I got my first exposure to the stainless steel Colt Rail Gun when a friend bought one shortly after they were introduced. His particular gun had a few issues right out of the box… it needed a reliability job and some of the hard edges broken as well as a few other minor things… all easy stuff to remedy. As I had this initial Rail Gun on my bench I got a good idea of what I would change if given the opportunity. Lucky fellow that I am, late last year I picked up a Rail Gun and decided what better to do than build it up for this year’s SHOT Show.
As I got into the gun I realized that, while it may not be the most “blank canvass”, there was still a great deal that could be accomplished on this base gun. As with everything I do, the gun got a weld-up frame and slide fit, Kart barrel with match fit bushing, a complete functional detailing and reliability job, trigger job, as well as only the best quality internals throughout the gun. Pretty straight forward stuff there, a full-house gun from the inside out.
On the outside I started by flattening and serrating the slide top and fitting a PG rear sight and tritium front. The rear of the slide was serrated to match the PG sight and the front of the slide was ball-cut to correspond to the rail/dustcover as well as reduce the visual profile of the factory cut front cocking serrations.
While the Rail Guns come with a beavertail grip safety and an ambi-safety they are, well, let’s just say less than optimal. The ambi-safety was sharp with corners that managed to find any soft spot on your hands and had a right side lever that was disproportionately large when compared to the left side lever. Quite frankly I don’t understand Colt’s choice of that part… luckily it was easy to replace with an EGW machined single-side safety. Swinging off the new thumb safety is an EGW machined beavertail that replaces the factory Colt part which was actually an okay effort. I cleaned up the factory done high-cut and hand-checkered the gun front and rear at 30lpi while using one of the Max-Bevel mainspring housings for a nice big opening at the mag-well. After a bit more polishing and re-contouring here and there as well as a thorough de-horn the entire gun was matte blasted and fit with set of VZ Operator stocks.
