“Rebated” isn’t a technical term, you can look it up. It is a finance term, sometimes it is even a marketing term which are subjects I know something about. Don’t know about the first use but some smart guy at Colt probably used the term when selling the idea to the army when they were putting a large cylinder on a small frame. The secret in marketing is to maximize benefits, if you attempt to make the diminutive seem larger you may trap yourself. It is always better to accentuate the maximum size of something if that is what the customer wants. “Rebated” does that, it shows you squeezed a more powerful caliber onto a smaller gun.
I have been told the same thing has happened many times with Colt. They changed the way that calibers were defined more than once. The .45 Long Colt is the same diameter as the ammunition used in the 1860 Army model, but they marketed it as a .45 caliber which was a departure from the caliber naming they had used before. Bigger was better in this case and it even matched the new rifle caliber diameter the army was fielding. Marketing.
I learned this one from my wife’s cousin who thinks he still lives in Scotland. Kludgies are a common term to them, he once told me this when I used the term in his presence, so I looked it up for you. It differs a bit from his, he was much more colorful.
kludge definition
/kluhj/ (From the Scot Gaelic "kludgie" meaning an outside toilet) A Scottish engineering term for anything added in an ad hoc and possibly unhygienic manner. At some point during the Second World War, Scottish engineers met Americans and the meaning, spelling and pronunciation of kludge became confused with that of " kluge".
The spelling "kludge" was apparently popularised by the "Datamation" cited below which defined it as "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole."
["How to Design a Kludge", Jackson Granholme, Datamation, February 1962, pp. 30-31].
[ Jargon File]
(1998-12-09)
It looks like the Datamation definition is how some people use it when referring to the brass guns. I have no problem with them, but I also have a camo .50 cal. Rem. 700ML which tells you that I really don’t care as long as it shoots. I don’t even always shoot black powder in my 1871 Open Tops. I have a couple of Navy, an Army revolver, a Walker I rarely shoot and I have 58 New Armys in .36 and .44 which I have been told isn’t correct. I shoot Rugers and sometimes I shoot them in the black powder cartridge class and I don’t care if I use black powder or pyrodex.
People can shoot anything they want, and companies will always sell anything to make a buck, but that doesn’t make it authentic anymore than my muzzleloader is a plains rifle like Jeremiah Johnson used.
Murphy