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You Can Win A Custom Colt Carry From Cylinder & Slide Shop   Colt will introduce a new variation of their famous 1991 pistol next year based on suggestions from American Handgunner’s Custom Gun Giveaway. The pistol you see here is a hybrid made especially for the Custom Gun Giveaway consisting of a Colt Commander slide on a Colt Officer’s Model frame. Colt liked the idea so much that the gun will become a Limited Edition of between 250 and 500 units. (They haven’t made up their minds yet on either how many or on a model designation.) But the new Colt won’t look exactly like the custom version you see here from the work benches of the Cylinder & Slide Shop of Fremont, Neb. Mast gunsmith Bill Laughridge, who is profiled in our Steel Challenge feature story this issue, first proposed the idea of blending the highly concealable Officer’s frame with the longer sight radius of the Commander slide. After all, reasoned Laughridge, the frame is the portion of the gun that is hard to conceal and the slide is the portion that determines the gun’s shootability. Why not combine the most concealable frame with easiest to shoot slide? Laughridge, who runs an authorized Colt warranty repair station, obtained a prototype of what might be called a “Lieutenant Commander” for this special collector’s version of our Custom Gun Giveaway. To enhance the Colt even further, the Cylinder & Slide Shop performed a complete Tactical Package on the pistol. Novak sights are installed with a Wilson beavertail expertly fitted and recontoured to eliminate snagging. An Ed Brown tactical extended thumb safety is added. A Wilson full-length guide rod aids reliability along with a Bar-Sto match grade brushing. The extractor is radiused and tensioned and a complete “reliability tune-up” is performed on all the internal mechanisms. The ejection port is lowered and flared like on a Gold Cup while all the edges and corners on the pistol are radiused to prevent snagging. A combat trigger job rounds out the package. The complete Tactical Package, including test firing, UPS shipping and everything is $720 on a customer’s gun. In addition to this basic tune-up package, the Cylinder & Slide Shop offers a full range of custom services for the popular autos and revolvers, from full-race McCormicks and Para-Ordnances to no-frills carry guns and roller bearing S&W action jobs. Also, C&S offers a unique menu of pistolsmithing services for do-it-yourselfers who lack machine tools. If you want to build your own pistol, but need your slide machined for Bo-Mars or your frame cut for a beavertail, C&S can accommodate you. C&S also stocks a full inventory of all the major brands of combat accessories available for immediate mail-order delivery. For complete information, catalog and price list, write to the Cylinder & Slide Shop, 245 E. 4th St, Dept. AH, Fremont NE 68025; phone: (402) 721-4277; fax: (402) 721-0263.