Of the seven revolvers Colt named after snakes, the rarest is the Colt Boa. Only a single production run of these were made totaling just 1,200 guns. They were made in 1985 as a custom order for the Lew Horton distribution company, which wanted something unique to offer its buyers. The Boa was an intermediary between the standard Colt MkV and the high-end Python. It was a 6-shot .357 Magnum with a full underlay and ventilated shroud. The only variation was in barrel length, as half were made with 4” barrels and half with 6” barrels. The serial numbers were “BOAxxxx”, with the 4” guns having odd numbers and the 6” ones getting even numbers. Five hundred of each were sold individually, but the first 100 of each length were packaged together into sequentially-numbered pairs in fancy cases.
The Boas all sold in 1985, and they are now the hardest to find for the Colt Snake collector. This particular pair is a gorgeous example of an original cased set, numbers 43 and 44.
what about the Viper????
care to address the “Viper”??
Colt Viper already was covered, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uecvkx2zSyQ please explain why do you think it should be described yet another time.
It would be nice if Colt reintroduced both the Boa and the Viper. Not to mention the actual King Cobra. What they call the King Cobra today is simply the Colt Magnum Carry snub (a stainless-steel Detective Special in .357) under the more grandiloquent name.
Most of all, they should be affordable, and better thought-out. The Python is nice, but it’s not $1500 worth of “nice”. The same goes for the revamped Anaconda, which still has a trendy “combat” grip that is simply too small for its .44 Magnum cartridge. (Even a .44 Magnum Peacemaker type should have either a Bisley-type grip or at least a Colt 1860 Army-sized “plow handle”, rather than the abbreviated 1851 Navy-sized grip of the Model 1873.)
The Colt Pony was a sensible attempt to appeal to the Cowboy Action Shooting market; a simplified, modernized Model 1873. Their big mistakes were (1) not making it an all-coil-spring design, (2) not making it in .357 and 9 x 19mm in addition to .45 Colt, and (3) doing such a lack-luster job of advertising and marketing it that most customers who would have been interested in it only learned of its existence after Colt had ceased production on grounds of “not enough sales”. All of this was typical of Colt, then and now.
Colt keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. Mostly, trying to appeal to what used to be called the “carriage trade” rather than making revolvers and etc. for the everyday citizen.
Consider that the same “marketing strategy” is why you no longer see revolvers with the Adams, Tranter, Dimancea etc. trademarks.
If not for their contracts to make M16 variants for the Department of Defense, Colt would have disappeared long ago. Because their civilian marketing has been one disastrous misstep after another for the last forty-plus years.
clear ether
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