mawkie
C&R Whisperer
When you're on a roll... Amazing streak going on. After stealing a Colt Match Target Woodsman recently I was on the hunt for a nice pre-war Woodsman or early pre-Woodsman. What I found and acquired was a super clean Woodsman from late 1941, one of the last built before the war. And the owner, more about him later, replaced the original grips with those from a MT Woodsman, aka "elephant ear" grips. Guess who has a MT needing those original grips and which is now sporting NOS Colt Woodsman grips, WWII vintage? Yup! I just need to swap out the grips and I'll have two correct Woodsman pistols, both from 1941.
The price wasn't cheap but I think when you figure a nice, clean pre-war Woodsman target is probably worth $700-600 and the grips would fetch about the same amount, maybe more as they're damned near impossible to find. Came in south of $1k so I'm OK with it. The bump in value to my dirt cheap Woodsman MT with the addition of correct grips easily swamps that investment. Killed two birds with one stone for sure.
As to the original owner. I had a nice conversation with the Illinois gunshop owner who put this Woodsman up for sale on GB and found that the original owner of the Woodsman was a member of an Illinois shooting club during the 40s and 50s. So this was a local pistol sold by the nephew of the original owner.
The only hitch in all this is that the Illinois shop owner has a policy of only transferring to 01 licences but he was up front with that and I was comfortable letting Skip at S&J do the transfer for me (Shout out for Skip, awesome to do business with). So I hope to have it in hand in a couple weeks time. For now I'll post the nice GB listing photos (yup, don't know what I'll do about the trigger shoe, it's obviously vintage and might just stay with her).
The price wasn't cheap but I think when you figure a nice, clean pre-war Woodsman target is probably worth $700-600 and the grips would fetch about the same amount, maybe more as they're damned near impossible to find. Came in south of $1k so I'm OK with it. The bump in value to my dirt cheap Woodsman MT with the addition of correct grips easily swamps that investment. Killed two birds with one stone for sure.
As to the original owner. I had a nice conversation with the Illinois gunshop owner who put this Woodsman up for sale on GB and found that the original owner of the Woodsman was a member of an Illinois shooting club during the 40s and 50s. So this was a local pistol sold by the nephew of the original owner.
The only hitch in all this is that the Illinois shop owner has a policy of only transferring to 01 licences but he was up front with that and I was comfortable letting Skip at S&J do the transfer for me (Shout out for Skip, awesome to do business with). So I hope to have it in hand in a couple weeks time. For now I'll post the nice GB listing photos (yup, don't know what I'll do about the trigger shoe, it's obviously vintage and might just stay with her).
