First year '51 Navy - prototype

[Abilene]

Judge Menday Coming is the landowner for the Tejas Caballeros CAS club. This is his gun.  He was showing it to some club members a while back and when he got it back, it was jammed, locked up tight with hammer down.  He asked if I could fix it and I said I'd try.  Well, it was a broken bolt leg, and I was able to rework an Uberti bolt to fix it, so he is happy. 

This gun is s/n 11xx and per Colt was made in 1850, but the owner says these were actually made in 1849 and sent out for testing.  So this gun is 175 years old!!  You can see that the arbor/wedge configuration is different, with the slot at the top of the arbor instead of through the center.  I would assume this was a cost-saving modification, easier than cutting a slot through the middle of the arbor.  But it apparently was not a success.  The barrel of course had to have a matching slot a bit higher than subsequent barrels, so if one of these guns ever needed a new barrel, the arbor would also have to be changed.

This particular gun has no finish, but otherwise is in fantastic shape for the age.  The grip frame silver plating is in excellent shape - maybe 90%?.  The grip has about half the finish still on it.  I can't guarantee these are original grips, but they are very thin which I like, and everything else on the gun is original - all matching numbers.  All the markings are perfect.  Look at how crisp the cylinder scene is and check out the condition of the bolt notch and leade, looks brand new!  You can see at the rear of the barrel on top a few small spots of bright blue (looks like charcoal blue). I have a theory, which is that this gun has been used VERY little but at some point lost all its finish in some sort of accident.  It could have been left outside and got rusty, or maybe somebody mistakenly soaked it in vinegar trying to clean it - who knows, but there is no pitting.  There are some dark stains all over the gun.  I think a lot of this is very old dried grease.  There was a lot of black grease inside the action. 

The screw slots are thinner than modern Colts - I don't know when those changed.  It was a very tight fit for my Grace screwdriver.  Fortunately all the screws came out fairly easily.  The Uberti bolt I used needed mainly to have the front pointy ledge thinned down quite a bit so the bolt would rise enough to engage the cylinder notch.  As it is now, there is a bit of play, not "bank vault lockup" but really not bad, no worse than a few of my CAS guns.

I made a video of putting it back together (including not being able to get a screw started for a couple minutes, and I can't edit out the middle with my phone    but it's nothing special, just like putting together any other gun except for pointing out the odd arbor slot. 


I was glad he trusted me with this quite valuable item since I am not a gunsmith, and it was fun working on it and getting it back in working order.  While I was at it I compared the grip to Uberti Navy grips, finding that the change Uberti made to their grip around 2009 makes it much more like the originals (I can only assume that's why they did it).  I will probably do a separate post with pics about that in the STORM forum.

edit: "prototype" in the title is my word. It definitely was used for testing the arbor design.

[Black River Smith]

VERY interesting.  Thanks for sharing this.  Your friend has a nice piece of history there.  Things like this are what I like to see, above and beyond the originals.

[Tornado]

Thanks for sharing!

[Coffinmaker]

  Hey Abilene

As a retired Cap Gun Plumber, I found that 1851 real interesting.  I have not seen an 1851 in that configuration previously.  I can only speculate, Colt moved the wedge slot down to the center of the Arbor to get the wedge further away from the Barrel Bore.  Maybe??  Sort of??  Perhaps??  Actually don't know why they moved the Wedge.  Really interesting though.  Fun Stuff.  And nice fix by the way. 

[LonesomePigeon]

Neato. My guess for why the arbor slot was moved to the center of the arbor rather than the top is that it is stronger and because it distributes shock better.

[Abilene]

On earlier Colt's percussion guns, the slot was in the center of the arbor.  I think they tried this as a cost-saving step, but it did not work as well as the original design so they went back to that.