Among avid single action revolver shooters there is a sub-genre of handguns well respected but often misunderstood. Those are the Colt Conversions of cap & ball six-shooters. The interesting fact is Colt’s Conversions weren’t converted; at least not in the truest sense of the word.

What happened was Colt engineers figured out a way to alter cap and ball revolver designs so they fired metallic cartridges. They didn’t actually take existing cap and ball revolvers, tear them down, and rebuild them into cartridge shooters. Colt’s Conversions were built of new parts with bored-through cylinders of new manufacture.

No gun company, back then or today, likes to junk perfectly good but obsolete parts, and Colt had tens of thousands of various models of cap and ball revolver parts on hand in the early 1870s. So, rather intelligently, they built them up into guns and “converted” parts into cash.