Colt Model 1900 Sight Safety Conversion Prototype

Look at the grips before anything else. Someone carved 1900 deep into the right panel and a circled letter into the left, and that crude hand marking is your first clue that this is no ordinary early Colt automatic. This is a transitional prototype, one of the experimental guns Colt and Browning used to work their way out of the sight safety problem that plagued the very first Colt automatic.

The Model 1900 was Colt's first commercial autoloader, built on Browning's short recoil system and chambered for the .38 ACP. The slide carries the familiar early markings, the Browning's Patent line dated April 20 1897, the Colt's Patent Fire Arms address out of Hartford, and Automatic Colt Calibre 38 Rimless Smokeless on the right. The rampant colt sits proud near the rear. All of that is standard. The rear of the slide is not.

Colt's original idea put a pivoting rear sight that doubled as a manual safety. Raise it and the gun was blocked, lower it and it fired. Shooters hated it. The sight was fiddly, and it would flip up or down when you least wanted it to. So the factory went looking for a better answer. On this gun the pivoting unit is gone, replaced by a fixed sight set in a transverse dovetail, with a filler plate closing the cavity where the old mechanism lived. That puts it squarely in the documented progression shown in Bady's Colt Automatic Pistols and Goddard's Government Models, between the raised sight safety guns and the clean Sporting Model of 1902.

The blue is mostly intact with honest scratches across the slide flats and some thinning at the muzzle. The bore reads strong. This one comes with both reference books that picture the conversion family. If you collect early Browning Colts, transitional development guns like this almost never reach the open market.