Okay Tim. Here ya go.
Both of my J. H. Dance replicas. The case is the one I got from Sourdough Jim. He got it from the Dr. Davis collection when he bought his Pietta Dance from there. He didn't like the blue lining, so he passed it on to me for a killer deal with all the accoutrements. My Dance fits perfect in it.
The standard barrel gun came about because I wanted an accurate representation of a Dance. The ones from Pietta are so wrong that I just didn't want one. So I had this 1959 G.U. Navy that was in bad shape. It had zero collector value (not that I care about that) so I decided to cut it up and do it right. Round barrel with blade front sight. Proper .36 caliber. No scene on cylinder. Blued frame. And of course, the recoil shields taken off. I did it all by hand and think it looks more accurate than the current factory edition.
Next up, I wanted a little bit more of a "custom" gun. I had read about and seen pictures in the Dance book, of a factory gun made with a 6" barrel. I believe they only made one. I really like the way the shorter barrel looked, so I went to town on another gun. This time I used a Pietta Navy and a G&G round barrel. That made life much easier than having to turn an octagon barrel round again. But I did have to shorten it and reinstall the lever catch by cutting a new dovetail and shortening the lever. I also installed a blade front sight. As usual the hardest part is removing the recoil shields. This 6" barrel gun has to be the perfect length. It handles better than any length barrel I have.
Both of these guns have full write-ups over in the Dance forum if you care to see how I made them, step by step.
So taking pictures of black powder things is what I did today.
