Pietta Remington 1863 Questions

#4, The rammer asssembly often breaks at the hinge hole. A real pain to repair and likely to repeat. Load off the revolver when possible.

The broken rammer is the reason I converted one to 22 LR in the 70s. What a pain that was to do. Looking back, there were a few things I did not know back then that I have since learned. I doubt I would even try it now.

No, the hole through which the screw passes doesn't leave a lot of surrounding metal. The surrounding metal is what breaks, usually at the thinnest point.

You could always buy a spare lever assembly and experiment.

But really, with the Remington design it's really easy to just pop out the cylinder and just use a short starter or whatever instead of fussing around with the little tiny lever and little tiny everything.

According to Pietta, the Chambers are .31496, Lands are .31102 and grooves .32677

It's hard to seat them all to the same depth with a short starter. If you're really striving for consistency you would want to find or make a loading setup that will handle a .31. But you should also consider that there are other sources of inconsistency with these things - it's hard to measure a 10gr load to the same percentage variation as a 30gr load...

rodwha said:

I've seen the video in which Mike Beliveau uses a short starter to load a .31 cal cylinder, but I wondered if it loads the balls squarely or not. Couldn't it possibly make the ball a little uneven?

Click to expand...

It is nearly impossible to load a round ball unevenly. I am sure someone could do it but it would take a lot of effort.

I use the loading tool for my NAA super companion to start the ball then use the loading lever on the gunto saet the ball. And 12 gr 777, shoots more than a foot high at 10 yards

According to Pietta, the Chambers are .31496, Lands are .31102 and grooves .32677

Click to expand...

That's incredible. That means Pietta intentionally produces a gun with a design flaw that causes inaccurate shooting: the chambers, being smaller in diameter than the barrel groove diameter by 0.01181", will swage the ball into a shape that will allow combustion gas blow-by in the barrel.

By the way, I really doubt removing 0.0059" from the chamber walls will introduce any additional risk in the cylinder's structural integrity.

Mykeal, that seems to be common from what i hear of a lot of people measuring their guns.Not sure why, maybe a safety thing? Less pressure, or to make chamber-barrel misalignment problems be less of a problem? At least this is something that is not hard to fix. I have been thinking about buying some reamers the right size for my guns and them making them available here to other to borrow. There are a few older posts on THR that have reamed their cylinders to the proper size, witch would really be slightly larger than groove of the barrel, and they had good results.This is part of the reason i have been asking questions from some of the target competetors about what they do to their guns to improve them,like if they had custom barrels or whatnot to their stock guns. Ideally the best way to ream chambers would be to have some sort of bushing that went in the barrel and allows you to run a long reamer through the barrel bushing and into the chambers. This would be close to a line boring and would in therory help true up barrel to chamber alighnment along with making the chambers the right size.May sound complicated to some but really would be something any of us could do with the right tool if the gun was not way off to start with.

what is happening? Is the ball becoming elongated?

Click to expand...

Well, yes and no.

The lands will, of course, create a groove in the side of the ball. The material that's removed to form the groove goes three directions: towards both sides and rearward. How much goes where depends to some degree on how soft the alloy is. It also depends on how deep the barrle grooves are, or conversely, how tall the lands are. It may or may not fill up the void between the ball and the cylinder groove, but in general I think it's unlikely. It's easy enough to check, however: swage a ball into a chamber, then push it through the barrel.

Yes, undersize chambers are common amongst the Italian replicas. Unfortunately, it's impossible to generalize and say one manufacturer is better or worse than another with respect to this parameter. Amongst my revolvers, the Colts (that is, the guns manufactured by Colt's Manufacturing and Colt Black Powder) are the best, Ruger is a very close second, and ASM are the worst; Uberti and Pietta are kind of in the middle with just as many good examples as bad.

The reason it works is that the ball is swelling up as it leaves the chamber from the force of the blast. This is why you need to use soft lead in black powder guns. Same thing happens in a rifle with a patch.

That's true with hollow based conicals in which the base is made to expand, but I don't believe round balls expand in diameter, which is what would be necessary. The physics of that just doesn't seem possible.

The reason for soft lead is to make swaging on loading easier.

As soon as that ball leaves the cylinder I doubt it changes because of anything other than slamming into the lands and spreading into the grooves. If the grooves are larger than the diameter of the chambers, the lands ,I would think,would have to be smaller than chamber size.This way the lead is forced to swage to the correct dimensions.

I am not experienced with cap and ball revolvers at all, so forgive me if this is a stupid question...

Can you use a hollow base bullet from a .32 caliber modern revolver instead of a ball for a black powder revolver? If you can, you might as well use those, and forget reaming your chambers...