The first rifle made in Sam Colt’s Paterson NJ factory was the 1837 “ring lever” rifle. These were rather fragile and underpowered and while they were used successfully in the First Seminole War, they needed improvement. Colt set about doing this with his 1839 pattern, which was more robust and m...

Please support us at: https://www.patreon.com/capandball The Holt's booth is one of the best places to spend your time at the IWA show. The well known auction house had some very interesting guns on display including a Porter turret rifle, Volcanic pistol and carbine, and English civil war flintl...

Please support us at: https://www.patreon.com/capandball Buy autenthic Capandball cartridge boxes: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Civil-war-revolver-cartridge-box-in-44-caliber-2pc-/152466093823 This something I promised you a long time ago. Here is the new version of the video about the history and sho...

The pinfire system was a popular type of early self-contained metallic cartridge in Europe, but didn't find much use in the United States. Pinfire revolvers were made in a variety of calibers from 5mm up to 15mm, and a much smaller number of revolving rifle and carbines were also made. This parti...

The Porter was one of the few turret rifles ever put into serial production. Turret rifles are similar in principle to revolvers, but they is a cylinder with radial chambers (like the spokes of a wheel) instead of parallel chambers. Herein lies the potential problem: there is always a chamber poi...

Sam Colt's very first work was done in Baltimore, but this ended fairly quickly, and it was with his subsequent move to Paterson New Jersey that the first true production Colt firearms were made. Colt set up a small shop there and introduced both handguns and rifles using his patented system in w...

Heinrich Genhart was a Swiss designer working in Liege, Belgium in the 1850s making horizontal turret rifles. His design was actually pretty decent, and included recessed chamber mouths and a calming barrel which would lock more or less solidly into each chamber for firing, thus minimizing cylind...

This is a very unusual single-shot muzzleloading rifle. It is devoid of markings that might identify it, but appears (to my eye, anyway) to have been built from what was originally intended to be a turret rifle. It has a central puck-shaped block with a single chamber drilled in it. This puck sit...

The Ladies Home Companion was a pistol (technically) made by the Cobray company on the same frame as their 12ga "Street Sweeper" shotgun. It had no stock or front grip, and was chambered for the .45-70 rifle cartridge, carrying 12 rounds in its fixed drum magazine. It's kinda like watching a trai...

Edward Lindner was a Bavarian-born gunsmith who spent much of his professional life in the United States. He was granted no less than 13 firearms patents, and was involved in some very forward-thinking designs. Among other things, he has the earliest patent I am aware of which uses the term "stri...

The Wesson & Leavitt is one of the scarcest revolving rifles made in the US, with no more than 50 made (some sources say only 16). The reason for this is that the Dragoon revolver which Wesson & Leavitt based the rifle on was found to be in violation of several Colt patents. Most importantly, whe...

The Perrin was an 1859 revolver design originating in France, which was initially an open-frame, double-action-only system. It went through some significant improvements in 1865, including a single action mechanism and a fully enclosed frame for greater strength. The Perrin used a quite modern ce...

While Colt put significant effort into developing a revolving rifle design, Remington chose to simply use their existing New Model revolver architecture. Remington introduced it's Revolving Rifle (it had no other model name) in 1865, and a total of about 800 were made by 1880 when it was gone fro...

There were a surprising number of different revolving rifles produced in the United States in the mid 1800s, including a number of turret rifles like this one. Specifically, we have here a 7-shot, approximately .55 caliber Daniels turret rifle (well, not technically a rifle, as it is smoothbore)....

I recently had a chance to take a .36 caliber Colt Model 1855 revolving rifle our to the range. It was pretty interesting to shoot, but unfortunately the video ended up rather sub-par and I didn't realize it until after we had left the range and I didn't have a chance to redo it. Rather than toss...

Today, courtesy of Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage magazine, we are taking a look at a quite old Indian matchlock "toradar". Not just any matchlock, but one with a 4-shot revolving cylinder. Matchlocks appeared in India in the 1500s, and repeating ones like this appeared by the 1600s - firearms d...

Rufus Nichols and Edward Childs had a partnership in Conway MA making revolving firearms in the late 1830s. Their patent was granted in 1838, for an indexing mechanism that linked the cylinder to the hammer. However, the guns also used a spring loaded cylinder with nested cones on the mouth of ea...

Patented in 1852 by Henry North and Chaucey Skinner, about 700 of these revolving rifles were made by 1856. The design used a locking wedge to seal the cylinder forward so that the firing chamber would nest into the barrel and seal the cylinder gap. The operating lever that did this also served t...

John and James Miller of Rochester New York designed and built this rifle, which is an example of an intermediate revolving firearm. It comes after the flintlock Collier guns, but before Sam Colt’s Paterson demonstrated how to use the hammer to automatically index the cylinder. Miller’s gun (it w...

The Porter Turret Rifle was patented in 1851 by Perry W. Porter, and is a vertical turret design - meaning that it has a revolving cylinder in which the chambers are aligned pointing outward radially from the center axis (instead of all being parallel to the center axis as in a traditional revolv...

The North & Skinner was an early 6-shot percussion-fired revolving rifle design. Its design was patented in 1852 by Henry North and Chauncy Skinner (US Patent #8982), and the guns were manufactured from 1856 to 1859 by the Savage & North company (which was Henry North and Edward Savage - not the ...

The Model 320 Revolving Rifle was one of Smith & Wesson's least successful commercial products, and as a result has become one of the most collectible of their guns - less that a thousand were ever made. The problem with the guns was the same problem that has plagued virtually all other revolving...