Nonsense. Colt introduced the finger collet bushings as standard fitment on the garden variety Government Model.
I have many memories of the Series 70 Colts...many of them bad.
The games were starting to gear up in those days. Several custom smiths had started building match-grade pistols for public consumption. Jim Clark and Armand Swenson notably...and the general population came to first expect, and then demand accuracy of this sort from their 1911 pistols...along with zero play slide to frame fitting and ticklish trigger actions.
In the Series 70 days...what I often refer to as Colt's "Dark Ages"...Colt was producing some of the worst pistols it had ever fielded. Labor and financial problems...and losing many of their key people through retirement and the proverbial falling of the ax cutbacks...are the main culprits. The machining practices weren't as closely controlled because they were also faced with the first real competitor in a segment of the market that they'd had a monopoly on for over 25 years. The fledgling Springfield Armory had jumped into the fray with both feet, and was producing very good 1911 pistols at a very good price. Colt was truly on the ropes for the first time in over a century.
Clearances opened up, and the usual gauging and "cherry-picking" of the parts began to suffer or even disappear altogether as the failing company struggled to get the guns into the hands of their distributors. Quality suffered.
Enter the collet bushing. It was a quick, easy way of regaining the lost fit at the muzzle end of the gun...and it worked very well unless the tolerances were off...which they often were. When they were off, the accuracy and reliability was worse than if a very sloppy solid bushing were used. I owned a few of the collet-equipped Series 70 pistols. Some would eat a bughole at 25 yards, and others produced groups like a charge of buckshot fired through a cylinder bore choke.
On the other hand, I have a stock 1919 "Black Army" Colt that will shoot into 4 inches at 50 from the bags using PMC ball, and will break 3 inches with my handloaded SWC ammo, and a mint 1945 Remington Rand that will almost match that performance...and the WW2's were not as well-suited for pure accuracy as the older ones. The biggest problem with the two pistols for precise shooting is the trigger. Fired from a machine rest, they would do much better, no doubt.
But...Concentrating on accuracy to determine the utility of a weapon is to focus on only one aspect...and the least important one to boot. If we use that criteria for determining the best of the lot...I have a 6-inch Model 19 Smith & Wesson that I'll put up against any stock autopistol in the southeastern US. Would I choose that revolver in a grab one and run scenario? Nosir. The gun is one of those prodigies that just happened to fall together nearly perfectly...but that's also digressing from the discussion at hand.
If we use intrinsic accuracy as a yardstick, it means that the AK47 is one of the worst battle rifles ever devised...but we who have faced it know better.
While I'm not denying for an instant that the P210 is one finely crafted autopistol, it can't be used as the shining example of an ideal sidearm largely because it's unproven. It's never been to war in any number great enough to set a standard. The Swiss adopted it as their issue sidearm...and then did all that they could to insure that it would never be used for such by remaining neutral. It's easy to proclaim that your weapon systems are the finest in the world. Proving it is another matter...and doing it under controlled conditions is not the ideal venue for that any more than a brake dynamometer horsepower reading offers any realistic prediction of how the car will do at Lemans or Indy.
If you'll recall the early failure of the M16 rifle...unproven in the theater that it was sent to. It did well at Aberdeen...but quickly showed its flaws in the elephant grass and the paddies of Southeast Asia. Dinking around with the ammo was responsible for a lot of that...but there were other issues...and they were getting people killed.
As an old African hunter once remarked:
"I care not one whit about these people who can split a peat at 300 yards. What I want to know about a man is how he does against a charging lion at 10 feet."
So...I'm not greatly impressed by the intrinsic accuracy of a real weapon. What I want to know is how it does when you've picked it up off the ground an hour after its former owner has bled all over it...or dropped it into a mudhole...or hasn't had the opportunity to clean and oil it for two days after a soaking rain. Will it still work? Will it save my life in a sudden, close-range fight? These are the things that concern me far more than group size at unrealistic distances.
