Tonight’s Project |General Discussions & Questions|Forum|Winchester Collector

Not all héroes wear badges. 

I hope you charged a fair hourly rate!

Does that one use rolls of caps or little rounds that fit inside cartridge cases that hold single round caps, with a steel bullet over them? 

When I was a small boy in 1949 or 50, my Dad got me a cap pistol that was a pretty fair cast metal copy of a full sized single action army Colt. It came with a supply of cartridges like Ive described and a vial of caps. Plus holster and belt. It even had s functioning loading gate and ejector rod. 

I found out many Decades later, fortunately while he was still alive, these toy guns were actually made right in our Texas Industrial town and are highly collectible today. More than that, I learned they were really expensive for a cap pistol back in that day when our little family was barely getting by.

Dad was not a demonstrative man and this was one of the most profound expressions of his love for me I only learned about much later in life. When I came to realiz what it must have cost him, given his modest wages at the time, i had to close my office door and not take calls for a bit.

Not for nothin’ I remember wearing the  Naugahyde/ plastic holster and leaving the cap gun in the toy box so as I could carry around my grandfathers 1853 Colt Navy instead. Still got that gun! Funny where this all starts.

I think my mother used more rolls of caps than I did. She’d use them to try to scare the birds that were sometimes a nuisance. My cap guns were all broken and gone by then. Memories indeed!

Mike

oldcrankyyankee said
Not for nothin’ I remember wearing the  Naugahyde/ plastic holster and leaving the cap gun in the toy box so as I could carry around my grandfathers 1853 Colt Navy instead. Still got that gun! Funny where this all starts.
  

Tom,  that Colt Navy has an ideal grip frame for a young gun toter. As you probably know, it was the one William Mason and Charles Richards selected for the Single Action Army they designed for Colt’s.  It just seems to fit most hands, large and small. 

Of course, it does have its limits, if my friend Dynamite Dave and his mega-magnum pals are to be believed. I’m told they modify grip frames for the largest Ruger single actions to incorporate more length and a backstrap resembling the Colt Bisley model.  

I wouldn’t know because I’ve never wanted to occupy a shooting lane close enough to any of them where I could observe the hand cannon he was firing that closely. I don’t know what sort of proof load would be required to lift the top strap on a Ruger Blackhawk revolver but one of them got it done. Twice. 

The Web is a multi-edged tool and Google’s Gemini Pro and its siblings are scary. However, they can find things you’re looking for without having to construct elaborate queries in some awkward database retrieval language. (Those who have ever done research using Lexis, Nexis, or Westlaw in the Eighties will know what I mean by “asking for a particular tree and getting the whole forest.”)

But here, in living color, is a Nichols Stallion 45 just like mine; and here are the cap-shooting

cartridges that it fired. Most of them  that survive today are junk. They were made of cast Zinc. Like most things, if you want one LNIB you can still have it but one that complete and in that condition has hammered at a toy auction for seven hundred USD. 

For me, the memory of mine is still clear and more than enough. A real one might shatter it.