The story behind this particular handgun started many years before it was purchased. When I was a kid, there were such things as neighborhood gun shops. While on most Saturdays my dad would take me to an auto parts store, I could never get as interested in a flex-spout oil can like he could. I still can't to this day.
However, a trip to the local little gun store was always special. This store had for years and years a nickel-plated Colt Government Model. It was $20 or $30 more than the blued version, and just sat there, unsold. When the going price for a new .45 was about $80, this was a considerable bump in price, and probably the reason it never sold over all those years.
Of course, buying new weapons was always a bit dicey. As my mom always pointed out, we both had a shotgun, and a .22. As a farm gal, mom could not comprehend the need for any more firepower than that. She did relent once, and allow my father to buy his Ruger Mark 1. She didn't count his P38 against him, since that was donated by a kindly German during the war.
So month after month, year after year, we'd stop by the gun shop, and notice that the same nickel .45 was still there, the price going up slowly as all other gun prices were.
Eventually, my mom relented, and said he could buy it, even though the price had doubled by then. We get to the store, and find it had gone out of business in the months since our last visit. The store was gone, and obviously the nickel-plated Colt was gone, too.
Years later, with my dad's birthday approaching, and me now out in the real world with a more-or-less real job, I came across a nickel-plated Colt Series 70. The original Government Model was a full-polish finish, while this one is a combination of bright and matte:
My dad instantly replaced the uninspiring brown plastic grips with some highly-figured walnut ones he made. Those were later retired for the synthetic ivory ones, which appear pure white in this picture, but actually have that nice faint-yellow tint. Lighting is tricky when it comes to something that shines like a mirror. I had to take multiple shots at different angles, hoping for a shot that reflected most of the flash away from the camera, and yet allowed the markings to remain visible. Here's my best shot of the other side:
The Series 70 was an attempt at an upgrade of the regular Government Model, which was unchanged from the 1911A1, except for the "wide shelf" thumb safety, introduced some time in the 1950s. The Series 70 introduced a new barrel bushing with spring "fingers" to create the tight front-end lockup of a custom accurized .45 without the cost of hand fitting.
The barrel has a slightly-wider-than-stock forward section of the barrel, where the spring fingers of the collet contact it. A tighter fit in front helps with accuracy, as would fitting the locking lugs and/or the barrel link, which is one step in custom accuracy jobs.
This trick worked well, unless the interior of the slide was undersized. In that case, the stress of firing (some parts can accelerate at 200g) can fracture a spring finger due to binding in the slide. This would be catastrophic in an armed encounter. If the slide cavity was oversized, there was no improvement in accuracy, but no danger of failure, either. If everything was "just right", there was a nice increase in accuracy due to more consistent lock-up.
The Series 70 lasted about ten years, up until the coming of the Series 80. The spring collet was gone, and the product liability lawyers shoe-horned a firing pin safety system into the slide. It was a series of links, springs, and connectors that introduced new moving parts to the trigger system, making improving trigger pull much more difficult.
It also made maintenance more difficult, at least for me. I took apart one Series 80 .45, and almost couldn't figure out how to get all parts for the firing pin safety back in and still have the weapon work.
I also learned that a polished nickel finish makes for a very slippery handgun. I tried to rack the slide on this gun with my left hand, and didn't have enough strength in my grip to overcome the slippery surface. I had to hold it in my left hand in order to pull the side back with my right. I know my "weak hand" is pretty weak, but I don't have this problem with other weapons.
So that's the story behind this handgun, starting with an earlier nickel-plated Government Model that stayed in a gunshop cabinet for years, until the store and the gun vanished. And the substitute, which has some interesting features, and had a beautiful set of walnut grips made by my dad, until he decided he wanted ivory, instead. Jenb was right. Dark handguns look best with dark grips, and bright finishes work best with lighter-colored grips. It gives me a good feeling to know that my dad considered his Series 70 a thing of beauty once the generic plastic grips were eliminated.