I had the opportunity of watching Kolar make me a bespoke SC gun since i am about 30 minutes drive away. Every person i met whether in the office or machine shop was finely in tune with what they were doing and proud of thier product. The finished product is second to none in the world. I haven't yet visited CSMC but I don't doubt that its the same environment.
The past is the past, hand work won't come back and doesn't inherently make for a better product and frankly from an engineering perspective today's fine doubles are better made. One area that I found different is weight. The hand work/liability leads me to believe the doubles of years gone by have weights that can be hard to achieve. But anyway, to fix on a certain spot in time and then regard all other products as 'reproductions' short changes the individuals making thse products. You can purchase your older Parkers but frankly after 30+ years of collecting doubles, I have seen all sorts of problems/modifications made by individuals to these guns. For now, I and I suspect quite a few others, are turning to the handful of gunmakers in this country that turn out a decent product. In 50 to 100 years, these will be judged the 'Classics' of today and not as reproductions. -Dick
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