Very nice. Nice shooting too. I wouldn't mind a review if you have the time. Arbor fit, how did the Rem #10's fit the nipples, screws/nipples easy to unscrew, timing, trigger pull, ect.
I'm not a gunsmith but I like to tinker.
Seems Pietta's don't suffer from the short arbor that Uberti's suffer from. My other 4 Pietta's (2 1858's and 2 1860's) work perfectly with Remington #10 caps.
I did a review on this gun over at the high road but will do a short one now combining my thoughts on the gun and subsequent 100rds shooting.
A fellow on another board also bought one of these during the same recent Cabela's sale and received one with a broken trigger / bolt spring. Since I work overseas and didn't want to travel around the world only to find I had an inoperative gun, I went ahead a ordered a pair of Wolff Trigger springs (EMF 32297) to have on hand as backups. Side note, the wire trigger/bolt springs were a last minute addition to a planned order of a pair of Wolff mainsprings for my 2 - Pietta 1858 NMA revolvers to try them with the $15 fix mentioned in this thread:
http://1858remington.com/discuss/index.php/topic,5248.0.htmlI had 3 guns I wanted to shoot and 4 weeks of vacation. 1 week was taken up by a road trip to visit family in Illinois and Michigan. I then added a 4th gun...
Going back to the Pietta 51 Navy, the bolt spring in my gun was intact but I noticed on taking the gun out of the box that the timing of the cylinder seemed a little off. Could be it was just gunked up with the factory grease.
I went ahead attempted to disassemble it. That bolt screw was a serious PITA to get out. I have a set of Grace gun smithing screw drivers and still munged the heck out the bolt head. I finally put the gun into a padded bench top vice and was able to get that bolt screw out by applying pressure to it while turning my screw driver. I then completely disassembled the rest of the gun.
I usually just do a quick test fit of the bolt to the locking notches on the cylinder. I found one notch a little tight and swiped the bolt head a few times on some black 600 grit sandpaper, retested the fit, and found it good. The hand spring was put in cockeyed to the hand and had a bottom corner of the spring sticking out at sharp angle. I swiped that sharp edge of the spring on the same sandpaper making it flush with hand.
I didn't mess with the hammer or hammer groove as seen on Duelist1954's tuning videos and mentioned in the 2 pdf's on tuning Pietta revolvers. I reassembled the gun using the munged bolt screw and found the timing of the cylinder seemed better. Could be just cleaning up the internals + working the action briskly made things line up more precisely.
I went ahead and prepared to shoot the gun. Normally I'd degrease the cylinder and nipples. Instead I fired 2 cylinders of caps to clear the nipples and then loaded up 5 chambers with 20gr of Goex FFFg and 1 chamber with 30gr of Graf's FFFg. Note - I have 2 powder flasks. One is cheap plastic flask with a 20gr spout the other is a brass flask with a 30gr spout. 30gr will the fill to the chamber mouth and still allow a ball to be loaded on top of it with no wad. On this initial cylinder I put a dab or bore butter over the balls in each chamber.
I was being a bit lazy - my last vacation home was Christmas and I cut a bunch of wool felt wads for my 44 cal Pietta's plus made up my 1st ever batch of homemade lube. On this vacation, I didn't get around to cutting .36 cal wads even though I have all the tools and materials to do it.
Firing the initial cylinder with the 2 powder charges I had one misfire on a 20gr chamber - the cap fired but the main charge didn't. It fired when recapped.
The 20gr charges were powder puffs. The 30gr charge seemed to really bang my steel gong. I did note some significant cap sucking on the 30gr charge. The cap was stuck to the hammer face.
I fired a couple more cylinders using 30gr charges but found it to be messy - real easy to spill powder all over the face of the cylinder. I didn't have any cap jams but I was careful to clear the caps after they were fired. I went back to shooting a 20gr charge as it was less messy. The targets above were shot using the 20 gr Goex charge. Next vacation, I'll try 20gr of Graf's to see if there is any improvement on the groups.
The majority of my shooting was done at my steel gong. Comparing this Pietta 1851 to my 1860 Army revolvers I found to the tiny tight little sights on the 51 navy to shoot closer to point of aim than my 1860's. The elevation isn't as far off. With the 1860 Army I have to aim at the base of the 5 ring. With this one aiming at the 7 ring hits near the bullseye.
Summary I prefer Colt style C&B revolvers. My pair of Pietta 1860's were my favorites. However, this gun might be in the running. I look forward to shooting this one some more.
