Colt Country | Home of The Almighty Colt

  Hawg's right. I've fired hundreds of 10 mil annealed 4 petal copper caps, they work better. They'd also cost about twice as much to manufacture as modern caps, so forget about ever seeing them on the market. I cock muzzle up, and haven't had enough cap problems to worry about even with modern caps, which is what I mostly use. Smoothing the notch, adding a post, packing two pistols, or buying a Remington all sound like worthwhile solutions, pretty much a matter of individual preference I suppose.

Well Richard, I can promise myself to consider all sorts of options to deal with this hellish, even dangerous windage problem  , but I know perfectly well that I'm gonna pin a target up, grab a sandbag, pad the jaws of my vice, and go to alternately whacking the pistol with a lead bar, and shooting it down the length of my basement to see whether anything's happening. The better angels of my metallurgical soul will not win against the lure of brute force, crudely applied.

  Richard, I've damaged two guns playing around with the defarbing of the Pieta marks, and won't be doing it anymore (I'll just buy Ubertis). The roll engraving on the cylinders offends my eye more, and is easier to eradicate. I handled my first Colt as a kid in 1958, followed by a Remington in 1960, there's just something in me that appreciates cap and ball pistols with most of their original finish gone and replaced with the handsome patina that bare steel develops over time. On the other hand, I used to color my cap pistols with magic marker to give them the look of bluing!
  As a purely practical matter, I prefer a taller front sight on a Pieta, and have found that it's easiest for me to dovetail a replacement. Unfortunately, I always manage to damage the factory bluing during the surgery, with the bottled bluing never working out too well for me; it seems to wear away rather quickly. Stripping the barrel, giving it a good polish with carbide paper on a sheet of glass, and then nitre bluing works for me, but then I've never tried anything else.
 

Richard...
Not sure I follow why cutting a dovetail with the jig pictured on the thread you linked will change the fact that the blade has to be drifted way off the barrel's center line to get the windage back to what it was originally. I opened up the hammer notch  to try and correct the problem, but couldn't gain enough. I'm really scratching my head here since I find it hard to believe that peening the barrel more on one side than the other could cause such a radical change, but I'm at a loss to come up with another reason; or a simpler solution than whacking the barrel upside its head 'till it behaves! ???

Richard, thanks for the link, I shall give it a try with brass.   I'll post some photos of the re-blued .61 and also a '51 which I use as a beater. Dunno how nitre bluing compares to other methods for durability, it's all Ive ever tried. I like the colors that are possible, and the simplicity of the process. Like with many bluing methods, surface preparation, particularly polish, is very important.

Dussance tells us in his 1864 treatise ( I suspect plagiarize fr the 1861 Army Ordnance Manual) that caps were stamped from a four foot by fourteen inch wide piece of well annealed copper weighing three pounds, by my calculations that works out to a cap a tad over twice as thick as a modern cap, and probably considerably softer.