Paterson five nipple powder charger

My flask is one of the early Italian copies from 1970s that came in a cased set with a "MOFRA" marked Replica Arms, Marietta, Ohio imported Paterson.
It does not have the bottom ball storage section and is totally for storing and dispensing powder.
On the bottom, it is marked "Euromanufacture."
To open it, you turn just the bottom RING counter clockwise a short distance while holding the flask upside down.
The base ring is attached by two pins to curved slots in the sides of the flask and the bottom should lift off when it has been turned about a inch.
Note - only the base comes off not the whole lower half the way the originals did.
The center ring is just part of the sides of the flask and allows for a better grip but does not separate.
Fill the flask up with Black Powder and reverse the process to close it.
After removing the barrel, hold the flask over the cylinder centered on the arbor with one spout in each chamber and push down once, then release to fill all five chambers at once.
Place a ball in each chamber and work your way around with the loading tool.
Even these replica flasks are hard to find and the last one I saw on Ebay went for over $100.
The replica loading tools also go for a premium when they can be found at all.
Good Luck with your Paterson!

I curious as to how much powder did the original or repro throw per nozzle. Seems like you'd be wasting a lot a powder for each charge.

I would imagine if it's a Paterson powder flask it would throw whatever a Paterson normally used, but then not everyone wants to throw the same charge. They look cool if nothing else.

Notice that they were not made for any of Colt's later revolvers (as far as I know!?!) I'm guessing that if they had been reliable, simple to use and sturdy that we would have seen them continue for other models. I think that packs of paper cartridges were KISS compared to loose powder and ball even in a fancy flask.

The Italian copies of the Paterson powder charger were never made to operate like the originals. As has already been noted, they have no separate chamber for ball and powder. In addition the spouts on originals are fixed and the powder is dispensed by twisting the assembly to open a multi-holed trap door. The spouts on Italian replicas are instead the plunger type used in the larger single spout flasks made for the later Walker and subsequent Dragoons

What the Italians did was not even bother with trying to duplicate the original mechanics. Since they had already come up with tooling to make the plunger type single loading nozzle on the Walker and Dragoon type flasks, they just used five of those plunger style nozzles to replicate the look of a Paterson flask. Also, Individually those nozzles have pretty decent springs. Now multiply that by five and you will find it sometimes pretty difficult to effectively push the Italian version down to get an equal load.

There have been some replica flasks made that duplicate the original construction and operation, but they were costly. There was one such company in England that would supply flasks, molds, cleaning rods, and even the fancy snail type cap loader with the prancing pony cast in the top. These were used in some of the fancy cased sets sold by the US Historical society and such. However, the company is no longer making these accessories since the demand basically died. They are quite expensive when they show up occasionally in auctions.

The only reason for this type of loader in the first place was because the initial Paterson design had no loading lever nor any cap channel to put caps on the nipples. As designed, one was forced to have to pull the barrel and cylinder to reload. The idea was that if one was going to have to do that anyway, why not come up is a flask that could charge all 5 chambers at once.

One should note that toward the end of the Paterson production, a loading lever was added to the Paterson and a cap channel machined into the rear flash guard. From that point on, cased sets only came with a single nozzle push plunger flask--the nozzle working like those on the Dragoon flasks.

With the exception of the Baby Dragoon, all Colt percussion revolvers from that point on had built in loading levers and cap channels, eliminating the need to pull the barrel and cylinder to load and thus also eliminating any way to load using a multi-spout flask.

The only use for one today would be for those who load with one of the off gun loading presses, but those are a relatively modern black powder accessory.

Cheers