1860 Colt vs Cartridge Conversion

thank you for tuning into an episode of in-range I have a lot of things on the table in front of me but most prominently I have a 1860 Colt percussion revolver and a type 2 Richard Mason conversion these are both reproductions originals are quite expensive and hard to come by this one is by pietà and this one is by uber tea I have gone over both of these guns and assured that they are quite reliable now what I want to talk about today isn't the progression of the percussion gun to the cartridge gun and ultimately the 1873 Colt Single Action Army that'll be a video for a different day what I do want to talk about is that when these cartridges started becoming the thing and conversion started becoming available on the market and of course eventually the 1873 single-action Colt or other variants came that were cartridge guns the reality is that if you are already used to using an 1860 Colt percussion gun or some other form of percussion gun that you know was reliable the reality is there wasn't a lot of reasons for you to move over to the cartridge gun now that's gonna probably surprise a lot of you in the audience but what I plan to do today is use the backup gun match here it's a local match run by my friend that I helped design some of the scoring mechanism and timing based mechanisms around a long time ago but it's his match not mine and the reason for using that match as a litmus test for these guns is that every stage is 30 seconds long you only have 30 seconds which is kind of a realistic scenario based on realistic self-defense shooting situations and you have a bunch of targets presented whatever they are steel or paper and you have the option of getting as many of them as you can within the 30 seconds and it isn't based on penalties for how many you don't get but it's based on score for how many you do get divided against the time you took to do it so as a result obviously higher capacity higher fire guns are capable of doing better scores but it presents stages and scenarios that allow you to use gun Z normally not using any other competitive environment and a realistic way of presenting realistic self-defense scenarios itself tonight's event scenarios back in the Old West and in 2020 for the most part statistically are identical the reality is reloads are not common and not too many rounds are typically fired now let me go ahead and say right off the bat this is not me saying that you only need a six shot gun in reality or in the world I'm not saying that at all I'm saying that for many people in the Old West and in modern self-defense scenarios six shots probably suffice is for the average scenario that does not mean that you should be limited to that those are two different conversations but what I want to show is this an 1860 Colt percussion gun if done properly loaded properly and all the alchemy has been done which there is some alchemy the black powder especially with reproductions with proper nipples or cones whichever phrase you prefer proper powder charges and etc the 1860 percussion gun can be extremely reliable so much more reliable than most people think by modern standards many people have bought reproductions done nothing to them not really learned the alchemy of black powder and they now are left with the bad taste in the mouth that percussion guns are these unreliable things and that the reason you moved to cartridge was just to get away from this troublesome design but the reality is these are not that troublesome and you're going to see that in the video today and that when the cartridge versions came out there was not a lot of reason for the average person on the frontier to upgrade first of all there was cost involved whether you did a conversion to your original gun by sending it in and having it a cartridge conversion or buying a dedicated cartridge gun like the 1871 open top or the Single Action Army or something else that's a lot of money if you already had an 1860 Colt that you felt was reliable for six shots and you already had all of your accessories your leather your belt your caps ammunition it was a hard argument to sell that you needed to have a cartridge gun so the transition from percussion to cartridge was a slow one and we see people in the Old West on the frontier using cartridge our percussion guns way up into the 1920s 1930s because there just wasn't a reason to change in fact we have one gentleman here of historical record named a george hand who was ran a saloon in tucson arizona during the territorial days and he his pistol which is an 1860 Colt percussion gun is on display today in the Arizona Historical Society he wrote diaries of his day in day out here in Tucson he witnessed the the body of Frank Stilwell after the irbs party killed him and he saw no reason to convert from the percussion gun to a cartridge gun and he even though he died in the late 1880s there was just absolutely no reason for him to switch over and there are a lot of people that are exemplary exemplary of that but first let's go through a couple things about why that matters and how these worked it differently and then represent some of the match footage to explain and actually demonstrate that in real life on the clock alright so one of the things that people think about when they think about percussion guns is you have to have this flask of powder and you have to have a ball that you see it see you pour the powder and see if the ball or put a wad put Lube on it seed it then have to cap it and you can certainly load them that way and that's the way I'm loading them for today because today I'm using Johnston and Dow proper projectiles most people load percussion guns today with round ball and there's reason for that it's easily available you can get a four fifty four round ball from almost any Sportsman's Warehouse or something like that but the reality is back in the day when they shot most people carried and used 1860 Colt percussion revolvers or any 44 caliber percussion gun they fired bullets like these these are conical x' they're Johnston and Dow they have a rebated rim so that they'll seat easily there are around 200 and 210 to 225 27 to 30 grains they give you substantial power and velocity so originally these guns would have been loaded with paper cartridges but today for convenience I didn't bother with that but it did bother with historical accuracy in a much more important way first of all the appropriate historical powder charge of black powder but more importantly the proper projectile this is a Johnston and Dow 210 to 217 green conical projectile which is actually what they would have been using in the era round ball was really not common but these chemicals were and these conical x' provide the same power as the later 44 Colt cartridge that the conversion revolvers used so there's a little rebated rim on that a purpose so that it kind of seats into the chamber easier gotta line it up with the ramrod and then boom and you do that for all six cartridges alright so another thing that people think about is that you didn't want to have to carry this flask and powder in the field but in the reality is very few people actually did that when they carry percussion guns most people would go to the local gun shop and they would buy a box of paper cartridges for their percussion gun would come in a box like this open it up and while these are currently round ball loads but a paper cartridge just like this which you would then seat in the front of the chamber and Ram it with a rammer and then put one of the six percussion caps that came with your paper cartridges in this box was the way you loaded your percussion gun you loaded it seated the percussion caps and you were done just like loading any cartridge gun so the reality is while most people would not carry loose powder and ball they would either carry a box of cartridges or a box of cartridges some cartridges were metallic if you had a metallic cartridge gun with of course a primer built into the cartridge or rimfire if it was 44 Henry rimfire or a paper cartridge with percussion caps sometimes you would carry spare percussion caps in a little tin like this but the difference between carrying this and that isn't significant of course paper cartridges are more fragile and that's why they're generally kept in some sort of hardened case like in this case a wooden box but for the person in the field or the average person who was wielding a firearm for self-defense carrying paper cartridges with a little tin of caps or carrying a box of loaded cartridges such as these really didn't make much difference at all another unexpected advantage of carrying the 1860 Colt percussion gun versus the conversion gun or any of the other cartridge guns by Colt at least for sure was that you could have [ __ ] stick the hammer between Scylla chambers and you could carry all six chambers loaded so you had six rounds in your percussion guns another advantage of the original 1860 Colt to the country cartridge conversion is there's actually a safety knot between chambers which means you can carry six rounds instead of five reality was that with a cartridge gun because of the way they were done they did they had omitted that safety knot between chambers it was unsafe to carry all six chambers loaded so you would typically load five and bypass and then put the hammer down on an empty chamber this meant that with the percussion gun as long as it was a reliable percussion gun you actually got a dedicated six shots before reloading and in the charactered cartridge gun you only got five shots before reloading now one of the things you're gonna say in the audience is yeah but you could actually reload the cartridge gun under stress and under time and I'm gonna argue that in most self-defense scenarios that is not true by the time you've opened the loading gate ejected at least one of the spent cartridges out of your cartridge gun and loaded it from your belt although in 1870 cartridge belts were not common pouches were cartridge bolts helped but pouches doesn't make that much of a difference but by the time the Situationists was over with being able to reload this and still use it to continue to defend yourself without getting shot in the process was an unlikely scenario so in a very strange and counterintuitive way I will argue that the percussion gun with the safety notch between chambers provided one extra round the cartridge gun did not [Music] [Music] I tried to reload this and I do this intentionally I shot these differently to represent could I reload this under the time stress of the environment to get more shots off and for the most part I could not the part-timer ran out and let's say if this was based on a real-world scenario unless I had covering fire from a friend and I was not alone the reality is if I would duck behind cover and started reloading this thing chances are I would get flanked or killed if I hadn't already taken care of my adversary reloading this was an administrative task just as reloading a percussion gun was an administrative task the cartridge guns made it more viable to do under duress in the field but I would argue that not really tactically sound under duress in the field with both of these guns the reality is the quickest reload was another gun in terms of power I talked earlier about using the proper Johnston and dowel bullets which that's what this is here 210 ish 220 grain bullet with the proper powder charge which leaves the bore of an 1860 Colt at around 700 feet per second and when they first converted to cartridge guns they went to 44 colt which ironically was around a 210 grain bullet at around 680 feet per second they were trying to reproduce the ballistics of the original black-powder percussion gun to the cartridge gun as they were moving from percussion to cartridge now a lot of times we see people today shooting only round ball in these reproduction guns and that's because round balls are easy to get but that said at 138 to 140 grand round ball will not produce as much oomph on the target as a for conical such as this would and this is what was generally used back in the Old West quote-unquote so if you want to have the real experience of firing in 1860 or any other percussion gun based on the actual ballistics of the time you need to get bullets like these now these Johnston and Dow are made by eras gone bullet molds you can buy them from Franklin Armory you can buy them from eras gone you can buy them from paper cartridges calm I believe and these allow you to really experience the reality of what it was like to fire the percussion guns in their day but one thing you need to be aware of is that unfortunately reproduction progression guns for the most part did not bore out this loading area properly for conical type bullets such as Johnston and Dowd they're made for roundball so if you you can still load these by hand if you use loose ball and powder with these bullets but you cannot load paper cartridges into a reproduction 1860 Colt unless you modify this gated area to relieve it to make it more open for seating the paper cartridge that said if you're gonna lose use loose ball and powder and not paper cartridges I would highly recommend getting yourself that Johnston and gel bullets from eras gone bullet molds because it really does we produce the actual experience of firing the profession guns in the ballistics and power that they had in their day so one last thing you probably notice there was a little bit less smoke from my conversion gun than there was from the percussion gun that's because in the percussion gun I'm using genuine black powder and in my conversion gun I'm using a black powder substitute called black horn 209 and the reason for that is that black powder cartridges require specialized Lube that are meant to deal with the fouling that black powder generates and if you use modern Lube bullets with black powder you have big problems and you get wax and lead residue in the barrel so since I only had bullets that were for this cartridge for this gun with modern Lube on them I used a black powder substitute so I could get through the stages produces a little less smoke but for all Tencent purposes doesn't make a big difference and it's generating the same velocity same bullet weight now the original cartridge guns were chambered in 44 colt for ease of reloading and convenience for me - chambered in 41 cult but I was not firing 45 colt I was firing 45 Cowboys special it's a cut-down 45 colt and I was using the exact powder charging bullet weight to simulate 44 colt it doesn't make a difference ballistically but it does make a big difference for what bullets I have on-hand for reloading shooting and etc scores between both of these guns are essentially virtually identical even though I approached the problem somewhat differently from stage to stage the reality is a reliable 1860 Colt percussion gun if you know what you're doing and you understand the alchemy is a reliable gun and it's absolutely a viable self-defense tool specifically in the day and era in which these guns were common for firing over 40 rounds guess what there is no fouling in this action at all proper Lube is what makes the difference getting your nipples or your cones configured properly these happen to be slick shots but originals will work too if you do it right with the right size percussion caps means you don't get cap jams either I have shot this entire match today including rounds for practice before getting here without cleaning the gun and having absolutely no issues whatsoever no reliability issues no jams no malfunctions the reality is a percussion gun properly maintained by and used by someone who knows how to use it is a very reliable fire I would be I would argue that I was a man in 1875 and I had my reliable 1860 Colt percussion revolver it would be hard-pressed for me unless I was a gun aficionado which I am but as an average person to convert to cartridge or to upgrade or to spend X any extra money on the gun I already have that I already know what works is reliable and will do the job so you will see these again being carried well into the 1930s because there was just no reason to change but of course the slow progression from percussion to cartridge occurred people ultimately as they bought new guns didn't buy percussion guns they bought either conversions or guns dedicated to cartridges and that's going to be a video for another day in which I go through that whole process but hopefully you enjoyed watching this video today and it gives you a little bit of an idea about the reality is the percussion guns are incredible firearms that are completely viable for self-defense in their day and age and that some of the lore we have around them today are based on the reproductions and how people use them now versus how people use them then guys if you like this kind of content please consider supporting us on patreon both of these pistols were just with patreon fundage as well as the paper cartridges and reloading ammunition everything here you saw was capable and viable because of patreon supporters like you out in the audience this is not an ad-supported channel we have no sponsors no overlords it is completely viewer supported and all fiduciaries support for this comes from you the viewer if you already are view or thank you for allowing me to make this kind of content if you aren't one and would like to please consider it you can find us at patreon.com slash n range TV if you can't we understand just subscribe to one of our multiple distribution points we're all over the place not just YouTube you can find them all at in range TV share and thanks for watching

Channel: InRangeTV

Views: 162,707

Rating: 4.9503641 out of 5

Keywords: 1860 colt, richard-mason conversion, cartridge conversion, percussion revolver, old west, 1858 Remington, cap and ball, cap n ball, black powder, inrange, inrangetv, forgotten weapons, kasarda, mccollum

Id: wWCqNViqQC8

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020