The Colt Bright Stainless .38 Super 1911 Review

The components that make something a luxury item — leather seats, granite countertops, fine wood paneling, diamonds, a million-dollar view — almost invariably are not man-made. There’s a whole theology that explores the significance of lovely things in nature as evidence there is something greater than us, and there is a unique sense of awe brought on by encountering stunning beauty concealed in places it was never seen for thousands of years. Anyone who’s been to the bottom of the sea under a scuba tank knows the feeling, as do those who explore caves.

This sense of wonder must have been felt by whoever first stumbled across the turquoise in Kingman, Arizona, where it’s been mined for the better part of a couple thousand years. Within recent memory, stone hammers and other equipment have been found in at least one long-forgotten tunnel. Ranging in color from green to pale, then darker blue depending on where on the mountain it came from, Kingman turquoise, dating to 200 AD, has been found as far away as Mexico City, where it likely arrived via trade routes. How it wound up on this pair of pistol grips is a different story.

Stone Heritage

In that abrupt era when America was passing from the cheerful seeming naïveté of the ’60s to the much harder-edged ’70s (courtesy of the bloodletting at Altamont, among other things), Bill Wirtle began a journey of self-discovery that took him to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he found himself making jewelry from raw materials. Although college educated, a bigger deal then than now, and formerly employed by IBM, working with stone, with his hands, was a bit of a family tradition. His grandfather and great grandfather were part of a stonecutting family from Bohemia and Czechoslavakia, where “Wirtle” was the name of the logo for the stonecutter’s guild.

Unfortunately, the jewelry market in Santa Fe was crowded, and rather than try to elbow his way in, Wirtle made his own way by using jewelry techniques to make non-jewelry items. Letter openers, gearshift knobs, bolo ties — anything that could be made more attractive while remaining functional. This includes knives, which Wirtle learned how to re-handle, creating stunningly beautiful knives offered by Camillus, Spyderco and others.

Forty-six years later, the day-to-day of Santa Fe Stoneworks is largely in the hands of his children, Myles and Anna, who were born in the same room of the house where the business began. At 81, Bill Wirtle still describes the joy of watching what the grinding and polishing process reveals as a dull surface suddenly becomes a beautiful piece of jewelry. It is, he quickly points out, not as easy as it looks. There’s not a lot of give with rocks, so there’s no squeezing inlay pieces together and hoping for the best. Parts must be precisely ground to fit together, and once fit, the different materials vary widely in hardness, which makes it very difficult to keep a consistent surface when grinding them to shape. Turquoise, for example, is so soft the vast majority of it has to be stabilized before it can withstand shaping, lest it disintegrate into a pretty, expensive powder. The lessons learned in handling knives, however, can be applied to pistol grips as well — only 1911s for now, but stay tuned.

Grips From Nature

Wooly mammoth, dinosaur bone, ironwood, semiprecious stones of all kinds, carbon fiber, Fordite (a fascinating, Damascus-like pattern created by layers of paint overspray in automotive plants) … each have their beauty and working characteristics. For this article, I chose to focus on a pair made of turquoise and obsidian.

Turquoise, we’ve talked about, but obsidian is a different beast entirely. When molten volcanic rock cools slowly, it can produce quartz crystals. Cooled suddenly, it becomes obsidian. Essentially glass (it’s translucent), it breaks in predictable patterns to create wickedly sharp edges, making it an early material of choice for weapons — arrowheads, knives, spear points and other tools. This includes primitive surgical tools, a role it still fills, as some surgeons believe an obsidian scalpel cuts cleaner and heals faster than steel. Impressive and significant to weapons evolution, but you obviously can’t make grips out of it — not by itself.

But it can be combined with other natural stones into a hybrid material. The process, which was perfected by Colbaugh Processing, who has the rights to the Kingman turquoise mine, compresses the stones and injects a liquid bronze material that fills the empty voids, creating a gleaming, vein-like appearance.

Polished

Something that pretty belongs on an equally impressive gun — in this case, Colt’s bright stainless .38 Super. Polishing, too, is less about just the pretty than what it represents. In this case, skill. The Colt factory is the only place I know that has a sign hanging from the ceiling honoring its polishers.

This focus is not new: In 1855, the Dickens-run magazine Household Words talked about the polisher in Colt’s London plant submitting to regular eye injuries from “red-hot particles of emery” thrown off by the wheel rather than wear protective glasses, likely because it would have limited his ability to see his work. In 1912, the Ordnance Office promptly asked Colt to tone down the shine on its newly adopted 1911 pistol before it got somebody killed, to which Springfield Armory responded drily, “it is believed that a more dull finish can be provided.” As of 1936, even experienced polishers hired by Colt were required to go through a training school. That may sound a bit much if you haven’t tried it yourself, but like jewelry making, there’s a lot more to it than appearances suggest.

It takes a skilled craftsman 40 hours to fully hand polish a firearm, working through multiple grits of abrasive, from 400 to 600, 800, 1,000, 1,500, and in some cases to 3,000, carefully removing the scratches from each prior grit before moving to the next. You also have to keep the rounds round and the flats dead flat, without a wandering line where they meet, which is very difficult, even with the part stable on a bench. Now imagine freehanding it on a wheel since a manufacturer doesn’t have the time to rub on every pistol for a week. Traditionally, Colts were polished on a large wooden wheel covered in leather to which the abrasive was applied. The wheel was then trued and used by exactly one person. That’s been updated, but it requires no less skill to use a modern Baldor.

Knifemaker Bob Engnath called the buffing wheel a killing machine, and he wasn’t wrong. Gunsmiths love the Dremel because even its tiny wheel is so hard to use well that people frequently damage their guns and have to bring them in for expensive repairs. On a big wheel, a twist or roll in the wrong direction wrenches the part from your hand and launches it across the room, not to mention the various skid marks, divots and wavy lines a mistake leaves, even when the wheel doesn’t take it away from you. Voila, you’ve scrapped a thousand-dollar gun.

That’s why there’s a sign.

Accessories To Match

Understated but elegant is hard to pull off a shelf, so I reached out to my friend Andy Kitner of the Revelation Leather Company for a holster to complement the Colt/Santa Fe combination. I’ve been test-driving an early version of Andy’s innovative design that uses keepers instead of belt slots and found it very comfortable and easy to conceal. Silver-colored keepers and a stingray accent panel give just enough extra pop to stand out without being over the top.

A gun is, of course, a functional item: One can fairly ask about the durability of bolting a piece of rock — lovely rock but still rock — to a centerfire handgun and blasting away. “We aim to be functional beauty,” Anna told me, and Santa Fe Stoneworks backs it up with a lifetime warranty. Of 25–35,000 knives produced every year, only a percent or so come in for repair, which is free of charge. By the way, knives are offered in the same materials as grips, which makes for a stunning pair.

DoubleTap provides its +P National Match ammo and at 300 rounds in, so far, so good. Colt wisely used blued sights (the only thing on the gun that isn’t polished stainless) so you can see them. The combination of polished front strap and smooth grips is slicker than my heavily textured carry gun, but not so much so you can’t hang on to it, especially in an easy-recoiling .38 Super. The grips are backed with G10, making them a bit thicker than usual, and due to the hardness of the material, you’ll want to check the grip screws after shooting (a copper insert is in the works that would eliminate that).
In the words of Butch Cassidy, a small price to pay for beauty.

For more info: SantaFeStoneworks.com, Colt.com, [email protected], DoubletapAmmo.com.

Subscribe To American Handgunner