Colt Service Model Ace .22 Long Rifle

Most Service Model Aces come to market as bare guns with a story you have to take on faith. This one shows up with the paper. Tucked alongside the pistol is a 1954 Rock Island Arsenal sales requisition made out to a Captain in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Ordnance, the matching Railway Express Agency receipt that carried it to Washington, D.C., and the original arsenal shipping carton with its stenciled stock number still legible. That kind of documented Ordnance provenance is the reason to stop and look.

The gun is Colt's .22 LR answer to the cost of training troops on the 1911. It mirrors the weight, balance, and controls of the .45 service pistol, and David Williams' floating chamber gave it a recoil impulse that feels far closer to centerfire than a straight blowback .22 has any right to. The slide carries the diamond ACE logo with the COLT SERVICE and .22 LONG RIFLE MODEL markings, and the left side wears the early-style address roll. The grips are the correct checkered brown plastic, and the frame keeps its military Parkerized finish with honest thinning on the high edges and along the dust cover.

Worth noting: this is a fixed-barrel rimfire on a 1911 platform, so the controls behave exactly as any 1911 shooter expects. The adjustable rear sight sits in the slide dovetail, the barrel mouth shows the characteristic floating chamber face, and the single .22 magazine is present.

What anchors this piece is the trail it carries. The carton, the requisition, and the express receipt tie it to a specific arsenal, a specific officer, and a specific moment in the early 1950s when these were still moving through Ordnance channels at ten dollars apiece. For the collector building a focused 1911 or military training collection, the documentation is the part that does not come around twice.