Forgotten Weapons - 1847 Walker Revolver: the Texas Behemoth

As my regular readers may know, I used to work in a gun shop that specialized in black powder weapons.

We would repair many original pieces in addition to selling them.  I would also build many BP revolvers from kits and we would sell them in the store.  One of my specialties was antiquing the bluing on those kit revolvers making them look as if they were a hundred years old.  In the years I worked there, I only worked on 3 Walkers.  Two repro's and one original.  The original had extremely fragile lockwork that had broken, and the customer did NOT want repro parts put in it.  So my father in law and I spent several days welding, brazing, cutting and filing the original parts back together and I had to make several of the screws by hand, and cut the threads by hand with a triangular diamond file as we had no tap or die set that matched the original threads.  I then spent over a week heat treating and bluing the newish parts to match the rest of the pistol.

This was back in the early 90's and our bill for repairing that Walker could have bought a repro Walker and 2 repro Colt Navy's.  The customer was happy though.  I'm just glad the original nipples we located for the cylinder threaded in right.  I would have hated to try to make new ones.

I will tell you though, that I enjoyed shooting the two repro's we worked on.  However I found out why Colt switched to the loading lever latch system.  Having the loading arm drop on you when firing off a round and blocking the cylinder, could be disconcerting, especially if you were in a fight.