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There have been countless tales how Colt's dusted off the old tooling from the 1851 and began manufacturing new guns at Hartford, which would have been very interesting had the tooling not been destroyed when a fire razed most of the factory on Feb. 4, 1864. As for the tooling used to make the later percussion models produced through 1873, it was simply discarded over the years, so Colt's could never have brought back the 1851 Navy, or any other percussion era model had it not been for Forgett, Uberti and, ultimately, Lou Imperato.
Imperato, who founded Colt Blackpowder Arms Co. in 1993 (which produced the 3rd Generation Colt Blackpowder line through 2002), recalls that Forgett sold Colt's the components (rough castings) to build the first 2nd Generation 1851 Navy revolvers, which were completed at the Hartford factory from 1971 through 1973
Okay all the Colt bp tooling was either lost to fire or "discarded" So, how did the Italians ever get all the specs for these Colt pistols in order to reproduce the first replicas? Did they copy Colts old tooling or just have access to specs and build modern tooling from those? Or maybe they actually had old Colt pistols to use for reference and produced copies from them? And what ever prompted them to even consider producing bp replicas in the first place? That seems like a bizarre business venture for an Italian gun maker to take on.
I read different histories of the Colt repos and these fundamental questions are never addressed.
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