Stunning Tiffany Engraved Colt 1861 Navy Revolver
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Hey guys and welcome to another Walk-in Wednesday. Today I'm going to talk about a gun that is way outside my wheelhouse but it's so unique I thought I'd bring it to you. Before I do that, you'll notice right away we have a brand new set. We've been doing YouTube videos for about a year. Early on, I didn't really understand the value of YouTube videos but my younger generation crew talked me into it. But since then I'm a believer. So after one year of doing this, we have done over 100 videos, we have over 32,000 subscribers and we have several videos that have approached the half-million views mark which is astounding to me. I find that incredible and your positive feedback has been greatly encouraging to me.
Welcome to our YouTube Studio
But we've grown to a point where we really felt like we needed to set up a studio so that we don't have to set up and take down every time we do a video. This will be our permanent studio and we're going to try it out. Give us your feedback. I'm sure we'll have to tweak it a bit, the lighting and things. We got comments on the gloves, so I'm back to the white gloves. We just want to make sure you can see these guns really well.
OKAY! Let me see this Tiffany Engraved 1861Colt
So as I already mentioned this gun is way outside my wheelhouse and certainly not something I'm an expert on. The reason I call it a Walk-in Wednesday is I actually went and got this. This is owned by a collector friend of mine and he mentioned to me a number of times that he had a Tiffany Engraved 1861 Navy Model Colt. I had no idea what that was but he showed it to me one time and I thought this thing is really beautiful, I have to do a video about it. So again, I'm not an expert on these guns but I did a little bit of research and decided it was worth showing to you. It may be outside your wheelhouse but if you watch I'll bet you'll learn something because I did.
Where My Ladies At!!?? Heyyy!! A Tiffany Colt for You!
Recently one of our viewers mentioned to me that I really enjoy your videos and I even got my wife to watch. Well, congratulations on that, I have a hard time getting my wife to watch but this one is for the ladies because this is a Tiffany Designed Engraved Colt.
Avoid the fakes – Get the factory letter!
Let's take a closer look and talk a little bit about this gun in particular. So first and foremost we start off with a Colt Engraved gun. If you're trying to avoid fakes which we all of course want to do, you can get a factory letter. They usually will not say engraved but the factory letter will say soft metal and that just means that it was left unfinished, unhardened and went off to the engraver.
Nimschke the Engraver
Now we know from history that these were engraved by a man named L. D. Nimschke. He was a famous engraver during that period of time. If you look at the engraving on the gun itself, not the grip, the grip is completely separate but let's take a look at the gun.
A Good Investment - The Colt Engraved Pistol
We see on the cylinder that it has a navy scene. I already mentioned that this is a model 1861 Navy. That doesn't mean it was issued to the navy, it's just a navy model. These came in .36 caliber. I'll look at the bore on that, normally you would see a .44 caliber or .45 caliber but on the navy model it was a smaller caliber. This has a round barrel, some of them were octagonal. Also, the scene which is often worn off, so barely able to see it, it has a naval scene. There are other commercial ones that will have a stagecoach scene but this navy model was very popular and to find a factory engraved gun like this is very very rare. Also, it can be quite an investment, although in my opinion a good investment because every time I watch these go on auction they just seem to continue to increase in value. Again I'm only talking about the gun which is the typical Colt Engraved pistol.
The German engraved guns
As you know, if you've been watching my videos we did a whole video on German engraved guns - the Walther’s in particular and just looking at the engraving, the Germanic style which tended to be oakleaf and acorn, this is a more open less ornate style. When I showed you the German guns you could see that every part of the gun is completely engraved. On these, it's a little less ornate. Several of you mentioned to me what the style of this engraving is and I forgot and I apologize but I'm sure we'll get some comments. If you look underneath you do see that the trigger guard has an engraving on it and that's pretty unusual. You do see all matching numbers on the bottom and what about the finish?
The Finish on the Tiffany Engraved Colts
I was looking up other Tiffany Engraved Colts and I found this one. If you look at the finish on this one I believe that this gun I'm holding probably looked more like this when it was first made. Because when I go back to the gun that we're discussing today, I see signs of tarnished silver but I also see like a shadow of gold wash. So I don't know if that's tarnish or perhaps after seeing this other American Eagle Tiffany Engraved, I believe that there was probably some gold wash on this at some time.
The grip on the Tiffany Engraved, not so comfortable
Let's take a look at what makes this Tiffany Engraved is because the design on the grip itself. Now, this grip is not very practical, meaning if you wanted to go out and shoot it, you hold it in your hand, it's not very comfortable, has a lot of sharp edges on it. It's a heavy gun, heavy piece and so the pressure in your hand is not comfortable.
Poor grip, excellent bore!
So these were not really made for people to take to the range and in fact, when I looked at the bore of this gun, the bore is excellent. You just never see a gun this old with an excellent bore, this one has an excellent bore. Other people have agreed with me that whenever they see them they generally are not to be shot. So they were basically presentation guns and they weren't presented by the government or by the military but it was probably private gifts. And these gifts were designed by Tiffany's, the engraving on the grip.
Tiffany Colts weren’t a big hit with the ladies
They came in four styles. So from the research that I read or listened to, the four styles were what this one has, the most common one was a civil war scene. In this one we can see the American flag, we can see soldiers fighting. This probably was presented at the end of the war. They first started making these in the 1850s and made them all the way through to the 1890s they were available. Evidently they were less popular after that, again maybe people found them too gaudy. It turns out that women didn't really want Tiffany designed guns and it turns out that a lot of men probably thought they were just a little bit too gaudy and not as usable as I would want them to be. Not something you would take out and shoot, so it's just something you put on display in your man cave. But if we look at this grip, you can see the beautiful design.
A popular feature – the inscription plate
As I mentioned already, the civil war scenes and this was the most common pattern. We see this blank plate. If you remember the video I did on the Lincoln Assassination gun that had a similar plate, so that must have been a popular feature. But all of the ones that I looked at on the internet and I found about a half a dozen of these that had been sold somewhere in the 25,000 - 50,000 range, none of them had initials or an inscription on this plate. But that was there for an inscription if you wanted to present it to somebody and you wanted to inscribe it with their name that was an option.
Other observations of this Tiffany Engraved Colt
The back of the grip, you can see an American shield, beautiful design. And one of my favorite parts if you look at the bottom of the grip you see a beautiful American eagle in all its majesty. You also see a slightly unsightly screw and that just tells you, I did take that off that plate comes off and then you can get down inside and take the grip off but it's not easy and since it's not my gun I decided not to mess with it, I left it alone and therefore did not take the grip off. And in addition, I didn't ask Randy to take this out and shoot it. So again, not my gun, I'm not sure that I would have shot it...I might have, if it was my gun I might have had somebody take it out and shoot it. Maybe I'd even do it myself. But speaking of shooting you can see that it is a percussion or cap and ball rather than a cartridge. A lot of these later were converted to cartridge guns.
A quick rundown of the engraving styles
In fact, if we look at the different styles, I already mentioned there were four styles of engraving - the civil war scene was the most common, followed by the American eagle. You can see here the example I already mentioned, in beautiful condition, an American eagle, very ornate American eagle on the back. And then also there was another auction and Ian did a video about one that has a Mexican eagle on the back. Very similar to the American eagle. Again very ornate and the fourth style which I never found one but it's said that there was one that had a missionary and child. I think these generally went to war heroes, General's, special presentation for military people from their family. Whereas the missionary with child, I understand was more for people who had given their life in service to others. So maybe nurses through the civil war or humanitarians might prefer that design.
Tiffany Engraved Colt in summary
So again just to clarify, the gun is made by Colt, the engraving is done by a Colt engraver, Nimschke however the design was by Tiffany's. How many of these were made? It's unknown. I read a couple of articles, some said they were very very rare and some other people said they were fairly common or not common but they were available at the time. But again the popularity really died out at the end of the 1800s into the 1900s, people just didn't like the gaudiness of this and plus the lack of utility.
What’s the timing like on these guns?
Let's take a quick look at the mechanics. If you pull the trigger back so that it's half-cocked that's where you can cycle it through and you can check the timing. So if you're buying something like this, again you want to get a factory letter make sure it was soft metal, so you know this was not engraved later or faked. Because obviously if somebody could reproduce the engraving they could make a lot of money. So you check the timing on these guns and you can see it in the half-cock mode. But another test you want to do is pull the hammer back all the way and it should lock up tight. This one does lock up tight, so when you hear somebody says it locks up tight that's what they're referring to. And we do check these. Whenever we sell a gun such as this people will ask about the timing and they'll also ask about how is the lockup.
What’s that about the hammer?
And one other feature when I do pull the hammer back I see something that is unique to this gun and probably part of the Tiffany design because I've not seen this on another engraved gun but there is the head of a dog I would assume or some kind of an animal on the hammer which is kind of unique. Also as I look at the hammer, it has a brass finish. And I should mention that these grips were typically brass. This hammer is special in that it is a brass hammer and engraved. Sometimes the brass could be silver plated and I'm told sometimes the brass was gold washed. I believe if that was done it would wear off really quickly especially with a sweaty hand or if it was used very much it wears off right away. We saw that with even the more modern German guns. When I handled them you could see the gold wash would come off very very easily.
The newly designed Tiffany Colts
So I mentioned that the popularity of these really died off after the 1890s but interestingly Tiffany's actually came out with new designs in 1980 and 1990. I'm not sure why but maybe they thought there would be a market and so there are Tiffany designed Colts made in the 1980s, 1990s. Again they only made a few, again they were not that popular. If you find them on auction they can sell for a lot of money because not very many were made and they are much less ornate. The design is usually used on a second or third generation Colt.
Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe!
Hey, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video and again a little outside of what we normally do but with my new studio I'm about to do a second video with one of our old favorites which is a Walther PPK - back to the wheelhouse. Hey make sure you like and subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell so that you know when I'm posting that next video.