Sometimes you can get a bit overwhelmed and burned out in this industry. What’s been hot for the entirety of my career as a firearms writer is the tactical scene. In general I actually really love the tactical world, it seems to produce some of the best, and some of the worst accessories and guns on the market. Sometimes typing the word ‘picatinny’ just gets old. So what is a firearms writer to do? Well, for me I went back in time. Or as close as I could to going back in time. I recently received a C. Mason Conversion 1860 Army from the Taylor Firearms Company.
The C. Mason Conversion Details
The C. Mason Conversion is a pretty cool little gun, it’s a 38 Special replica of the original Colt cap and ball conversions. I have a history lesson planned for a bit later, so we won’t dive into the history now. We’ll dive into the gun itself. The C. Mason Conversion comes in 38 Special and 45 Long Colt, and you can choose between a 4.75-inch barrel, a 5-inch barrel, or an 8-inch barrel. I’m reviewing the 4..75 inch barrel in 38 Special, mostly because I love short barreled cowboy guns and I like cheap ammo.
I also really love the look of conversion guns. The lack of a top strap and the unfluted smooth cylinder is pure old-school cool. The Taylor Firearms C. Mason conversion utilizes Army grips and a round barrel with a blade style sight. There is a Navy version of this gun with an Octagonal barrel and slightly different grips.
The finish is a rich blue, with a case hardened frame. The cylinder features an inscription of ships as decoration. In the hand, it feels amazing. It’s heavy but in a very good way. Cowboy guns should always be heavy. The hammer slides rearward smoothly and the clicks as it locks it place satisfies my soul.
Cowboy Style
What’s refreshing with guns like these is they aren’t designed to fill some kind of tactical real-world niche. They aren’t designed to be the next revolution in handgun design. They are built to be admired as a piece of functional history and are built to be fun. I haven’t gotten a massive amount of time behind the gun, so this isn’t a full review. This is me showing the gun off a bit, and giving a little bit of a history lesson. Expect a full review soon though.
The History of Charles Richards and William Mason
Charles Richards was an engineer who worked for Colt and helped design the Colt Single Action Army revolver. He worked for Colt more than once, and would later go to teach at Yale for 25 years. Outside of helping design revolvers he also invented the Richards Steam engine indicator which was apparently a very big deal at the time. He returned to Colt in 1861 and began helping Colt design a metallic cartridge conversion for cap and ball revolvers.
William Mason began his career working at Remington and designed a swing out cylinder and star-shaped ejector mechanism. This design was later used by S&W on the hand ejector aka M&P models. We still see this design, or variations of this design in revolvers today. Mason joined Colt in 1866 and began working with Charles Richards on the Colt conversion. The C. Mason conversion was needed to fulfill the Army’s wishes for a metallic cartridge revolver.
Smith and Wesson still held the Rollin White Patent for metallic cartridge revolvers so Colt had to find their own way to make a metallic cartridge revolver. They bored through the rear of their cylinders and devised a new means of ignition and extraction to avoid infringing the patent.
Charles Richards and William Mason accomplished their task and were granted the patent for the C. Mason Conversion sometimes known as the Richard Mason Conversion.
Conversions?
Metallic cartridges revolutionized the arms industry. Prior to metallic cartridges, shooters were forced to load the cylinders of their revolvers quite slowly. This involved manually loading a ball projectile, the gunpowder, and a percussion cap into each chamber of the cylinder. Cartridges made reloading ten times as fast.
Colt scrambled to design a cartridge revolver, as well as convert their current cap and ball percussion guns to metallic cartridges. Designing a new gun, and building the equipment to manufacture it was a time consuming and costly measure. A cheaper and easier method was to use machinery and parts already on hand to produce what became known as conversion revolvers.
These conversion revolvers are somewhat forgotten to history when compared to guns like the Colt Single Action Army. That’s a real shame because these revolvers were an important step in the evolution of firearms. They remained popular even after the introduction of the Single Action Army. They tended to be much cheaper, and there were thousands already in circulation.
Usage
In modern westerns, the Colt Single Action Army is made to look like the Glock of the Old West. Without a doubt the weapon was popular, but realistically guns like the C. Mason Conversion were much more common due to their price and prior availability. The C. Mason Conversions were 15 dollars, and the Colt SAA was $17.50. That’s roughly a 50 dollar difference when taking inflation into account.
In many ways, there wasn’t much of a reason to convert to an SAA if you were already rocking a conversion revolver. Plus, it’s not like your enterprising rancher and cowboy could log onto Gun Broker and have a gun overnighted to them. Of course, once Colt stopped producing the C. Mason Conversion the Colt SAA took over.
The Modern Variant
The Taylor C. Mason Conversion is a sweet little gun and a nice change from the polymer-framed-9mm-double stack-wonder guns that come out every week. Sure, there’s no purpose to it other than turning money into noise, but that’s good enough reason for me. Stand by for a full review of this sweet little wheel gun with 100% less history lessons.
