Nagant 32 cylinder fitting questions

[Weareone101]

I know this is probably been asked hundreds of times, but recently i got my hands on a nagant revolver and about a day ago I purchased the 32 acp cylinder for it, and upon installing it I found that it will not cycle to the next round after SA and DA movement of the hammer from a perfectly lined up gas seal. The only way I can get it to cycle is if i slightly adjust the cylinder so that its no longer properly lined up with the barrel, which is not how it should be operating. Does anyone have any advice for fixing this issue?

 

[Dave DeLaurant]

Yeah, but you won't like it: get a second revolver. I have three 1895 Nagants, two Soviet, one from 1931 and the other 1943, plus one pre-war (1908) Czarist single action. All three are Tula production. I also have two .32 ACP cylinders, both reamed to accept .32 H&R.



One of the ACP cylinders works flawlessly in the interwar Soviet revolver. The other works just OK in the 1943 revolver but just in single-action mode. Neither ACP cylinder will work properly in the Czarist revolver. If this small sample is representative, there's enough dimensional lot-to-lot variation, or perhaps between individual examples of these revolvers to make a 'drop-in' cylinder a crapshoot. You'd probably need to alter the revolver rather than the replacement cylinder to make it work, and it would make better financial sense to keep the revolver as-is and sell the cylinder.

Incidentally, if you handload it's not difficult to fabricate ammo for the 1895. Doing it using the gas seal feature is a real pain, but you can shorten the PPU Nagant brass and make a compromise cartridge that will work in this and several other military revolvers.