PD trade in 6520 - a couple questions.

[Circle_10]

Very nice. Mine has the screw style pin as well. Annoying but not a huge deal. Is yours one of the Summit Gun Broker 6520s?
Have you looked up the serial number on Colt's site yet to get a manufacture date?
Alternatively, you may also have a date stamp on the barrel under the handguards up near the handguard cap.
Mine is stamped 1/99, so the month I was born and the year I graduated high school, which is kinda cool.

[usmcvet]

Very nice. Mine has the screw style pin as well. Annoying but not a huge deal. Is yours one of the Summit Gun Broker 6520s?
Have you looked up the serial number on Colt's site yet to get a manufacture date?
Alternatively, you may also have a date stamp on the barrel under the handguards up near the handguard cap.
Mine is stamped 1/99, so the month I was born and the year I graduated high school, which is kinda cool.

Very cool! I'll check. Yes from Summit. There was nothing under the handguards. I looked at the bolt and BCG tonight and they look almost new. The outside is pretty beat. The inside is pretty cherry. Carried a lot & shot a little.
I noticed the left rear side of the trigger (inside the lower) looked very different. It's shorter.

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[Pappabear]

In addition to being my first Colt, it's also the first complete AR I've ever bought. All my other ones were pieced together to one degree or another, which I why I wasn't familiar with the way the inside of a Colt lower looked.
It is a very handy carbine, although it probably won't be getting used for much as I've already got "working" ARs. I mostly bought it because I wanted a Colt and was more interested in getting one of their older models vs a 6920 (not that there is anything wrong with the 6920, I've just become a bit of a retro head of late)

Restricted lower, very nice. Picked up a little gem.

PB

[Circle_10]

You may find yourself using the Colt more often than you have predicted after spending some time with your new acquisition.

Well someone had a crystal ball......my 6520 was supposed to be in "retirement" but as of last month it's currently pulling duty as my "primary" iron sighted AR for those times when I'd rather tote around a gun weighing less than 6lbs vs an optically sighted one weighing 7+lbs. I ended up putting another 500 or so rounds through it in September to make sure everything was good to go.
I swapped out the dead night sights for a Colt front post and rear aperture and sighted it in at 100yds. With the irons, the gun averages about 2.5-3.5" groups at 100yds with Federal XM193, with the occasional 4"+ group probably being my fault rather than the gun, and one 1.75" group probably an impressive fluke.
While the rifle never failed during the "vetting" period it did fail a gas ring check, so I changed out the rings (I even went to the trouble of getting Colt gas rings), then preemptively replaced the buffer spring with another Colt spring, and changed out the existing extractor spring/insert for a new Colt gold one.
But that little update is not really the reason I resurrected this old thread.
I'm still very curious as to what department had this rifle prior to me buying it last fall. However I'm not paying Colt $100 to find out.
The box the Colt came on had this on it though:


Does this mean anything to anyone? I'm assuming "Credeur, M.B." is either an officer who had the rifle issued to him or maybe the chief or other department official who handled the trade in. I'm thinking "No purchase" means department personnel were given the option to purchase the gun before it was traded and they opted not to.
I'm not sure what the numbers are. It's not a zip code and it's not the serial number of the gun. Maybe it's a the serial of a different gun and they just stuck mine in whatever box they had?

I also figured I'd ask here when exactly Colt stopped production of the 6520. I was under the impression it was sometime between 2006 and 2010, essentially replaced by the 6720 in Colts product lineup but I don't actually know.
In this video however: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hoKnPp9vq8o Chris Bartocci discusses a Canadian made 6520 and seems to imply Colt is still producing 6520s to some extent. However it's been many years since I've seen them listed on Colt's website.

If these are still in production I'm assuming they must be some kind of special agency order item.

I'd be all over another one of these for the right price so I'm hoping as more departments modernize their patrol rifles perhaps another batch of these will show up on the used market.

[Stickman]

Based off my agency, the writing on the box would be typical turn in procedure for getting issued new weapons. Place your weapon in the box, write your name and ID number on the box, and whether or not you wish to buy the firearm from the place buying the weapons.

[Circle_10]

Cool, so my guess wasn't too far off at least.

The Pennsylvania state police were apparently one of the major sources of these trade in 6520s, they seem to have upgraded to the 6940.
I got ahold of what is apparently the master list of serial numbers of the 6520s, plus some other long guns (what I think were some SP1s and a few HKs IIRC) that the PSP traded in, but my gun was not among those listed. Maybe the list was incomplete or my gun just came from elsewhere.

[Stickman]

Cool, so my guess wasn't too far off at least.

The Pennsylvania state police were apparently one of the major sources of these trade in 6520s, they seem to have upgraded to the 6940.
I got ahold of what is apparently the master list of serial numbers of the 6520s, plus some other long guns (what I think were some SP1s and a few HKs IIRC) that the PSP traded in, but my gun was not among those listed. Maybe the list was incomplete or my gun just came from elsewhere.

It could still be a PSP weapon as a Master list is only for the items immediately in the order for turn in AND are on hand. Officers who are on military service and still have weapons at home, or especially weapons in evidence lockup would not be on there. These most likely follow up in twos and threes until they are all gone. I know of weapons that have sat for 15-20 years in evidence, and personally have one that has been in for quite awhile. Others are pulled from evidence after a few months.

[Circle_10]

Good info, thanks.

[Stickman]

Mine (turned in cop gun, but not my department).

[Circle_10]

Nice. Mine is actually leaning against the wall behind me right now after riding around in my Jeep on a dreary, rain-soaked Tuesday.
Crappy impromptu photo:

I haven't tried the carry handle optics thing yet but I may give it a shot just so I can say I did.
Does yours have 6 hole or 7 hole handguards? Mine has 7-hole handguards, and since I'm not even sure if Colt actually made a 7-hole variant of their skinny CAR handguards, it's quite possible that the handguards on mine are not original.

Maybe someday I'll be able to snag one of the other older Colt carbines or perhaps an SP-1.