Law enforcement hand cannon

I love Colt New Services. It may be sacrilege here, but there is just something about this oversized sixgun - built during a time when a guy reaching 5'10" was tall - with no ejector rod shroud, no front lock up, no pinned barrel, and no recessed chambers that appeals to me. Especially in God's caliber, the .45 Colt.

A 7 1/2" New Service was the first gun I ever pointed in someone's face in self-defense. No skulls were exploded, but I'll always remember one of the responding cops holding that big Colt next to his holstered Model 10 and saying: Jeez kid, good thing you didn't pull the trigger or we'd be looking across the street for his head.

Anyway, I recently found this old warrior. 5 1/2" .45 Colt, circa 1921.





The good thing was it was only $32.95!



OK, not really. They originally wanted $1100, but I shrewdly pointed out the cylinder had British proofmarks meaning it was a replacement and had been rechambered from .455 to God's caliber by some oaf. The price dropped $300 and it was mine.



That Brit cylinder really bugged me, even though it shot fine. eBay to the rescue. A proper cylinder, unmarred by Royal proofmarks, came my way. Despite protestations from all that it wouldn't drop right in and I would need a Keebler elf with shirt garters and a green eye shade to fit it, it dropped right in. Even the finish matched.








It shoots great. I like to think some of its finish issues come from salty tears dripped on it by a grizzled upstate Trooper handing it in for a wimpy .38 Official Police.

Great find!

Maybe a dumb question, but why wouldn't a cylinder drop in? If it was properly manufactured with reasonable QC to control dimensions, what possible machining or fitting would be necessary? Certainly not shortening if the cylinder to barrel gap was too close. I'm not a gunsmith and don't know Colt innards at all.

ggibson511960 said:

Maybe a dumb question, but why wouldn't a cylinder drop in? If it was properly manufactured with reasonable QC to control dimensions, what possible machining or fitting would be necessary? Certainly not shortening if the cylinder to barrel gap was too close. I'm not a gunsmith and don't know Colt innards at all.

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That’s what I thought - but I was assured (elsewhere) it would need to be hand fitted and everyone who knows how to do it is dead.

I had a similar issue with a Colt SAA circa 1916. The hammer wouldn’t hold in the loading position so it took three hands and a temp employee to load the thing. Same advice - send it to one of the surviving Colt wizards along with a blank check. I bought a trigger on eBay and put it in and I’ve been shooting it happily ever since.

Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but these things aren’t the Space Shuttle.

Wonderful. I have one from 1939 sent to troop L of the New York State Police. It also has an inventory control number.

Basically the same revolver was adopted by the U. S. Army as the Model 1909 as a stopgap measure until the M1911 could be issued. Most went to the Philippines, not many returned. I have two of them.

DWalt said:

Basically the same revolver was adopted by the U. S. Army as the Model 1909 as a stopgap measure until the M1911 could be issued. Most went to the Philippines, not many returned. I have two of them.

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Got one also.....really would like to find the USMC. Model 1909 that was reasonable. I shoot about 100 rounds a year through mine I use a loading that duplicates the load that the War Department ordered in 1909

I man I worked with almost 50 years ago carried one in 44-40.

He was an accomplished amateur gunsmith. He fitted a welded steel plate to serve as an under-barrel shroud and had the gun nickel (or chrome) plated. It was very menacing to say the least.

I have a 1917 Colt in .45 acp. Thankfully it has not been refinished and parkerized like so many of the Colts. Still has the original finish with the visible machining marks. I fire it occasionally with cast bullet handloads in AR brass. There is something primitive about those big old Colts and I love mine.

If the replacement cylinder & most importantly it's ratchet along with the orig guns hand are in reasonably good orig condition, the replacement cylinder will often drop in fit, time and index OK.

A lot of these oldster Colts have been abused and worked over in attempts to 'fix' them. With that the hands have been altered and stretched, the 2 teeth have been filed on and reshaped in attempts to get them to time.
Worn hand windows, pivot points and rebound arm contact points with the hand can all make them less than perfect.
Ratchets get peened to increase timing then filed back when there's too much. Cranes can be bent to a very small degree to help correct timing but there is a limit and some don't seem to realize that.

Quite a few DIY gunsmithing articles in the gun rags in the 50's and 60's about how to fix the Colts both SA and the DA's when they didn't obey.

All that adds up to many of the older DA Colts being way out of wack and any replacement parts you generally buy are coming from guns stripped for their parts because they don't work either.

Looks like a very nice NS.
45Colt and a NYST as well. Nice find.

I have one,,a 45 Colt,
I think they catagorize it as a Model 1905 N/S (?) .
The action has a few small differences inside from say the 1917 Colt N/S.
The frame silouette especially on the bottom edge just ahead of the trigger guard is slightly different as well. No shoulder on the bbl,,just a straight tube w/ a slight taper to it.
Gotta get that one back together and out for some range time now that I'm reloading 45Colt.


One of my wifes Uncles was NYSP and we have one pic of him in uniform taken likely just post WW2. Maybe very early 50's.
Old style uniform with cross draw SamBrown belt and holster w/issue revolver which was the Colt N/S 45colt 7 1/2" bbl at that time.

Just beautiful!

I like the New Service revolvers, too.

I have a 44-40 and a 38-40 from right around 1900, a US M1909 and a M1917.

Rob

Apparently whoever wrote that advertisement hadn't been informed that ".45 Long Colt" wasn't correct nomenclature.

Of course, that was back in the good old days when folks had bigger problems to deal with and there was no internet for the sort of folks who might have still bellyached over something so innocuous to make their petulant pet peeves known.

Congratulations on your boomer. They're great revolvers imo, and were Colt's largest frame until the introduction of the Anaconda.

I have a 1920s Commercial, also in 45 Colt. Shown next to a Heavy Duty Transitional for size comparison. It's a BIG revolver.

All I can say is if you bring the m1909,either Colt or Smith & Wesson or the 1937 contract Brazilian to the range better be prepared to have a lot of other people than yoursefl shooting your lovely BIG revolvers. Reason is they have become so gloclkified by the huge number of wonder nines shooting yours will be like a revelation to them. I shot over 100 rds of 45 auto through my Brazilian 1937 contract and could have easily shot twice that amount if I had more ammo. You don't
normally see the big revolvers at the range anymore.Frank

Nice revolver! I've thought about getting a 45 Colt. I just haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Forte Smitten Wesson said:

Apparently whoever wrote that advertisement hadn't been informed that ".45 Long Colt" wasn't correct nomenclature.

Of course, that was back in the good old days when folks had bigger problems to deal with and there was no internet for the sort of folks who might have still bellyached over something so innocuous to make their petulant pet peeves known.

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I’ve always thought the modern objection to the very common usage of “.45 Long Colt” was based in modern ignorance.

That “old” usage of .45 Long Colt was there for a reason.

When the US Army adopted the S&W Schofield revolver it got the .45 Schofield cartridge as part of the deal. Even then they knew wars were won by logistics and thus they understood that the “shorter” Schofield round made more sense as it could be fired in its existing Colt Single Action Army pistols (that term used intentionally to spark another argument with the revisionist historians). The .45 Schofield was similar to the .45 Colt but shorter to fit the shorter Schofield cylinder, and with a slightly larger rim to improve ejection with black powder fouled chambers. That rim wasn’t necessary on the .45 Colt as the SAA used an ejector rod and the rim was only there for head space purposes.

That logistics decision and the similarity between cartridges led to the “.45 Govt”. The .45 Govt differed from the .45 Schofield in that the rim was slightly smaller - which didn’t seem to pose any issues in the Schofield revolvers, even in the black powder era.

.45 Colt and .45 Govt:



As you can see above, there’s an obvious difference as one is long and the other is short.

Colt designed the .45 Colt to maximize powder capacity. Colt did that by using parallel case walls, rather than the common black powder era practice of a slight bottle neck (such as the .38-40 and .44-40) or a tapered case (.45-70, 38-55, etc). Those features made ejection from black powder fouled chambers easier and Colt knew it could get away with the straight walls because of the rod ejector on SAA. Colt however covered it’s bets by making the chamber for the .45 Colt slightly tapered - about .007” larger at the base than at the mouth, which is why .45 Colt brass life is still relatively poor.

In 1875 when S&W was asked by the US Army to produce the Model 3 but incorporating the improvements recommend by Major Schofield, and using the .45 Colt cartridge, S&W realized that ejection of a half dozen full length.45 Colt rounds from fouled chambers would be sketchy at best. Consequently, they developed the shorter .45 Schofield cartridge. That shorter case only accommodated 28 grains of powder. S&W however knew the .45 Schofield would function in the Colt SAA just fine and bet the US Army would not object too fiercely to a second pistol round, or do exactly what a did - field a common cartridge for both.

In any case they were partly right as in 1987 the US Army adopted the M1887 Military Ball round. Since that won’t fit on a head stamp it was stamped as “.45 Govt”. However, given large stocks of existing .45 Colt cartridges the SAA remained the primary US Army pistol in use until the Colt 1911 came along.

Ballistically, the .45 Long Colt with its 40 grains of black powder (in the old balloon head case) would drive a 255 gr bullet at 850 fps, while the .45 Schofield and .45 Govt cartridges with their 28 grains of powder drove a 230 gr bullet at 750 fps.

Enter then the civilian consumer at the time. He walks into a store to feed his much more common Colt SAA and sees .45 caliber cartridges on the shelf behind the counter and asks the clerk for .45 Colt cartridges. The clerk grabs a box of .45 Schofield or the Remington loaded .45 Govt cartridges that were available on the civilian market and the customer says “no not those, the long ones”. It doesn’t take very long at all to just start calling them “.45 Long Colt” for reasons of both clarity and specificity.

And it made sense as well as there were also:
- .32 Short Colt and .32 Long Colt;
- .38 Short Colt and 38 Long Colt; and
- .41 Short Colt and .41 Long Colt cartridges.

Why wouldn’t people call the .45 Colt the “.45 Long Colt, when there were in fact also two very similar short versions of the cartridge? It was just common sense.

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In the the smokeless powder era, where the .45 Schofield didn’t survive in any significant production numbers and the where the government stopped making the .45 Govt, there was arguably no longer a need to call it the .45 Long Colt. But that still didn’t make the common usage any less correct or any less specific.

Interestingly, with the rise in CAS/SASS shooting you can now find .45 Schofield ammo once again, and there is once again an arguably need for a distinction. Now, as was the case then, when you say “.45 Long Colt” people know *exactly* what cartridge you are talking about. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and it pays homage to a whole lot of otherwise forgotten history.

I have my Dad's (6' tall 195lbs) from 1938/39 in .357 magnum. 6" barrel

He sent it off to King's in Calf for adjustable sights and a trigger job.

He carried in on the job for 39 years as his primary gun. Thou when he made Lt and Capt. his 4" 1946 M&P and 1950s 2" Colt Detective Special saw a lot more use.

He also used it as his centerfire pistol in the Pittsburgh Police pistol League shooting "Master"( > 640 out of 700 ;out to 50 yds ).

I have a New Service 5.5 inch barrel, .45 Colt, circa 1906. It's been at the gunsmith for 6 months while we look for a strut spring. In 1907, Colt changed to a coil spring which are readily available. The pre 1907 leaf spring is a rainbow unicorn. My smith is planning to fabricate a spring. In my searches, I found references to people using springs from old pocket watches filed to fit.

But if anyone knows a source, I would be grateful. I've tried all the usual places.

I am so envious. I had one of these years ago but had to sell it when I lost my job. Had to sell the gun to keep the house.