1914 colt 1911

[Lethemgo]

Years ago I bought a 1911 that a guys dad bought from Alameda sherffs dept if I remember right. Gun had been confiscated and later serial # scrubbed and renumbered. Value was not what it would have been otherwise by condition and year it was. Dated to be from 1914 as far as we could tell. Decided to sell it but talked to a guy that had been doing 1911 stuff for years but getting up in age and not really dealing much anymore. We stripped it down and everything looked great as to dating the gun. His suggestion was to put a different barrel in it and sell it because the barrel was worth close to what I could get for the whole gun. So I bought a new old stock barrel and did that. He was going to hook me up with a guy who still looked for old parts but since has passed away. What he told me was the barrel was worth $400 to $600 because it was only used from 1914 to 1918. Said it has some of the best rifling he'd ever seen from that time period. It has a P over an H on the end of the barrel. Told me to try the reno big gun show but then all this covid stuff hit and stuff was canceled. Tried to get a picture of letters on barrel but me tablet only does so good. The paper is what he wrote for me reference.


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[DougGuy]

So, is this a question or what?

[Lethemgo]

Just now thinking about selling it and checking for opinions on value.

[Der Gebirgsjager]

I found your post quite interesting. I have a 1911 that had the serial no. filed off, which was subsequently renumbered by the Alameda S.O. There is a longish story connected with it that I've told here once or twice before, so I won't bother again. Suffice it to say that at one time three agencies were authorized under the Calif. Penal Code to assign new numbers to guns, and they were Alameda S.O., San Diego S.O., and Sacramento S.O. A question concerning these renumbered guns has come up only once before in my time on the Forum. My specimen had a real sewer pipe of a bore, lots of pitting and faint rifling, but still shot surprisingly well. I replaced the barrel with a Colt commercial barrel and chucked the original in my parts drawers. My pistol's number is a diamond marking followed by ASO followed by a 4 digit number followed by a diamond marking.

DG

[ddixie884]

Interesting...........

[Cougar Hunter]

Post the barrel for sale on the Colt Forum or the 1911 Forum. There are lots of guys looking for era correct barrels for their mismatched pistols.

[Bigslug]

Those early guns got exposed to potentially two world war's worth of corrosive ammo, and no armorer cared about parts originality until probably the 1980's at the earliest, so yeah, if you have a clean WWI-era tube to sell, you should have about ZERO difficulty finding someone with an otherwise correct gun that needs it.