Video - Shooting A Colt Revolving Rifle

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One of my shooting buddys has the Uberti cartridge version. Fun thing to shoot for sure.

It's the first time I've even heard of the Colt 1855. It's an odd bird what with the offset hammer. I gather they designed it that way so they could use the rearward extracting cylinder pin. Given the real danger of what happens to your hand in the event of a chain fire I wonder why they bothered with a wood foregrip. And with the foregrip not in place a forward cylinder pin could have been used.
 
Arthur Hunnicutt used one in the John Wayne movie "El Dorado". It was a remake of an earlier JW movie called Rio Bravo. It was featured throughout the movie and was shot by Hunnicutt's character.
 
The Colt 1855 is a E. Root design and the rear removing cylinder pin is a feature of the Root designed Colt pistols as well. Colt was looking for something other than his own designs. It is interesting to note that now adays internet experts and the like like to talk about how Remington out did COlt with producing a solid frame rather than Colt's open top, when in fact Colt had a closed frame system in the Root guns and abandoned it to go back to the open top designs.

The .44 carbine being tested in Hungary was intended to arm Cavalrymen and some few were used by state troops in the American Civil War.

The larger rifle caliber rifles were used most famously by 1St US Sharpshooters aka Berdans Sharpshooters for some time before they recieved their Sharps Rifles they had been promised. The 1st USSS generally complained that trhe COlt 1855 was not accurate enough for their mission and their were complaints about not being able to grasp the rifle forward of the cylinder without risk injury.

The shotgun was made in 10 gauge as well. There was one in a little museum in St. Augustine, FL where unfortunately there is now a book store where I could not talk everyone into stopping yesterday just to make sure that the building was not still owned by the same family and that maybe somethings were still around (doubt it anyway) It was right across from Flagler College. Both of the really neat private museums in St Augustine are now long gone.

BTW if you visit St Augustine O'Steens shortly after you cross the bridge of Lions to the Island is the place for shrimp.

By the way Colt actually tried to interest the Army in his own earliest open top designs for revolving carbines to fight the Seminole in Florida and a few were used to do so with and so came to the attention of a few folks one of whom had the name of Walker......

-kBob
 
Long before the Colt Model 1855, the Patent Arms Co.'s product was the Paterson ring lever revolving rifle. It preceded the Paterson revolver and according to Wikipedia, 950 of them were made in a variety of calibers, some of which were larger than the Paterson revolver's calibers such as .38, .40 & .44.


In March, 1836, Colt formed the Patent Arms Company and began operation in an unused silk mill along the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. His first product was a ring-lever revolving rifle, available in .34, .36, .38, .40, and .44 caliber, in which a ring located forward of the trigger served to cock the hammer and advance the cylinder for each shot. This was soon followed with a revolving pistol. These five-shot "Paterson" revolvers featured folding triggers, and were available both with and without loading levers in .28, .31, and .36 caliber. Patent Arms also produced smoothbore revolving carbines and shotguns. The outbreak of war between the U.S. government and the Seminole tribe provided Colt with his first break. Seminole warriors had learned that soldiers were vulnerable while reloading their single-shot firearms, and they developed a tactic of drawing fire, then rushing the temporarily defenseless soldiers and wiping them out before they could fire a second volley. Colt's revolving rifles were quite effective against this, and the Army purchased his products for use by troops in the Florida campaign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_revolving_rifle
Click to expand...
 
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The revolving carbine is best fired with the user's off hand wrapped around the user's trigger hand. Or, the technique used by some shooting the C96 Mauser with shoulder stock: off hand grasps the wrist of the stock and wrist of the trigger hand.

I would not shoot a revolving rifle without an archer's leather bracer (arm guard) on the off hand.
 
One story (dunno wither it's true or not) has it that Berdan's troops when they were armed with the revolving rifle would lower the loading lever and grasp that to steady the barrel.
 
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Carl N Brown said:
...I would not shoot a revolving rifle without an archer's leather bracer (arm guard) on the off hand.
Click to expand...

I'd trust a revolving CARTRIDGE carbine with a leather brace. But it wouldn't save my hand on a cap and ball revolving carbine if it suffered from a chain fire situation.
 
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