>This discussion rather reminds me on the reams of discussions out
>there about how to convert a cap-and-ball revolver--say, the Colt Navy
>1851--into a cartridge firing revolver, as well as the hundreds of
>people who will shout at you not to do that.

The funny part is that cartridge conversions are totally period - they were sold as kits, and a great many people who couldn't afford a whole new gun bought and applied them to their Civil War-vintage cap-and-ball revolvers. Virtually all the sidearms you see in old Westerns that aren't Single Action Army Colts are either Colt 1851/1861 Navy or Remington 1858 New Model Army revolvers with cartridge conversions.

I have a vague memory of watching an old Western once in which the hero's adherence to percussion ignition was a plot point. The film was set in the 1880s, long after metallic cartridges had become the norm, and the main character carried an 1858 New Model Army that hadn't been converted. There's a scene where he knows he's going to have to fight basically everybody in town the next morning, and he sits at a table in his rented room and painstakingly loads three or four whole cylinders for his gun, and during the giant climactic gunfight, he reloads by swapping them out wholesale when empty, which only takes him a couple of seconds - way faster than the bad guys can reload their SAAs pumping out one empty at a time.

(Of course, you can also do that with an SAA, but that wasn't the point, the point was the this guy had trained himself to do that because of the limitations of his old cap-and-ball sidearm, and the other guys hadn't because they didn't think they'd need to.)

Nowadays the punch line - as in the fictional anecdote of the Bryar GP-41 in the OP - is that there are companies that makes "cartridge converted" 1851 Navys and the like that were never percussions firearms to begin with, which is pleasingly ouroborian.

>(The 1851 Navy is a very pretty revolver. I have a repro.)

As have I! Sort of. Mine's a Connecticut Valley Arms copy, vintage ca. 1989; I say "sort of" because, although my revolver has the 1851 Navy roll engraving on the cylinder (the naval battle), it's a .44 (which was the "Army" caliber in Colt's product line), not .36 like the real one. Historical authenticity aside, it's a good gun, and has considerable sentimental value. My grandfather and I built it from a kit.

(Sadly, it doesn't appear that CVA does kits any more, or indeed historical reproduction firearms at all. Based on a quick snout around their website, it looks like nowadays they're all about the fancy high-tech modern muzzleloaders, which is a thing I frankly don't get the point of. It's like using modern materials and technologies to build an automobile, but deliberately making it as uncomfortable and hard to drive as a Ford Model T. Why?)

I've also got a reproduction "Pocket Navy", which is just what it says on the tin - a pocket-sized version of the 1851 Navy, caliber .31. (Seen here with the aforementioned 1851 Navy for scale! Isn't that adorable?)

The provenance of this one is unknown; I found it fully finished in a now-defunct Army-Navy store up in Presque Isle, and it bears no identifiable maker's markings. Whether it's a kit someone built and sold, or a fully produced item by one of the various Italian companies that do 19th-century repros, I don't know. It's a dandy little gun, though. I don't think I'd be eager to carry it in a pocket, but then I could say the same thing about my 1903 Pocket Hammerless. Men must have had bigger pockets in those days. :)

--G.
and greater trust in safety catches
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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