up late on 5 chambers, and a hair early on the sixth.
I figure it was probably a Monday-morning gun, made after a three day free-beer-holiday weekend. I'm a shooter, looking for a pistole that I'm going to carry and shoot. This wasn't it, so I sadly passed.
I thought about a flat-top, but that front sight base looks like a hangup waiting to happen. I suppose it could be replaced with a ramp, and I might go that route.
Nothing wrong with a 44wcf. I've just not had much luck with bottleneck cartridges in revolvers, so now I avoid 'em.