Reprocussion 001: Colt Paterson Revolver No.5 Part 1

[Music] hi i'm ortiz and some of you may have noticed that there was a slight difference in the intro for this particular episode well that's because you're not actually watching a primer this is the first of a new series one that will appear occasionally in place of our usual content this is repercussion and since it is the first i probably need to explain the concept in general these are the cult percussion cap black powder revolvers they represent a storied past a foundational stone in the american gun industry they are also extremely old extremely valuable to collectors cults represent one of the most desirable categories of collectible guns to the sort of men who grew up in the era of the cowboy radio and cinema but today many of our younger viewers find them completely inaccessible not just because westerns are nowhere near as popular but also because original pieces are well beyond their financial means the good news is that there are a great many affordable reproductions like this one right here the patterson revolver let's get a closer look this single action only black powder 36 caliber percussion cap pistol is in this case an uberty made reproduction it has an overall length of 12 and one quarter inch and weighs 2.5 pounds it features a five round cylinder and requires disassembly in order to load that's right not just lightboxed a reproduction pistol and that is going to be the point of the series if you couldn't tell from the title we're going to explore some small arms history using uh tools that many of our viewers can actually afford to try themselves and hopefully that will make this a much more accessible series for all of you now since we're covering the colt patterson i suppose i should tell you something about samuel colt born in july of 1814 to christopher and sarah colt his father had been in the west indies trade a euphemism for the triangle trade but this did not last long as his earnings fell he switched to textiles particularly silk in 1821 samuel's mother sarah would die of tuberculosis his father remarrying two years later around the same time the cult family children would be scattered sent to live with relatives or if old enough put to work in various trades nine-year-old samuel was signed up for a year's work on a connecticut farm supposedly it was during this year that he began thinking of a multi-shot pistol because at that time his most prized possession was a single shot flintlock cavalry pistol possibly although not known for sure a gift from his maternal grandfather this was also the period in which he became buried in a volume called the compendium of knowledge which introduced him to a variety of scientific principles after the farm samuel went to work in a textile factory for his father in ware massachusetts there not only was he exposed to manufacturing machinery but also met a chemist william smith who would regularly share his knowledge with the boy samuel including trying nitrous oxide together after three years of factory work samuel was sent to a school in amherst where he did anything but excel honestly colt the man deserves a series all on his own as he has a near endless well of personal stories of triumph failure and cartoonish chicanery i won't be able to cover even a tenth of it i suspect but the short summary is samuel colt had no use for anyone's rules it showed early in school where he was frequently in trouble and this trouble was apparently regularly accompanied by explosions like on july 4th of 1829 when young colt circulated flyers that he was going to blow a raft sky high on where pond apparently there was a miscalculation as the resulting blast drenched the gathered crowd and saw colt fleeing an angered mob the raft by the way the target of the explosion that was just fine in what would become something of a standard for colt his tragic cloud had one distinct silver lining story has it he was rescued by a young man named elijah root a local machinist who found the spectacle more entertaining than the rest colt's new friend would actually end up teaching him how to do rudimentary technical drawing following this display colt would spend another year at school which still was not to his liking following another unexpected explosion he would flee to his home and declare his intention to head out to sea just like his elder brother his father intervened and colt would spend a few more months at school while arrangements were made for him to take work as a midshipman in training aboard a brig named the corvo and here's where our story gets a bit muddy what definitely happened is that colt sailed with the corvo to calcutta and then on to england the most repeated story i have seen is that while in calcutta although some admit it might have happened in england colt saw a particular device a collier revolver this was an early revolving firearm using a multi-chambered cylinder and single barrel now colyer actually had a patent out on a mechanically indexed version of this mechanism but i don't know of any surviving examples instead all existing colliers have manually indexed cylinders now i know a lot of people are disappointed by the notion that collier had the first mechanically indexing revolver ahead of colt but take heart because my friend jonathan ferguson at the royal armories has already put out a video on a self-indexing revolver from the late 1600s so yes that means rotating cylinders with singular barrels and mechanically indexed revolvers did exist long before colt however his design would be more efficient and he'd see it all the way through many claim his vision came from a ratcheting brake on the ship's wheel but this is also somewhat unlikely as he was no pilot most of colt's time went into more laborious work including loading and unloading the ship where he would have encountered a ratcheting windlass these devices allowed users to wind up a rope or cable and included a directionally toothed gear and a flat locking bar or pawl preventing it from unwinding between their pulls colt's vision was as simple as having that lock bar do the pushing and attach it to the hammer so as he sailed back home to the united states of america colt began whittling a prototype a proof of concept of his revolver whereby uh cocking the hammer drives a pawl to rotate the cylinder into position once home he convinced his father to fund his further experimentation and together they enlisted the help of a hartford gunsmith anson chase the first manufactured example of his new revolving pistol well that exploded okay it was going to take a little while colt lived on his meager savings and his father's dime managing a few crude but now working models of his action unfortunately his gun was taking too long to develop and his father's patience and his checkbook especially ran out using some family connections he arranged for samuel colt to once again serve on a sailing ship determined to see his son actually work for a living samuel colt however ran away putting together a bit of scientific kit he began the life of a traveling lecturer he built himself as the celebrated doctor cult of new york london and calcutta with the incredible disguise of adding a u to his name now if this lecture sounds a bit high brow don't worry the primary subject of his lectures was the unique characteristics of nitrous oxide or laughing gas dr colt would for a price let you see your friends and neighbors get high as a kite on stage with him amazing and apparently profitable now with his first round of those profits colt headed for washington to patent his new firearm but a family friend and commissioner of patents henry ellsworth told him to go with just a caveat for now his models were not substantial enough for a true patent and honestly once patented that timer starts so colt went back to the road performing and earning money which he would spend on a number of independent gunsmiths in early attempts to complete his dream eventually he would seek help from a t baxter who employed a man named john pearson who ended up doing the work on the colt guns soon samuel would hire pearson directly putting him to work in baltimore and over the years this man would literally hammer out the original cult revolving pistols and rifles while colt paid the way the income was infrequent and pearson repeatedly had to spend out of his own pocket or went into debt due to colt's staccato payments the development money was still coming from the performances of dr colt highly dependent on whether or not he could draw a crowd in any given city or even if he could manage to travel freely on an unexpected schedule this carried on until the spring of 1835 when samuel colt returned to baltimore with some small savings and started working alongside pearson they expanded into a larger rented workshop and brought in an assistant named brash colt floated his funds by pawning every gun that they made as they made them make a gun pawn it use that money make a gun and in time they saw real progress after weeks of dedicated work he would visit his cousin dudley uh selden dudley selden in new york who advised him now was the time for colt to strike so he borrowed money from his father and uncle in exchange for interest in the patent had illustrations done by jw post and submitted them to the patent office they would also sail to britain and then travel on to france patenting the same in each though interestingly the u.s patent office was the last to grant which technically broke the french one thanks to a rule about subsequent patents in other countries though no one ever challenged it this is also one of those times when i have to kind of cut out a chunk of samuel colt's personal story let me tell you something folks colt did a lot of interesting if not entirely moral things in his life uh from his odd marriage to the mysterious non-execution of his brother sadly i can't squeeze it all in here just for the revolver so check our research uh resources below in the description for yourselves okay with the patent in hand colt now had the leverage with which to build a business and so he started traveling between washington hartford and baltimore also new york seeking investors and a way forward in this regard he was greatly aided by the latter years of an economic boom silver had been flowing into the us economy since 1834 and following jackson's war with the second bank of the united states many smaller less regulated banks were loaning out money fairly freely at the time hard money and hard assets were favored people wanted to put that paper money to work on real assets and while many would invest in western land others sought to you know stock up in new business ventures ownership in new business ventures and so the patent arms manufacturing company was chartered march 5th 1836 with a factory erected in paterson new jersey in a showroom at 155 broadway in new york city that cousin dudley selden would become the company director and encouraged samuel to grant his patent rights to the organization which he did on the proviso that should the endeavor fail they would revert to his control this actually proved to be a very wise move while the patent was in the hands of the company he would also eventually earn a royalty four dollars for each rifle and one dollar fifty cents for each pistol manufactured that manufacturer would be undertaken at the gun mill a factory set along the passaic river that despite a rifle motif would also house a silk processing business in its upper floors sadly throughout this process pearson had still been hard at work trying to finalize the cult designs and despite the newfound investments samuel still neglected to timely pay pearson in the end he would leave colt's employment never to finish the work that he started instead i have to introduce pliny lawton a man who i sadly know even less about biographically we do know he was formerly of springfield massachusetts and may have worked at the armory though no record has been found one would now become responsible for overseeing not only the setup of the patterson works but also adapting the pearson guns for machine manufacturer this would take over a year of extra work before the guns could enter true production having observed machines at work in his youth and taking in the latest available technologies samuel colt had wanted his new factory to be as machine driven as possible in a bid to make as close to truly interchangeable parts as possible this process didn't require machine work as it had been done very expensively with jigs in the past but that had proven so wastefully difficult that it was easier to hand fit replacement parts as the need arose versus trying to do a perfect fit in this sort of non-machine way colt envisioned mass manufacturer with machinery removing the need for expensive hand manufacturing and the sort of rapidly consumed jigs and guides that came with labor could be less skilled as well with each man responsible for only a minimum number of tasks ideally one task colt however had no experience with this and the business did not have the funds at present to afford such a massive setup let alone guaranteeing the sales required to keep that flow you can't just do this with onesie twozies in the end with lawton and selden negotiating colt would have to settle for a combination of machine and hand work resulting in not entirely interchangeable parts but a fairly good product nonetheless eventually and then for a while we got one more episode now if colt wants mass sales he's gonna have to go to the us government and he would have to get past the then colonel george bomford who was serving as chief of ordnance initially bomford's department had shown interest in the revolving colt rifles as early as july of 1835 bomford had asked for models drawings and even samples of the new guns unfortunately from colt's eventual perspective bomford was in the pocket of the hall rifle this single-shot breech-loading rifle has a unique history all its own but at the time some speculated that bomford had a less than objective role in his promotion of this particular firearm now i have not taken the time to investigate the other half of that claim and it could be true or just sour grapes either way colt's revolver did receive a trial by the ordinance department in june of 1837 at west point note that this was before all the production kinks had been worked out there the cult went up against the cochran the hackett which is also known as the fusi robert uh and the dreaded hall of these the hall was victorious the cochran scared the hell out of everyone as it should and the hackett was recommended for further testing colt's gun was dismissed as too complicated and prone to chain fire among other comments now to be fair this early version colt revolving rifle was stretching it attempting to reach what was then the standard marshall pore size of just about one half inch ultimately this proved to be too awkward and a more modern and useful smaller bore would be favored along with improvements to the mechanism but in the meantime samuel colt had to head back to patterson where he assisted lawton in his endeavors to adapt the pearson gun to machine production this first example they finished was unfortunately tested in the presence of cousin dudley selden where it promptly burst this caused a massive argument which caused samuel to flee to new york where he penned his resignation in a letter to lawton who wisely pocketed that thing and did not pass it along uh i didn't know where else to squeeze this in by the way but colton dudley would argue frequently through the company's history dudley was a penny pitcher who actually did a lot to keep the fledgling firm from collapsing almost immediately the wild and impulsive samuel colt was exactly his opposite spending money liberally in order to draw attention to his invention also his spelling was creative each and every one of his letters is peppered with misspelled words although each thankfully appears to have been in an attempt at phonetics and altogether they result in my favorite written quote from cousin dudley i wish that you would so write english that i could show the letters buy a dictionary somehow that always puts genius into perspective for me in time colt returned to work and they got to solving the problem which seems to have been finally ironed out by the fall of 1837. the first production rifles were the ring levers which came in a shorter number one and longer number two pattern over time these would evolve to take on loading levers as an optional accessory and lose their pseudo top straps unfortunately telling the whole rifle story would take up several episodes all on its own and i don't have one so i'm going to skip to the end a bit and just tell you that no significant orders would be forthcoming for any of these guns at least nothing that could sustain the business instead we'll focus on the pistols as while these were not enough to save patterson they would be the ultimate legacy of colt first up would be the number one pocket model this diminutive 28 caliber 5 shot was ultimately the least popular in the market this poor choice for such a small pistol wasn't entirely without reason essentially you're trying to sell to both the military and civilian interests so you bring out this big rifle for the army and country folk and this little pocket pistol for the city people additionally a somewhat more offhand conversation with naval officials had seen some initial interest in that little 28. in hindsight this was probably more personal than it was marshall in nature cylinders of the number one usually feature roll engraving as would most colts for a number of years to come these designs were done by waterman lily ormsby and the number one pocket started things off with what appears to be centaurs versus indians that's rad production of the number one is estimated between 1837 and 1838 it was ended due to low sales with perhaps 500 made patent manufacturing turned its attention instead to a more utilitarian design revolver number two would be slightly bigger advertised with a 31 caliber bore these featured straight grip lines like the previous number one barrels are found from three to five and one half inch although some special 12-inch cased spare barrels have been noted right alongside the number two is the number three belt pistol same frame size and overall features the number three's big change is a flared grip base and that's really all there is to it both of the belt designs also receive the centaur engraving now extended to include a horse dude with a rifle also rad now both of these belt size guns combine for an estimated 850 produced in total better than the pocket but nowhere near enough to support the patterson business now that's two revolving rifles three revolving pistols down and we're still not at our gun today and before we get there well colt has another patent in the works in 1839 he would file this which covers both his already in production pistol design alterations and a new carbine conveniently this would be named the carbine of 1839 which was a further bid at military contracts and was largely designed by the hard work of pliny lawton attempting to simplify and ruggedize the cult concept this gun was also under half the price of the old ring levers and represented patent arms best attempt at large orders unfortunately it too would fail to attract business at least until it was too late but once again we're not concerning ourselves with the rifles today so let's look at the other prominent feature of that particular patent a revolving pistol worked up from the original cult patent and incorporating a number of features from the models already in production although some minor features and the overall proportions point to a new gun overall so we have number one two three and of course that leads us to number five yeah i don't know why they skipped the number four but there isn't one i've never found an explanation for why so this guy is a reproduction of the number five or holster model board for 36 caliber this gun had barrels ranged from four to nine inches though again a few in 12-inch cased uh sets with a spare barrel large framed and with flared grips the number fives would receive their own unique engraving this time a stagecoach hold-up scene no mystical creatures in this one i'm disappointed to say it's also the only patterson pistol to really develop its own place in military history but first let's get a look at our reproduction today in order to feel out the design a little bit okay first and foremost i want to point out this is a reproduction pistol not an original there's a number of reasons we chose to do this obviously cost obviously not wanting to really risk an original especially for firing but also because the reproductions can be stronger they're made of better steel they're made of from machine tooling instead of being hand fit you know piecemeal there's less variance in them which means that they're not always going to be true to an original because originals have much more individual personality but they're certainly going to teach us all the lessons we need to see and it's a lot easier on you guys to you know potentially get your hands on one of these obviously now being a black powder percussion cap pistol we're also going to have to talk about some technology we've never had to deal with on this show so i want to quickly explain that this is the sort of gun where you load in powder you load in a ball if you want to weatherproof it at that time or if you're more conscientious about it you may put some grease or lard on the end of that and you will then put a percussion cap in each of the five in this gun five holes in the cylinder and then that would get you a maximum of five shots however a lot of the time because of the lack of safeties or the desire to keep the hammer down or whatever the case may be a lot of times people would download this to only four shots and allow it to rest on an empty uh cone more on those in just a second all right so you guys get the idea we're dealing with percussion cap now this is really the original revolver in a lot of ways yes there were revolving mechanically indexed guns as i said before this one but this really starts to set the mold and it really wouldn't be until the next gun that the mold is really set but samuel colt really uh exemplified what is the american revolver all right and it starts here so some of this gun looks completely alien to you like the lack of a trigger or lack of a trigger guard maybe some of this odd shaping up here but a lot of it looks like you would know how to use it most of you guys would recognize a single action gun you would pull the hammer and then pull the trigger right the cylinder is going to index he's going to drop on a percussion cap right all that stuff colt's defining it as he's developing this gun so don't take it for granted that someone in 18 you know the middle of the 1800s is going to see this gun and they're going to think the entire concept is alien this is going to look sci-fi future to them okay now single action only which means that we have to [ __ ] the hammer in order to fire the gun which is when our trigger is actually going to appear there she is we didn't even get to half [ __ ] and it pops right out in that first stroke now we're going to go all the way back as if we were going to fire it on these guns i find that it's particularly a good idea to make sure that you really get all the way back sometimes these cylinders don't quite come all the way around now if you look at it from the top you'll be able to see the alignment of that groove in the cylinder where the percussion cap would be and the groove through the back of what is our frame and of course when we pull the trigger on this gun the hammer is going to fall into that groove filling it up and smacking the percussion cap should it have been in there in addition to smacking the percussion cap it's going to hold the cylinder aligned with the barrel in that position so that we don't have any shaving of lead into unfortunate directions now i should also say at full [ __ ] this gun does have a cylinder stop as a matter of fact you can see that mechanism from the outside through these little holes right here in the cylinder there's a pin that aligns with them when it comes into the proper position holds them properly aligned for the hammer to be able to fall and then the hammer really secures the alignment during the actual firing we'll see more of how that works in our animation so that i don't have to take this thing all the way to the pins now we've covered the fact that it's single action we've covered the fact that it's percussion cap we've covered all of that so let's talk about what makes this gun unique all right uh number one the cones themselves which i do not know if they have been accurately reproduced but on the original pattersons these little cones down in here the firing cones a lot of people call these nipples technically i've seen that actually in period documents in an informal way so it tends to be like a firing cone or flash cone if they're talking about in a patent if they're talking about it more uh colloquially they'll just say nipple but these guys uh colt actually patented his own very specific tapered design in order to concentrate the blast and have the best possible ignition i don't know if they duplicated that internally i don't really have a way to check but know that colt really did think through all the details in his gun now the cylinder that houses these being an early design is actually a cylinder it doesn't have a rounded back or any fanciness to allow percussion caps to escape the only nod to this is there is a slight trough in this fitted brass piece that will allow them to you know come away out the side that allow them to keep from jamming between the cylinder and the bottom of the frame there's not really any protection between the cylinder and the back of the frame so cap jams can be fairly common on these we'll see colt try to rep to rectify that a little bit later all right so if we want to talk about how to load this gun unfortunately for this particular piece it is a disassembly process all right gang i've zoomed in on the most critical component of the disassembly that being of course the locking wedge now this is a piece of basically rectangular metal that's going to go through the entire gun now what it's doing is it's tying the front and back halves together and most critically i need to comment on this screw right here because this screw is why i've had to do a little editing on this episode now out of habit and frankly the way i was just showing black powder originally i loosened that before i drive the wedge i never really thought about why and in reviewing uh the original patent as suggested by one of our viewers and in actually manipulating the firearm i found that no you can leave that screw tightened down in order to disassemble the gun what it does do is one function by two directions so it is a stop in this case as originally described in the patent it would have been at least a stop for over inserting the wedge it's not doing that task now you can tell because there's been a cutaway here a notch that means that it's not really interacting with this side of the wedge at all and if we look at the wedge itself it has a little shelf on the bottom that's preventing over insertion from this side that means not driving it all the way through the gun and losing it out the right side of the gun what it does still do the one function it has is that it prevents this block from coming out the other way not from disassembling the gun but rather from getting it lost so let me show you how that would be if i flip this over we have the projecting side of the wedge here i can take in this case a plastic camera and give it a sharp tap and it's popped all the way out but not cleared the gun now the reason it hasn't cleared is because that screw is holding on to the wedge see i can't yank her out that is excellent now uh from here if i had gorilla arms i could just pull this gun apart but i do not so instead what you always end up having to do is just gently tap and pull with your fingers until she comes free plastic hammers are great leather hammers also good so once she's separated you can see what's going on inside we have a central spindle going through the cylinder and into the frame and then there's a hole in that that hole is filled by this tapered wedge now i want to be clear i don't know if the taper was original or part of the reproductions but it appears that all the modern ones that i've encountered have an ever so slight tapering which is noticeable because the further you drive the block in the tighter the action becomes this of course would help with wear so as you shoot the gun you compress the block and then you just set it deeper it's a wear part but it's a wear part that's sort of self-adjusting in terms of being able to tighten down you'll know if you've over tightened your block because what will happen is it'll draw this action sort of over center it'll tighten it up a little bit too much and you'll start feeling the cylinder drag now this gun was used when it came to me and i can tell that at some point it was over tightened and still tried to be operated because you can see where they scraped the front of the cylinder because this was so tight up against there that when they cocked it it just dragged so if that happens to you obviously you just tap the wedge back a little bit and then i tend to tap this joint just once or twice and then see if it's loose again easy way of adjusting all right now if you actually want to load this gun you're going to need a special tool patterson colt revolvers are a bit more kit dependent in introducing his gun colt also sold a series of accessories these tended to include a five-shot flask which also had a version that fed balls from the other side we sadly do not have one of these to tinker with here today however our friend joel over at rock island auction house has handled one and you can see that video as linked down in the description there was also a lovely capper meant to help speed up loading and to prevent having to handle those tiny number nine percussion caps individually you would also receive a bullet mold with your patterson and this would be critical to keep with your gun as especially amongst the early rifles the actual bore could vary a bit between the guns themselves and so if you use someone else's mold you might end up with an oversized or undersized lead ball i'm unsure if this was resolved in time for the number 5 pistol perhaps more importantly the early pattersons relied on this unusual device which is in fact a multi-tool thankfully we have a reproduction of one of those guys right here so this episode is not lost yet now the way this guy works is that he is truly a multiple use tool so we have a flathead screwdriver here which is obviously useful for removing that captive screw although a better modern screwdriver is probably better for not ruining your piece but you could use this if you had the original kit we have we're going to see this guy in a minute and we're going to explain the shape in a minute but at the other end we have a weird little bulbous screw-off bit with an eyelet in order to attach this to a lanyard or whatever so let's see what's going on in here right what's gonna be not one but two tools if you pay close attention so let me go ahead and zoom in on this all right over here we have see if you can see that with my finger there we have a very thin little metal poker right now what this is for is for being able to clear out those firing cones on the cylinder so i can go in there and you know clean clean clean all right the other side of this however is actually tooth now i believe this reproduction is slightly different i'm not sure which is the original configuration i have a cylinder with a if you look down closely on these guys you'll see there's like four notches around the firing cone uh this is a two notch tool so unfortunately these two are incompatible i'm not sure which company made this reproduction tool but i had to buy it separately uh they should align what should be able to happen is i should be able to use this uh key to grab a hold of one of these nipples and twist it out and therefore be able to replace the nipples or otherwise service them on the revolver now let me put this back together there we go and let's zoom back out for a second so i can show you how to use this section of it alright so with the cylinder here assuming we had put in our powder and now i want to add our ball well we would take a 36 caliber ball put it here and then we take this little guy and that's why he's got that weird shape because it goes inside what would have been the pathway for that locking wedge it's going to go in there we would align this little plunger over the ball and then we would push down now if the ball were there it would keep the plunger sort of centered which i don't want to put a live ball in there right now so we keep it centered until it dropped into the hole and then we would crank down and as we crank down you can see that hinge at work and it allows us to put bearing force down on the ball now this is not square headed it actually has a rounded pocket shape to it so it doesn't deform the ball and cradles it right down into where it should be so you would load one let me get it lined up you would load one and then rotator over and load your next one crank it on down and that's how this particular unique tool would work so you don't want to lose it necessarily because the only other i mean you can get away without it i mean you could take this guy off right and then you could uh just put in your powder take your balls and just take some sort of plunger of any sort like a bullet starter that's in the correct bore and then hammer that in there so you could do it without this but you're still going to need a secondary tool you're not just going to thumb it in there because then you're going to create an air cavity and it's not going to do what you want so if you're going to have a tool you might as well have the everything tool i'll also point out that most cased sets came with a spare cylinder which allowed not only redundancy but a means of faster reloading now before we get into actually loading and using this piece let's go ahead and get a look at how it works inside with the help of our animator bruno [Music] being a cap fired gun the falling camera strikes a percussion cap which ignites the chamber full of black powder which in turn propels the lead ball the core mechanism of the single action revolver is this the hand which is a simple pawl attached to the hammer cocking said hammer drives the hand upwards where it snags a set of ratchet teeth on the original pattersons these were suspended in the frame rotating a projecting screw which in turn rotates the cylinder the hammer is under constant tension from a large mainspring which presses on its stirrup releasing the hammer causes it to spring forward where it smashes the percussion cap alignment of the cylinder to the bore is handled by the cylinder stop a tipping cylindrical block as the hammer is cocked the block is tipped down freeing the cylinder to rotate with the hand as the hammer continues back the block is freed and springs against the cylinder wall until it catches in one of five indentations each aligning one chamber to the barrel the pin that actuates the stop is beveled on the lower side so that as the hammer drops it now snugs past the stop compressing one of its tines here we have the sear which is sprung to hold the hammer at full [ __ ] or you can ease the action into half [ __ ] where the trigger cannot be pulled and the cylinder stop is not engaged back at full [ __ ] tipping the sear frees the hammer to fall and last but not least the trigger bar serves two purposes first it allows the trigger to pull the sear out of the path of the hammer secondly if we fold up our trigger for holstering when the hammer is cocked the transfer bar is pushed forward popping the trigger back out alright gang let's load it up for real first i pull the hammer to half [ __ ] tap out the wedge and gently tap the frame while pulling it apart we'll need some powder this would have originally been black powder today we're using the equivalent pyrodex original pattersons would have shipped with a five spout flask so this step could have been done in one motion sadly i don't have one of those these pre-lubricated felt wads are something of an anachronism most shooters of the time would skip this step for our purposes however they are exceedingly convenient preventing flashover and helping maintain the bore between shots next up we have 36 caliber round balls which again could have been dispensed simultaneously with an original tool i'll just place them individually when filming we found that i need to slightly preset the balls with the starter i'm unsure if this was because of the reproduction gun or the reproduction loading tool which i placed through the wedge hole and use as a lever to press each round in tightly you on this early patterson i have to remove the cylinder in order to fit the percussion caps unfortunately even so my capper would not fit again having the original tools would be nice since i placed them by hand i'm just going to gently but firmly press them home with a punch from here we just have to reassemble the pistol the patterson has no half steps on the cylinder and so a fully loaded gun would need to be carried in the half [ __ ] position or as many choose to do with a hammer down on an empty chamber since i'm presently on range and ready to fire i'm going to let it rest between caps for just a moment so that you can see the fold up trigger in action ah the dreaded cap jam i'm glad we got to see one of these as they were apparently somewhat common on these early patterson revolvers we'll see attempts to address this in later design work nice now normally this would be the part of the show where i start discussing the production numbers and service life of the firearm in question but the front end of this particular episode was so heavy i think we're gonna have to save that for a part two and instead we'll skip straight from demonstrating this piece into having may discuss it with us all right gang once more we have room for may and of course plenty of room for what is a handgun an early percussion cap revolver wow our first one huh yep this is new territory now a lot of you are coming over from our world war one series this is not that this is reprocussion and so we're gonna have viewers that aren't used to what we normally do in this uh this gun is not gonna be put in the context of before in this show no matter the gun if it came from the 1870s 1880s 1890s 1914 1915 right they would all be compared they talked about a little bit in terms of where they came from but they'd all be compared to each other in world war one because that's the context yeah that's what we're talking about right this wasn't in world war one no uh this was only in its own time i mean they existed beyond that but i hope no one took the cinder wolverine yeah jesus uh i mean it would beat a stick yeah but we're only going to talk about this gun in terms of its own time period its own context now uh that being said what's it like uh to you know normally i would say handling yeah that's not the first process of this one no not for percussion cap for percussion cap i think we have to change things up and we have to talk about loading because loading is sort of this process that happens well before you ever handle or fire you don't want to be on a battlefield loading this thing right so what was loading like with this early patterson so yeah it is an entirely different thing when it comes to loading especially with this gun in particular because you don't get to just like any other pieces we've handled for our previous primer series where you get to load it and just shoot no you have to take this gun apart in order to load it yeah dealing with black powder teaches you how good metallic cartridge is absolutely just having to take the whole cylinder out in order to load it and then that is a whole process in and of itself like putting in the powder the wad the ball it takes time and if you don't line things up properly you could end up just not being able to shut the ball in or you could end up spilling powder everywhere like there's a whole slew of things that you have to worry about in just the loading in and of itself and on top of that things like you don't even think about like not putting in the key far enough or i don't it just feels like it's an entire thing that you you really hope you have a cylinder set off on the side already pre-loaded that way you don't got to worry about it yeah now i want to point out something this was your first time loading this particular black powder firearm like we filmed your first load on it i showed you how in the context of this one gun yep and as we kind of mentioned in that segment there's multiple ways to do this so you could have done it if you had the original five shot flask you could have taken this one cone put it over the cylinder and gone shake shake shake faster real cool assuming all five nozzles behave that's the other problem i've talked to guys that have reproductions of those they say that they don't even use them because getting an even load is really hard that's good to know yeah and then you would flip it over and you'd roll out five balls and line it up and all that really does for you is it plops five balls down which you might bump or scatter yeah you still have to sit there and start them you can't beat them in with the flask so you're going to sit there with a pusher and start them right then take it over to the frame of the gun and use that little uh the leverage yeah for you yeah so these are tricky like um i will say that was extra tricky for that load because it was what 40 degrees outside and my poor hands were frozen by the end to be fair a lot of people are going to be like 40 degrees it was like 75 the day before so there's no time to adjust literally went out there and went oh i want to wear a different i'm going to wear so um and by the way in the case of argon i know we said this before you loaded with wod which in particular with the patterson when you're trying to use this tool one is kind of a pain in the butt because it pumps everything up yeah it does kind of push the ball up so you kind of have to like you said push the ball in just a little bit in order to make sure you can actually get the tool over it yeah the use of that uh pre-lubricated wad would be an anachronism they would not have done that and in most cases as far as i'm aware they probably would not have even greased the outside unless they were smart because that provides a certain amount of weatherproofing uh moisture proofing and of course preventing flying and it seems like a good idea to me we don't want that flashover yet right and i don't know if we define that but flashover in this case would be if you managed to have now they thought of it as spark at the time to my understanding it's actually more of a plasma effect but um if you had the discharge of one cylinder managed to arc or spark into the next cylinder and discharge that cylinder either from the cap end with the percussion caps hopefully not happening because the protection the next percussion cap is sealing it right or at the front because you had a undersized ball and a little trail of powder or something that could ignite right uh if you you can have a situation in which flashover causes you to have a chain detonation and that means cylinders or chambers in the cylinder that are not aligned with the barrel at that moment can go off yes which is terrifying yeah i would not enjoy that yeah and it's why if you're ever dealing with like um a stocked black powder pistol because in america black powder is not considered a firearm so therefore you can stock a black powder pistol that's not considered an nfa device uh do not and i've i've thankfully never seen anybody blow their fingers off but don't be tempted to hold in front of the gap or out on the barrel even if there's enough room for that powder to blow out right you could actually still have a ball of ghost yeah it's why when you see the revolving carbines for colt and they talk about those chain detonations they're kind of terrifying because chain detonation would put you know around into the handguard area so you know you want to get behind and put but hand-to-hand comfortable thought yeah um and hopefully we'll see some of the stock carbines at some point with carbines in the future cool um sorry i know we're getting way down the road but we've never done black powder right this is our first one so i guess this is going to be an extra special time with me now you've shot other black powder revolvers before this that's true yes um i personally own a reproduction of walker um they're yeah super cool yeah um it's a process though it's definitely a slow process that's kind of like i don't know having a smoke on a nice warm cool day or something like that is if there's a whole thing involved with it i guess yeah i wouldn't recommend smoking while loading the don't do that at the same time don't do both no but you are right there's a sort of um process to it yeah however how do you feel about the process for this is because you just said you like sitting there on certain cool evenings or not evenings but during the day and shooting and um you pour your powder you you place your ball you roll it over you crank it down you hit it with a little board butter or something it's it's it's meditative and then you get to shoot it and then you get to go back to this sort of meditative task yeah that's really what it is it is just a calming meditative thing right how is this so i guess this would be more relaxing i think like it don't get me wrong it's still a relaxing process overall and i think in the outside of the context of a battle if i'm just chilling it's actually it's it's very nice it's pleasant i can take my time there's no rush with it it kind of forces you into a a relaxed state it really does but i will say i do kind of hate that i have to take it out of the gun to do it that's the part that i kind of don't like it kind of breaks the process i guess disassembling the firing room every time is a little annoying but there's also one part that i think you're forgetting what am i forgetting uh because this doesn't have a relief cut you have to set the percussion caps right on them before loading it in so you forgot about that you're assembling a firearm with live chambers and live percussion cats and you're you're putting your hands in front of that by necessity there's nothing i can do it just it has to be done and i can't say i enjoyed that yeah it's very unlikely to be a problem you have to strike those you know what i mean and you notice like i just i did a firm press down on them to really try to seat them because if you don't seat them well enough the gun might not go off yeah and in fairness it's not unlike if you were to hold like an 1873 with a center fire and hold it by the cylinder and start putting rounds in there you don't think about the fact that at the other end of that cylinder is a bullet and then behind that is your finger because what is really going to strike that while you're loading it you know it happens all the time still something about this just is nerve wracking where you're just like can't say it's enjoyable process it does kind of break it in two ways though thank you i forgot about that my mind just kind of erased it thank you oh i just remember when we were filming i was like yeah now you want to do this one thing and she's like these are live cylinders i was like yep that's how we do it i was like oh yeah okay there's no other way to do it you're right we'll see an option that colt came up with later that improves this quite a bit i'll be looking forward to that for next episode all right so what's it like to actually shoot this piece let's start off with the ergonomics first off um first handed this gun obviously it's it's kind of feeling muzzle heavy like it definitely does kind of sit forward of your hand and if you look at the script it really does swoop back into your hand as well so you're definitely supporting everything up front i think the bell grip helps you think so can you imagine it without a bell grip well no no i am trying to actually that does seem like that would position your hand kind of weird you wouldn't be able to reach back to grab this hammer so you're right this swoop back is absolutely necessary to give you at least some angle on that especially the back end of the belt to resist that muzzle forward because that puts it into the back of your hand yeah i guess so you're right you're right you're right it is necessary but dang does it feel weird at least compared to a lot of rollers i've handled before um so yeah it definitely feels weird and then where my fur forefinger has to be where my trigger finger is it's like okay well where do i place that well place it beside the gun but you know it's kind of awkward in a weird position where it's like there's no trigger here now when you know obviously hammer up uh there's no guard for me to put my hand near there's really nothing where do i grip it it's kind of awkward this is like the handgun equivalent of having a straight wrist stock yeah there's nothing to tell you where to put your hand except on a straight razor stock there is a trigger guard wait there's some there's like some light shaving on this on the metal right here that i'm like well maybe they meant for you to just kind of grab it like here or something like that that's for you that's for you to be able to reach around when you're pulling the trigger and not cut yourself oh okay well that does make sense but yeah otherwise it's just like i guess my finger just goes off to the side i don't know kind of bizarre well on the sense of the draw much safer you're not shooting yourself in the leg on the draw because a lot of people will habitually reach for the trigger go ahead and put their finger on there they go to pull out a leather and then they pull that trigger because they're pulling right especially if it's an emergency and you just sort of death grip whatever you grab you'll pull that trigger and so there is some element of safety there but it's also a single action only so you could just carry it hammered down and have the trigger out because it's a very odd decision that i've never seen explained entirely that's fair um and then getting into the actual shooting part from there uh cocking the hammer first and foremost dear lord so on this one in particular you have to make sure you pull the hammer all the way back otherwise it's possible you might miss your right placement for the cylinder to be able to pop the percussion cap right so it really does kind of suck because this hammer it doesn't like if you unless you wrap your pinky down underneath you really can't get a good position on it i mean i tried it several ways over but like that was practically the only way i could get it in order to be able to [ __ ] the hammer all the way back and even then y'all could see on camera i was struggling to get that thing pulled back yeah i've never really until handling the patterson i didn't realize that i used my ring finger as a position point yeah not even as a leverage point i just never i never noticed that my ring finger had a lot to do with my ability to [ __ ] a hammer because essentially whenever i cocked a hammer it would be ring finger and thumb doing all the work but i never thought about it yeah but once i was handed this gun the first time i got it i thought i was the weakest you want to instinctively do it like that right yeah i cannot [ __ ] this hammer and it's not just strength it's like bone is not in the right spot or something and everything starts slipping i have successfully managed to not wrap my pinky and and brute force this open and i did it right before the show and now now it's like yeah you're trying it's just not going i mean you can see you almost hurt yourself i got a half [ __ ] and then from here oh i did it okay there you go that's how you do it i made it but if i wrap my pinky like give myself some and this is something i had to kind of figure out for myself i had to find somewhere to get some yeah you had to do a few kind of maneuvers to be like oh try it this way yeah i think you were the actual like gave me the q on right okay so i wrapped my pinky done you know and i'm still kind of bearing on it because my yoke is so far away so i'm having to draw across a much more awkward angle than if i just had a trigger guard yeah and then you're trying to keep if i'm trying to do it i'm trying to keep it straight for the cameras like i'm trying as much as possible to make it like stay in the shot whatever i'm doing it too so it's really difficult to even give myself some extra time to do some extra motion even then just on camera i'm still having a hard time with it it's the ultimate grip strengthener oh yeah definitely um and then the sights on this guy you know what it's interesting i love that it's like part of the hammer what did we shoot did we shoot something before that had the sights as part of the hammer i don't think for the world war one series i think you're thinking of other black powder revolvers that we've shot probably so like the walker and thing yeah they're not too bad i mean it is a long sight radius too and i mean we'll get into the accuracy in a moment with that one it's kind of cool it's kind of funny to think about like early black powder revolvers had like the longest sight radius possible because it wasn't even the barrel they put it all the way back on the hammer which excellent in terms of sight radius the problem is how how accurate are you you know i know yeah how finely tuned is especially if the hammer is whacking into something all the time oh yeah god only knows hopefully it's decent um and the recoil on it wasn't too bad the trigger itself i mean i can't really say it was like the other triggers that we've handled for the series it's it's it's a weird kind of flimsy trigger that just kind of hangs out and wiggles down there at me i mean it wasn't bad but i really do wish there'd been a trigger guard on this one because i really think it would have benefited from it yeah but that doesn't affect the trigger pull no it doesn't um in this case being a single action it's a fairly crisp trigger it's just a single action release and i don't want to destroy my cones too much yeah no no you definitely want to give it some cushioning but it's still pretty no this is a reproduction it's not a polished up original cult i'd be curious what the originals would do by comparison it feels a little it's it's sharp but a little heavy and i think i need a little more ramp on it than i expect although i don't know that i wanted to be a hair trigger with no trigger guard at all anyway that's true so i find it to be a little bit of a clumsy if anything i wish it were a little bit heavier just because there's no no guard and it kind of just hangs out down there yeah but could you imagine heavy because don't forget you have to point this thing and being black powder you have a very long sort of lock time because you're going to drop percussion cap's going to go off there's a momentary hesitation so for black powder it's not as bad as say flintlock or something but you have that element of click boom instead of click boom and so that's true there is definitely a pause there yeah so a heavy trigger or a trigger that sort of like lopes off is going to throw your aim especially combined with a and then you even had at least one hang fire that's true i guess we did have one hang fire i can't remember that's the one that made it to footage or not but there's definitely a maybe click boom in there see fair we did do like a test one on this one to make sure it did fire i can't remember if that was during the test of the actual shoot itself yeah we also given away a lot there's a second episode on this obviously we have a different more different version of this and so different yeah um first you make a patterson then you make a more different patterson uh so that's coming next episode so we may be mixing up our footages as we're trying to think of that yeah although this is the one i was the most accurate with i think oh yeah no you did actually so interesting story when we were filming the high speed that you've seen uh uh i don't know if it made it into the audio of the high speed or not yeah it was our is myself and may on range and then we actually had someone helping us name kristin and so chris and i understand they're doing the high speed and we're about 60 yards from the berm and we tell may line up on something you know she'll pick a log or a target that's been left downrange or something yeah and then something i can reposition myself to several times over so that i can let the gun down give them a second to mess with cameras and i can put it back up again very easily and point the same thing right well it puts the gun ends up putting the gun in exactly the right position yes and so uh we had there was a may chose a white nine inch steel plate that was down at the end of the range it was a rifle plate figured it was white and a sea of green perfect right so she just vaguely points at it and you know we set up the camera she puts her arm back down takes her rest for a moment then we tell her go ahead and what she all she has to do is she has to pick up the gun and shoot it and then when she's done she puts the gun down and it's my job that there's a reverse four second buffer i'm sure everybody's excited to hear this but there's there's a thing to it i almost messed up my shot because what happens is the gun goes boom and in my head i have to go one two three click and so it's like three and three in the third seconds is when i hit it so that we get a little bit before you pull the trigger okay and so i almost messed up the shot because i go it goes boom and i go one and i almost start the word two in my head and i hear ting from the other end of the range and then chris and i look at each other and we look over at her and then okay and i hit the button luckily you hit the button before you both just started speaking right so i hit the button and then we're like dude and so it's like a 60 yard shot with the 36 caliber round accurate yeah so the target is on the floor pretty good too i would not underestimate one of these i mean you saw at 30 feet it was doing pretty good but then she apparently was hitting a nine inch plate at 60 yards with it so not bad yeah casually so it was a very casual day now uh for anybody curious that was 18 grains of black powder of uh in this case maybe just slightly under it because i was pushing my finger in a little bit right and this is pyrodex not even black powder i should say that too pistol pyridex so um we found that to give the most consistent results on these reproductions i've been trying to find the original load data and it i've heard that it was more like 15 or even as low as 12 i can't get a clear answer and i've never been able to get a hold of like an original uh five spout i feel like if i could get a hold of original five spout then what i could do is i could dump that and then use one of those measurements to figure out where they put it so um i'm still not 100 sure there uh and i guess while we're talking about being insecure about things i'm worried about data yes yes uh when it comes to patterson's and other early cults a lot of you may not know this there's a lot of books available out there by r.l wilson who was later outed as a fraud in the collecting community and there's a whole history there that i really need to dig in deeper to actually talk to you guys about right but the short answer is he greatly affected the modern research into the colts and now it's left this really muddy trail there's lots of people who still biblically repeat stuff that this man has said and the problem is we don't know what all he said that is incorrect or correct because he also simultaneous to frauding and modifying original historical pieces to make them worth more by having them engraved on their things supposedly right he also had the most through his hands so he had he was in the best position to have the real information by doing all this research and unfortunately decided against the real thing well he tweaked it right but we don't know how far or how much and so most of the episode that you're seeing is actually based on um an author that was writing in the 40s and it's a little bit further back than i like to go because information gets a little vertical back then right i'm basically a little uncomfortable with this whole episode in terms of being as accurate some of the stuff that's been more recently researched into the 70s 80s 90s you know but we're stuck all right this is where we're at until somebody comes through and sort of unpacks all of that mess and if you know of someone who's doing that work i'd love to hear from them yes um and as always we're completely happy to really film anything as soon as better information see arsenal is always the best available information that we know of right and as soon as we know it better we are happy to readdress everything which we have done i mean we've redone the label episode and it's way a thousand times better than it was the first time right so uh regardless if if there's problems always let us know uh it's just trying to talk about cult history you have to trip over this man's legacy and it is a huge mess okay so uh disclaimer aside there's nothing he can do to change how you feel about this reproduction feelings my true your true feelings on a reproduction because we don't have the original uh patterson is this it's 1840 okay ish 12 18 we're in that era sure um what am i wearing i don't i'm not that good on women's fashion uh but would you know is this something that you feel like is a viable weapon of that time period so we've got i don't want to get too far into it because we we do have another gun coming along down the pipeline that is more different than this one but quite similar to it but in the era of itself what we have here is a multi-shot well single shot and a like multi-shot gun in a single shot era effectively right so we are looking at what is already a base improvement with one like with a few flaws and one major one being which happened in our range was those cap jams that we experienced like that was a real problem that we saw with this gun the early patterson has a relief cut at the underside to help with clearing caps but that's it and we're going to see an improvement on that very next episode but right now that full cylinder wall is really tying them in there yeah absolutely and you're you're lucky if you manage to get it out by just cycling but the problem is is that there are times when it doesn't like we had now the interesting thing about the cap jam is that it can only affect your second shot or third shot or fourth shot or fish shot true so let's say you get two or three shots off and then you get a cap jam you've gotten off two or three shots at least there's that right so i'm i'm doing better than others might be with their single shots like having to then reload over and over and over again after every shot that's going to be terrifying at least with this one i've got the chance to get off a few before i potentially have a problem so that's pretty good i would say that's impressive what an expensive weapon too though yes very expensive for the time you're you're paying a high dollar for this high technology what would think the dollar would be paying you think um we had it in the episode in terms of the contracts and everything earlier we're going to i don't know where we are because this is two episodes compiled together the short answer is though that it's almost equivalent to the number of shots in terms of contracts so that's right yeah that's right it's just shy so you could almost buy five single shot pistols for the cost of one five shot pistol but do you want basically do you want to carry around abrasive pistols or do you want to carry around one pistol that fires five shots and there's some arguments well potentially fire spy shots like we said with that jam maybe the single maybe a bunch of pistols on your body yeah but then you're carrying around five pistols and you have to hide them and blah blah there's a lot to be said for this and also by the way if you have a failed percussion cap yeah you click again you go to the next one you can't do that with a single then a single shot you're going to pop that cap throw a new cap on there so there's a lot of advantages to this gun when it works properly it's pretty cool i mean a lot of advantage it's a huge advantage the only thing i can see somebody arguing with about is the fact that this only went up to 36 caliber at the time people really wanted like half inch rounds you know what i mean um and so we'll actually see not the next episode but when we get into the next gun that we're covering for repercussion we'll see an attempt to make a very powerful handgun uh but that was obviously a concern with this gun the fact that the next gun that colt comes out with is a monster compared to this it tells you that he realized that everything up to the 36 caliber ball was absolutely not enough and then went crazy and then we'll see it walking so the caliber probably was a real consideration point for people at that time whether that's valid or not it's sort of like maybe the 9mm versus 45 of its day right um i feel man if you're telling me i get a single shot horse pistol or that i'm taking that right i agree i can't see taking a single shot over this one right for all of its faults yeah like it just you know in terms of self-defense or something like that in terms of any sort of you know fighting with a handgun which is how this was designed for you know what i mean this isn't this isn't supposed to be a toy or target pistol you can make the argument that potentially um loading on this one could be faster too because if you have a pre-loaded cylinder in your pocket you could literally pop it on and like just take the key out put it back in ready to go they came with two so in theory you could knock it off you could have possibly ten for the for the time it takes you to have potentially maybe not even two right now what you couldn't necessarily do is go out and buy another cylinder i know people are thinking like you have a brace of them yeah i just have like 30 on you those would be fitted to the individual gun now you could probably have the percussion caps on them yes yeah oh god no well so that might explain by the way why those cylinder recesses are like that it makes it hard for the percussion cap to fall out but the fact that they're uh castled all the way up you know what i mean means that you can carry them without risk of them being impacted in your pocket so yeah yeah it gets all over the place also um cap jams are a little bit more common with modern percussion caps i should say that too it seems like they weren't as big of a deal with the old i think there was like mercury full money or something like that no i don't i don't know much about the chemistry i don't want to get outside my realm but that's fair um i've heard that they are more common now than they were then um because of the way we change production but i don't know for sure um anyway a high technology absolutely remarkable for its time period i think what really kept it down wasn't the gun i suspect it was that price there's just no way for it to compete especially in a recessed market like i it was it was inevitable for the cost fair enough all right how do you feel i'm pretty excited i'm happy to be handling black powder this is my this is my uh nice ending to the day kind of relaxing thing that i've been enjoying it yeah all right guys well uh stick around for after the credits um we'll have any updates to the show anything you might need to know a little bit more relevant because we film these ahead of time oh yes all right have a good one night everybody [Music] for this update the last of 2020 i'd just like to thank everyone for their support this year thank you for watching engaging and even financing this series we sincerely hope you're all warm and happy this christmas and here's to hoping that we can get things better sorted out in the new year to come

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 187,197

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, worldwar1, documentary

Id: Lpbh42KkMdo

Length: 72min 37sec (4357 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020