Revolving Rifles - Forgotten Weapons

Military-Issue Colt Model 1839 Paterson Revolving Rifle

April 23, 2025 Ian McCollum 10

The first rifle made in Sam Colt’s Paterson NJ factory was the 1837 “ring lever” rifle. These were rather fragile and underpowered and while they were used successfully in the First Seminole War, they needed […]

Beautiful Perrin Revolving Carbine

May 23, 2022 Ian McCollum 19

The Perrin was an 1859 revolver design originating in France, which was initially an open-frame, double-action-only system. It went through some significant improvements in 1865, including a single action mechanism and a fully enclosed frame […]

Lindner’s Improbable Tube-Fed Striker-Fired Caseless Ammo Revolver

December 6, 2021 Ian McCollum 23

Edward Lindner was a Bavarian-born gunsmith who spent much of his professional life in the United States. He was granted no less than 13 firearms patents, and was involved in some very forward-thinking designs. Among […]

Remington’s Revolving Rifle: Not Expensive, but not Successful

October 21, 2021 Ian McCollum 17

While Colt put significant effort into developing a revolving rifle design, Remington chose to simply use their existing New Model revolver architecture. Remington introduced it’s Revolving Rifle (it had no other model name) in 1865, […]

Daniels’ Seven-Shot Smoothbore Turret Musket

October 18, 2021 Ian McCollum 21

There were a surprising number of different revolving rifles produced in the United States in the mid 1800s, including a number of turret rifles like this one. Specifically, we have here a 7-shot, approximately .55 […]

Indian 4-Shot Repeating Matchlock Toradar

January 15, 2021 Ian McCollum 21

Today, courtesy of Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage magazine, we are taking a look at a quite old Indian matchlock “toradar”. Not just any matchlock, but one with a 4-shot revolving cylinder. Matchlocks appeared in […]

Colt 1855 Revolving Rifle at the Range

December 20, 2020 Ian McCollum 26

I recently had a chance to take a .36 caliber Colt Model 1855 revolving rifle our to the range. It was pretty interesting to shoot, but unfortunately the video ended up rather sub-par and I […]

Chichester “Pocket Shotgun” Revolver

August 20, 2020 Ian McCollum 16

Lot 1059 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. The Chichester Rifle Company (actually of Jersey City, NJ) was one of many small firms that sold branded guns made by the Hopkins & Allen company. […]

Nichols & Childs Revolving Rifle

September 2, 2019 Ian McCollum 4

Lot 3077 in the September 2019 RIA auction. Rufus Nichols and Edward Childs had a partnership in Conway MA making revolving firearms in the late 1830s. Their patent was granted in 1838, for an indexing […]

North & Skinner Wedge-Lock Revolving Rifle

March 25, 2019 Ian McCollum 5

This rifle is lot #1237 in the upcoming May 2019 Rock Island auction. Patented in 1852 by Henry North and Chaucey Skinner, about 700 of these revolving rifles were made by 1856. The design used […]