Swapping Cylinders For Reload?

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IIRC, Pony Express riders originally carried 2 revolving pistols. In order to save weight and increase the speed of the riders-an important safety issue- they switched to carrying 1 revolving pistol with 1 spare cylinder.
It seems like changing cylinders on horseback while trying to escape hostile Indians would be quite a feat to manage, but apparently the riders thought it was do-able.
 
IIRC, Pony Express riders originally carried 2 revolving pistols. In order to save weight and increase the speed of the riders-an important safety issue- they switched to carrying 1 revolving pistol with 1 spare cylinder.
It seems like changing cylinders on horseback while trying to escape hostile Indians would be quite a feat to manage, but apparently the riders thought it was do-able.

The Pony Express only lasted 18 months, from April of 1860 to October of 1861. It went out of business when telegraph lines made it obsolete. Riders were extremely restricted as to what they could carry. They were limited to weighing 125 pounds or less, and were allowed to carry a bag with 20 pounds of gear, including a water sack, a Bible, a horn for alerting the relay station master to prepare the next horse, a revolver, and a choice of a rifle or another revolver. Eventually they were only carrying a water sack and a revolver. Dunno about an extra cylinder, have not seen any reference to that.
 
Something I have wondered, CNC didn't exactly exist in the mid 19th century. Handguns were hand machined/fitted. Would the cylinder from one gun even FIT in another of the same model?????
i asked the same question, and would a typical guy be able to or have the stuff needed to fit one? Dunno be interested in somebody shedding some light on it
Gene
 
Colt parts were interchangeable for barrels, cylinders, etc. it was a selling point
 
Yeah, from what I understand, a lot of guns were hand made from the get go, even down to each gunsmith making his own unique screws which wouldn't fit anything else. It wasn't a matter of making their gun unique or forcing the gun owner to come back to him for repairs. It was just that everything, including the machine that made the screws, was hand made by the gunsmith.

Colt was involved during the startup of his manufacturing business with Eli Whitney Senior and Junior, where pioneers of mass production. The cotton gin and other machinery that the Whitneys made had interchangeable parts. They didn't use a production line per se, but they would estimate how many cotton gins they would need for the coming year, then make all of a given part for all of the machines, then re-set up the plant to make all of the next part, and so on. Then, when the supply of parts was sufficient, they would assemble them into completed machines.

Sam Colt learned mass production from the Whitneys, but his innovation was having teams of workers continuously making parts, then passing them on to the next teams for assembly.

Making parts accurately through the use of jigs and gauges was essential to making this work.
 
Adams in England made revolvers the old way and the two of them had a debate on it in 1851. Adams also favored the double action, Colt thought that hindered aiming and favored the single action
 
In a description of the Battle of Walker Creek or if you prefer Hays's Big Fight, "...the Rangers were each equipped with two five-shooters with two additional loaded cylinders for each pistol."

And I've read descriptions where all they had was one pistol and had to make the best of what they had. http://www.tomrizzo.com/battle-walkers-creek-turning-point-texas-rangers/

Again, I doubt very seriously if there are any 1st hand accounts of multiple cylinder use.
 
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It is interesting that the cased PAIRS of revolves only had ONE spare cylinder. Not so much for reloading as replacing.
 
When my great grandfather was still alive and we were watching a movie where the guy had cap and ball revolvers and cartridges in his belt for his pistol he told me that some of the cap and ball revolvers cylinders were were converted to hold cartridges but because they didn't have a loading gate they had to remove the cylinder to load it. So it is possible that some people had extra cylinders fitted when they had their pistols converted.
 
It is interesting that the cased PAIRS of revolvers only had ONE spare cylinder. Not so much for reloading as replacing

Spare parts is what I thought
 
I believe that cylinder swapping did occur, however probably very rarely. Cavalry most likely fired their revolver until it was empty and then stuffed it in their belt and switched to another loaded revolver or a saber. During a lull they likely reloaded with paper cartridges. As for Chamberlain in the movie Gettysburg I never figured he was switching cylinders. I always had the impression he loaded paper cartridges and maybe had the gun apart to wipe down the barrel and arbor during the lull. We only get a quick glimpse though and its impossible to tell.

I know he isn't a first person source, but Louis Lamour mentions swapping cylinders in several of his books. A good deal of his information came from diaries and journals that made up his 10,000 + personal library. I bet many of them are one of a kind and impossible to find nowadays. Not to mention in-person talks with some of the old time gunfighters and others who lived in that era. He probably read it somewhere or heard it from someone who knew.

Like I said, it was probably a rare thing but I bet it happened more than once.
 
Paper cartridges were commonly used for muskets and rifles in the CW era; .58 cartridges were made with paper that was emptied and discarded. (For the obsolescent .69, the paper was stuffed into the barrel with the bullet.)

But for revolvers, there were several kinds of cartridges. Those made at the government arsenals were usually of the same kind as those for the rifle, that it is they were encased in paper with the normal "tail"; the paper was discarded after the powder and bullet were loaded into the cylinder.

Those made by contractors varied, and there was even one in which the powder, soaked in collodion, was simply molded on the rear of the bullet, making a convenient and waterproof cartridge. It might have become more popular had the factory not blown up.

Colt's commonly used nitrated paper, but other common ways to contain the powder were skin (not unlike a sausage) and foil. All of these broke under the pressure of the rammer and were burned up or blown out of the barrel when the chamber fired. (The foil, incidentally, was true tin foil, not the aluminum foil common today.)

For military issue, revolver cartridges were usually packed in wood blocks holding six cartridges, along with 6 (or 7) percussion caps. The blocks were then wrapped in paper which was varnished or waxed, thus making the packet waterproof until opened. Unlike rifle cartridges that were often destroyed by moisture or by jostling in the cartridge box, pistol cartridges were fairly well protected and many packets have survived intact.

Jim
 
Per R L.Wilson's "The Book of Colt Firearms", 3rd Ed., each Paterson came standard with a spare cylinder with the same sn as the pistol and its originally fitted cylinder.
It is documented that Hays retrieved these Patersons and their spare cylinders for his Bexar Ranging Co. from the Texas Navy warehouse in Galveston where they were being stored.
 
This is what i love about BP and historical firearms the conversations lead
to some very interesting history.

somebody posted that the pony express used cyl swapping to save weight

so i looked up the pony express.

http://www.ask.com/wiki/Pony_Express?o=2801&qsrc=999



and here is a small snippet from the article

Billy Tate was a 14 year old Pony Express rider who rode the express trail in Nevada near Ruby Valley. During the Paiute uprising of 1860 he was chased by a band of Paiute Indians on horseback and was forced to retreat into the hills behind some rocks where he killed seven of his assailants in a shoot-out before being killed himself. His body was found riddled with arrows but was not scalped, a sign that the Paiutes honored their enemy

how did a 14 yo boy kill 7 indian attackers? did he have extra preloaded
cyls?

i dont know but its an amazing bit of history
 
ThorininNNY,

You would probably like Eugene Cunningham's "Triggernometry" as well.
It is a collection of gunfighter profiles, and has a pretty extensive section on the handling the single action revolver.

Cunningham describes most of the commonly known twirls, but I'm not a fan of dropping my pistols, so I don't recommend the practice.
 
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The road agent spin isn't too hard to master and it impresses the guys at the LGS. I learned how to twirl a revolver as a kid... with cap guns.
 
In late 1846 and early 1847, the Whitneyville factory was so swamped with Army contracts for mass produced rifles with interchangeble parts for the war in Mexico that Whitney almost declined Colts request to produce the Walker. The Whitneyville factory was the ultimate in modern mass production at the time, which Colt likely emulated in his own factory later.
 
until Eastwood did a cylinder swap in a movie, no one had ever heard of that. The minute that movie was released, everyone was writing tales of cylinder swapping and selling "spare cylinder pouches"
 
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