ImJustAnotherOkie said:
The real trick was ejecting the percussion cap while cycling the next round. I’m sure a lot of guys were shot trying to unjam them.
If you have ever seen any old cowboy movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s, you will see people pointing their revolvers straight up in the air when they cock them. This is because they were taught by real old-timers, who knew that if you did this, the fired caps would fall out, and not back into the gun.
I have fired my percussion revolvers in Cowboy Action shoots enough to know this works!
“The real trick was ejecting the percussion cap while cycling the next round...” [ImJustAnotherOkie, post 7]
“If you have ever seen any old cowboy movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s, you will see people pointing their revolvers straight up in the air when they cock them. This is because they were taught by real old-timers, who knew that if you did this, the fired caps would fall out, and not back into the gun.
I have fired my percussion revolvers in Cowboy Action shoots enough to know this works!’ [G-Bear, post 18]
Anyone who has fired more than a shot or two from a percussion revolver finds out that percussion caps are a squirrely proposition.
They fall off before firing (or get blown off when another round ignites OK), they split, the fragment, they occasionally freeze in place on the nipple and cannot be removed except by filing or grinding. Sometimes they jam on tight but refuse to fire: a real head-scratcher wen it comes to safe handling and de-loading.
The cock-while-muzzle-up technique is often recommended, but I’ve seen it fail, or make things worse - cap fragments come loose and fall inside the mechanism, tying everything up. Not a safe situation, if there are any rounds still unfired.
No technique to avoid cap-jamming is foolproof; one other I have seen work is to hold the revolver right-side-down while recocking. Thus oriented, any fragments trapped under the hammer will fall out the right side as the cylinder advances. At least, they fall out most of the time.
Sam Colt’s initial design had a cylinder with square shoulders at the rear. It’s said that early on he found that fired caps jammed the mechanism repeatedly. Thus, just about the first alteration to the design was the rounding-off of the rear shoulder - gave cap fragments fewer tight spaces to hang up in. Other modifications adopted still later included a trough machined into the recoil shield, on the right side, just behind where the nipples pass when the cylinder rotates. Another way to provide extra space, for split, ballooned, or fragmented caps to move through, after being fired.
(the direction of side-holding, and the description of the channel in the recoil shield, apply to right-hand (clockwise) rotation only. Revolvers that rotate cylinders to the left must be held the other way. Not that I’ve seen many.)
I cannot recall seeing any western films predating 1960, where any actor used any handgun except a Colt Single Action Army, and a few S&W (or H&R, or Iver Johnson) break-tops. Filmmakers and TV producers cared less about historical accuracy then. Can’t speak to what G-Bear has seen on film; I do know I’ve not seen every western ever made.