Howdy folks, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and by the way I'm from Arizona
where neither this hat nor the term "howdy folks"
is actually considered all that unusual.
Anyway, I'm at Rock Island today
wearing this very fine western hat
because we are taking a look at a pair of
very fine Colt western revolvers.
These are Colt Model of 1877 revolvers,
we have a Lightning here and a Thunderer there.
This was Colt's very first double action revolver design, and,
well, it's not that Colt invented the double action revolver, far from it.
In fact this was so much in the public domain by 1877 that
Colt didn't get any patents on the trigger mechanism for these guns.
In fact Sam Colt himself was kind of dismissive of the whole concept of
double action in revolvers. He thought it made the ... lockwork fragile
and prone to damage. And he thought it was wasteful of ammunition.
That you were better off having to individually cock each round,
and take good aim and make a careful, good shot.
And if you gave someone access to a double action trigger
they would just whale off all six shots, waste all their ammo, and then be in trouble.
This is frankly very similar to the arguments against repeating rifles.
... And that's why Colt never made a double action revolver during Sam Colt's lifetime.
But Sam Colt passed away in 1862,
and the company would decide to come out with a double action revolver about 15 years later.
Now what really spurred this decision, because
Colt was doing really quite well with its Single Action Armies,
but in 1873 Webley revolvers started showing up in the United States being imported in from England.
And Webley was making an interesting pattern of gun, it was small, pocket-sized but large bore.
Well, they made a variety of them, but they went all the way up
to .45 calibre, double action, like a Bulldog revolver.
And these became really quite popular guns in the American West.
They were affordable but they were still high quality,
and they were concealable and fast to use.
And that is probably the single biggest reason why Colt decided to introduce these guns.
They wanted something to compete against those Webley imports.
So in 1876 a guy named William Mason, who was a long-time employee of the Colt Company
and a really quite talented and skilled engineer,
he designed the lockwork for this gun which was released the very next year in 1877.
And would become a reasonably popular gun.
This wasn't Colt's best-selling model, but it was far from their worst-selling model as well.
Let's go ahead and take a closer look at these two, and I'll show you some of their details.
There are actually three patterns of the Model 1877, of which I have two to show you today.
This guy on the right is a Thunderer, and that is in .41 calibre,
it would fire .41 Long Colt or .41 Short Colt.
The one on the left here, the nice fancy engraved model, that is a Lightning
which is the .38 calibre model. Again it would fire either .38 Short Colt or .38 Long Colt ammunition.
The third pattern was again the exact same frame size but it was a .32 calibre gun
that was given the name "Rainmaker".
And those are extremely rare with only something like 300 of them being made,
compared to tens of thousands of both of these patterns.
You can see a lot of the obvious styling carry-overs from the 1873 Single Action Army revolver.
The barrel, the ejector, the upper part of the frame, the cylinder, the hammer,
all of these elements are very, very similar.
The bird's head grip is a bit distinctive to the 1877s,
these were intended to be more of a pocket style gun.
Colt would introduce a .45 calibre double action in 1878, just the very next year,
but it used a substantially different frame and different lockwork.
It was not just a scaled-up version of this,
so we'll cover the 1878s in a separate video later on.
... As with basically all of Colt's production, you could get a wide variety of features and finishes.
Barrel lengths were offered from as short as 1.5 inches, in fact without an ejector rod,
all the way up to 10 inches with an ejector rod.
Typical was something like this, a 4.5 inch barrel.
These were all six shot revolvers.
If we put the two side by side here, you can see that the barrel wall on the left, the .41, is a bit thinner.
The external diameter of the barrel is identical for both guns.
And you can see down here on the cylinders that the cylinder walls are a bit thinner on the .41s.
This is in fact safe, so ... I think they designed this for .41, and then they just
drilled smaller chambers for the .38 calibre version.
You could of course get these very finely engraved with pearl handles, like this one has.
These were not double action only revolvers, they were what you would ... call DASA.
So you can cock the hammer manually and then fire,
you can also just pull the trigger and fire like so.
I don't want to snap this one, because this is a very nice, rather expensive example.
There is really no good way to distinguish between the Lightning and the Thunderer from a picture.
If you can't see the barrel or the chambers
the only thing you have to go on is the marking on the barrel.
So you can see this one is marked Colt D.A. 38, double action .38.
And our Thunderer here is marked D.A. 41.
This is the sort of standard hard rubber grip that you would normally get
if you didn't pony up the extra money for something fancy like pearl.
And, of course, we have Colt's company information marked up on top of the barrel there.
These guns were far from Colt's best-selling product,
but they are also far from its worst-selling product either.
They did develop a reputation for being fragile and difficult to repair.
And today in particular, ... it is uncommon to find
... original Lightnings and Thunderers that are in really good mechanical shape.
And they are tricky guns for gunsmiths to work on.
So something to keep in mind if you're looking for one yourself.
That said, ... they were in production until 1909 or 1910, and they produced 166,849 of them in total.
So, 35 years, 167,000 guns, that's not a bad production run.
But they would of course be eclipsed by newer and better models.
So there were a bunch of Old West folks who enjoyed the Lightning and Thunderer.
Probably the most notable of them with the best actual proven
connection to these guns was Doc Holliday, who particularly enjoyed the 1877 pattern.
There are rumours about people like Billy the Kid also using them,
but a lot of that's kind of anecdotal and apocryphal.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video today.
I am going to go back to regular videos without very fine hats,
but thanks for watching.