Colt Richards Conversion 1860 Army

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian I am here today at the Rock Island auction house I'm looking at some of the guns that are coming up for sale in their February of 2016 regional auction now a while back I took a look at a through conversion of a Colt revolver and today I have here a Richards conversion of a Colt revolver there was a third one there's also the Richard Mason conversion which is in some ways the most popularly known one today although it was not the most common one actually made the back story behind these things is that while Colt was manufacturing percussion revolvers 1860 armies 1862 polices 1851 navies this whole slew of percussion revolvers Smith & Wesson was kind of cornering the market on the most modern handguns Smith & Wesson had exclusive rights to use a patent from a guy named Robin white which the short version is which allowed them to use standard metallic cartridges so they were developing the rimfire cartridge and later the centerfire cartridge and they were the only people who are able legally to manufacture revolvers to use those metallic cartridges those cartridges were of course far more practical far better firearms than muzzleloading cap and ball revolvers and as as cartridges as more powerful cartridges became available they were quickly becoming the obvious go-to solution for anyone looking for a modern revolver well because of this patent Colt and other major companies weren't able to directly compete until 1871 now Roland White's patent actually technically expired in 1859 Smith & Wesson kind of had some legal shenanigans going on and they were able to stretch it out until 1871 when it finally did lapse and Colt immediately started producing cartridge guns now they needed some way to kind of bridge the gap so in 1873 of course Colt would release the Colt Peacemaker the Single Action Army which would become one of the most recognizable and iconic firearms of all history and that that firearm was designed from the ground up from modern centerfire metallic cartridges but while that was still in development they needed an interim product that they could sell to people who were no longer interested in buying a percussion revolver so what could coal offer those people well they came up with three different ways to they're called cartridge conversions but they were actually manufactured from scratch at Colt for centerfire cartridges these were the fewer the Richards and the Richards Mason so what we've got here is a Richards and it looks an awful lot like an 1860 army because Colt had been making literally hundreds of thousands of 1860 armies and other percussion guns and they had a lot of these parts left over so they designed their very first centerfire conversions to use almost entirely existing 1860 army or other percussion model parts so the grip frame is identical the barrel is basically identical the hammer is identical almost identical the firing mechanism is the same really the only one of the very few parts made from scratch differently was the cylinder which was board clear through so it didn't have a solid piece at the at the back like a percussion cylinder and then in addition to this cylinder sized four cartridges they added a loading gate to the back they moved a rear sight onto the back of the frame here instead of being on the hammer like a percussion gun and they added an ejector rod so we'll take a look at all of those details up close in a moment however the first the first conversions to be sold were the sewers which were kind of complicated and not super practical the Richards was the best of the bunch probably it was certainly the most popular Richards was a Colt employee at the time and he patented this conversion technique in 1871 the Richards Mason was a modification of this in total on the 1860 army frame they made about eight or nine thousand of the Richard's conversions so not a whole lot but these were only being made for about two years 1871 and 1872 just to fill that gap between the percussion guns and the Colt Peacemaker so well I bring the camera back here and let's take a closer look at how exactly this conversion was done because there's actually a couple of pretty clever little details to it so as I mentioned at first most of the components here are straight off the 1860 army were minimally modified now one of the big obvious changes is that there's no longer a ramming a loading lever or a ramrod under here that originally would have been to press a projectile into the cylinder well obviously you don't need that with a cartridge firing gun so what cleverly did is they filled the gap in the barrel lug down here and what they filled it with is an extension that is connected directly to this tube for the ejector rod so you need this objective rod to kick out empty fired cases and rather than deal with trying to pin or screw or weld this thing on to the barrel this is a single piece that slides into this open piece of the frame or the barrel lug right here and then they've got it a screw that simply locks it all in place so that's pretty clever you'll notice that the ejector rod is cut off about an inch shy of the cylinder that's deliberate I suspect that's just to give space for the the barrel latch or the barrel cross cross lug here now at the back of the gun obviously we need a way to get into the back of the cylinder to load cartridges so what they did is put in a loading gate pretty pretty standard sort of design a loading gate like this would go on to be basic equipment for a lot of revolvers for some time to come and then when you put a hammer at half [ __ ] the cylinder spins freely which allows you to load cartridges in the back and eject empty ones out like so there is no longer a firing pin fixed to the hammer instead Richards came up with the use here of a spring-loaded frame mounted floating firing pin so kinda this is actually something you would normally expect to see on a much more modern gun but yep back in 1871 is when Colt started doing that now this does not have a rebounding hammer so when the hammer is down the firing pin is extended all the way through and in the condition like this if it were over a loaded chamber and you were to the back of the hammer it could discharge so even though you've got cartridges now you would still want to do the old fashioned load five and carry it with the hammer down on an empty chamber with the Richards conversion the rear sight is mounted on this flange that has been added to the frame on the original percussion guns of course the rear sight is on the hammer now you still have a pretty minimal sight picture that's what you got for a sight picture there so interestingly the most common guns to get this sort of conversion treatment were actually 1862 pattern guns which is it's a 31 caliber frame with a 36 caliber cylinder and when converted to cartridges that would have been a 38 caliber that was used these of course this is an 1860 frames so it's in 44 caliber and the cartridge that colt designed for these and by the way this was actually used as the official US Army handgun cartridge for just a couple years was the 44 colt it was a heeled bullet design so one of the one of the issues here is they actually board the cylinder to be the same diameter as the barrel basically where today we would expect to have a step in the chamber where the brass ends and the bullet starts and and then the bullets outside diameter is the same as the inside diameter of the case if that makes sense with some of the early cartridges like the 44 Colt here they used a heeled bullet where the outside of the bullet was actually the same diameter as the outside of the brass and then the back of the bullet had a little step down and a narrower section that fit into the brass case now heal bullets turned out to be inferior in some other ways that we won't get into today and they were discarded in favor of other designs but for an early gun like this that's the type of cartridge that was used this fired 225 grain bullet at about 650 feet per second might be able to bump that up a little bit but not very much in comparison the 45 colt that would replace this in the Single Action Army was about 50% faster that had a 225 grain bullet and more like 950 feet per second the difference being the 1873 gun had a solid frame over the top which made it significantly stronger these had a inherent weakness of not having a solid frame so if you were to push too heavy of a projectile through here or too hot of a projectile you would actually start to open the frame up here which leads to problems right so one last thing right here on the frame you can see the two patents from 1871 and 1872 that were used on they were relevant to these cartridge conversions thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed the video the richards mason has kind of become the de-facto known Colt cartridge conversion because simply there are more replicas made of that than anything else but originally in the 1870s you this was this would have been the most common of the colt conversion mechanisms that you would see and you know these are pretty cool because they were only made for a couple years right there at the height of the Old West a lot of them saw very heavy use you know this was the the high tech gun for those brief couple of years so if you would like to have this particular one yourself do yourself a favor and check the description text below you'll find a link to rock island's catalog page on this because of course it is coming up for sale and you can take a look at their pictures and their description and if you would like to have it and place a bid right there online if you want one but maybe this isn't the one for you well there's at least one or two others in the catalog that I will leave it to you to search for thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 156,789

Rating: 4.9628005 out of 5

Keywords: richard, richards, conversion, 1871, 1860, 1849, 1851, 1862, police, pocket, house, open top, cartridge, rimfire, centerfire, Colt, mason, thuer, factory, rollin white, patent, army, navy, 44 colt, 38 colt, 38 long colt, 38 short colt, heeled, loading gate, history, development, technology, revolver, handgun, pistol, gun, firearm

Id: eWa6lie6t4g

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2016