Dixie Spiller and Burr kit

Thought I'd share my experience getting a Dixie Gunworks kit of the Spiller and Burr revolver completed. Having been very impressed with the quality of a Pietta Remington 1858 .44 that I saw at Cabelas a month ago, I decided to get a .36 with a similar design. The Dixie kit being a few dollars cheaper than the completed model, I went with it. I also happen to like kits, but I would only recommend getting one if you're comfortable filing and polishing metal. Since I could find zero information on what work a cap and ball revolver kit would entail prior to purchasing one, I hope others might find this post useful and be encouraged to try one too.

The gun comes fully assembled and packed in heavy oil. The barrel and cylinder are high quality steel and are well machined and blued. The trigger and hammer mechanism is well made and fits properly. I see no sign of stoning on the bolt, as I do on the 1858, but the cylinder locks positively and indexing seems good. The trigger feels amazing and the hammer is case hardened and fits properly in the cylinder safety notches. All the interior machining and fitting of parts is completed.

The trigger guard is not well fitted and in my case I believe it is actually machined too thin to fit the frame properly. More on this later, but I may ask Dixie to send me a replacement. Or I might figure out a way to solder some shim stock and refit. We'll see. This is the only part I'm not pleased with.

The grips are nice unfinished black walnut, cut oversize and drilled and fitted with the hardware needed to attach them to the gun. They are partially shaped, which should minimize the amount of material that needs to be removed. I'm not yet certain if this is actually a good thing in terms of getting them to look correct, but they feel nice even in their raw state.

The majority of the work on this revolver lies in getting the frame and trigger guard filed smooth and polished. The exterior of the brass castings are extremely rough and coated in scale. At a minimum, several small flat and half-round files are needed to carefully grind the scale off and smooth everything to the point where it can be polished. The work could probably be done with various grits of wet dry sandpaper, but I don't recommend it. Others more talented than I could probably do the work with a rotary and/or small belt sander.

I believe that this will be a nice looking and shooting pistol when it is done.

Hi All,

Thanks for all the responses. I think I most definitely would NOT buy another kit, unless I was interested in doing the finishing myself for some reason. The difference in price between the 2 is almost insignificant and the quality of the finished Pietta guns is outstanding, way better than the $25 I saved by buying the kit. That being said, I am enjoying the process of getting this one completed. Like I mentioned earlier, I just found it surprising that there was so little information about what was actually involved in getting one completed. And I'll say that I don't know enough about this topic to to really have an opinion, but my experience with Dixie GW has been really good so far and I'd be fine with buying from them again.

As far as the piece being period correct, I did purchase a book titled "Colonel Burton's Spiller and Burr Revolver". It's a good book with respect to the history surrounding the manufacture of the gun and the difficulties of getting a factory running in the Civil War era South. I don't find it to be incredibly enlightening with respect to the gun itself though. It basically says that it was derived from the Whitney design. I appreciate the recommendation of the book by Albaugh, although I see it's out of print. So far, the only major deviation I see is the size of the relief on the frame to load caps onto the cylinder. (It's the place where the load gate would be on a cartridge gun, but I don't know the correct name for it.) All the pictures I've seen of real Spiller and Burrs have much larger reliefs cut out than the Pietta replica does. I haven't decided yet if I'll enlarge the area on mine, or not.

Expat, the "pins" which you mention seeing in my 1st pic above are actually casting marks. You'll see that they're pretty well gone now. You'll also note in the pics today that the front part of the trigger guard doesn'tactually meet the frame? There's a gap there that I'm not sure I'm going to be able to elminate just by filing. I think I'll solder some brass shim stock in there and then taper it back.

jmar, I could not imagine doing this on a steel frame. And then bluing too? No thanks.

4v50_Gary I really appreciate that advice. It's good to know about the single cut file and backing the emery paper with brass.

Here are the pics from today. This is as far as I could get without going crazy. I'll disassemble it and go at it some more in the week. I'm not interested in defarbing, per se, but I think it's going to happen as part of the polishing process. It appears this has a 2014 manufacturing date.