On our way home

Barb and I are sitting in the Reno airport waiting for our plane. I’m pretty sure I’m the last of the gun bloggers to leave town. Barb and I had dinner last night at the Black Bear Diner with The Conservative UAW Guy, his wife, Mr. Completely, and Keewee. Back at Circus Circus I chatted with them and Ride Fast, the last hanger ons, about airport security theater until about 21:00 when most of us said our good-byes. Mr. Completely, Keewee, Barb and I had breakfast together this morning and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous was over.


I have a few pictures and will post more later, particularly about our day at the range, but for now here is an odd gun I saw at the museum today with Barb. This gun was part of an exhibit on bootleggers:



Sawed off pistol. (Click for bigger.)


[Please excuse the poor photo quality. I used my cell-phone camera.]


I noticed one of their exhibits was mislabeled and they seemed very grateful when I corrected them. A device used to clean wheat had original markings saying it separated wheat from wild oats. But was labeled as tool for separating wild oats from chaff. Just me being nit-picky as usual.

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3 thoughts on “On our way home

  1. Sawed-off pistol, or pistol missing some parts? Could you see that the barrel was cut? I guess one could load the cylinder elsewhere and put it in.

  2. Yeah, the barrel was cut. The whole barrel structure forward of the cylinder was one piece on the open top Colt revolvers. The lever is of course missing (you see the lever pivot screw hole just below and behind the muzzle) so yeah, you’d have to knock out the barrel key, (wedge) remove what’s left of the barrel, remove the cylinder and load the chambers off the gun, then reassemble it, Paterson style. One technique was to use the cylinder arbor as a ram rod, but I don’t know if that works on the 36 caliber pistols. I suppose you could always use a ram rod through the hole where the original ram would have been.

    Nice little 19th century snub nose pocket gun. Pretty out-dated for Prohibition era use though.

  3. That’s a cool little heater though. I saw a similar one in a Civil War exhibit in Washington, DC – instead of a ’51 Colt it was a ’58 Remington. The problem was that by cutting the barrel on the Remy, you lost the loading lever rod, which was also used to retain the cylinder pin. So the Shade-Tree Gunsmith of the day had gussied up a neat little spring latch which retained the pin the place of the loading lever. It was a pretty cool piece of technology, actually and spoke well of the inginuity of our forefathers.

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