colt patents

[bezoar]

found some interesting patent ideas created by colt and his design team before the civil war.

The first was a way to eliminate all gas seapage from the face of the cylinder and breech of barrel at firing. Colts solution was to mount one end of a hinge onto the end of the barrel, and then have it swing down over the cylinder, and latch ontothe framejust behind the top of the recoil shield. According to the patent data, itwas to be secured down by a wingnut.

Has any device like that ever actually been found on a Colt?

Colt also "solved' the issue of barrel fouling caused by having a lead bullet go through a pistol or rifle barrel. He decided to design two oiling systems, that when activated would place a drop of "oil" ie "lubricating oil" onto the projectile in the cylinder.

has one of the oiling systems ever been found?


Im just curious because it would be fun to see how well Colts ideas on these two topics alone would have functioned in real life.

 

[almrl]

Here is one of the patents. I'm having trouble uploading one of the pages on the oiler patent to photobucket.

The "Seepage" patent is number 7613 dated Sept 3, 1850.

Right click on the images and save picture to your hard drive. Then you can look at the images with whatever picture viewer you have. The images save much better than they display here.

Old Coot

 

[almrl]

Here is the "Oiler" patent.

There are some realy odd Colt patents. One rotates and locks the cylinder by means of a complex system of grooves on the outside of the cylinder.

Sometimes, I wonder if some of the patents registered by Colt and his employees were more for the purpose of preventing competition.

Old Coot

 

[doublesnider]

There are some realy odd Colt patents. One rotates and locks the cylinder by means of a complex system of grooves on the outside of the cylinder.

The same system was used later in some german "selfloading" revolvers.
Martin

 

[bezoar]

the patents are beautiful to look at. im just curious on any surviving examples of the finished part. So far no luck with the colt collectors association, but there is still a chance.

 

[Zonie]

Yes, Colt's Arms had a number of unused patents and yes, some of them were intended to stop his competition.

I think that many of them were just the result of having a good design staff working for him and if something came up that looked interesting he would patent it.

After his poor experiance with the Patterson crowd his patents are the only thing that saved him and permitted him to go on to bigger and better things.

He was ruthless with anyone who attempted to violate one of his patents, money being no object when it came to beating down anyone who used any of his ideas.
This even extended to having a "barrier" between the nipples of the guns to prevent chain firing.

Colt was a very interesting man.
He even built a wicker furniture factory on the Colt property.
To man this he found that some of the best workers lived in Germany so he built a little town with the houses and shops built in the German style and hired the German workers to live in it!
His experiments with electrically detonated mines is an example of his going 'beyond' the norm and developing totally new ideas.

 

[almrl]

The patent is number 14905 dated May 20, 1856.

Here is the patent drawing.

The Webley-Fosbery had a similar cylinder groove system.

Whereas in the Webly-Fosbery The whole upper frame, barrel, and cylinder assembly recoiled to rotate the cylinder and cock the hammer; the Colt design used an extension on the hammer nose to rotate and lock the cylinder.

Old Coot

 

[almrl]

the patents are beautiful to look at

Unfortunately, Colt's first patent drawing is rather crude. Although, as an historic document it is interesting.

Old Coot