I finally got to shoot my Pietta 44 Caliber 1951 Navy Colt replica. I think I may need some help/suggestions on the care and feeding of this. Here are my findings.
Soon after I bought it, and before I shot it for the first time, I replaced the stock nipples with Slix-Shot Nipples (the ones with the little holes in the sides of the cones). Mike Beliveau said that these really helped solve many of the problems with spent cap jams in his 1951 replicas. I fired a total of 35 shots with it the day before yesterday (About 6 cylinder loads). I was using about 30 grains of 3F 777 powder under a .454 round ball, with no under-ball wads but with my 50/50 Beeswax/Olive Oil lube over the balls. The gun seems a bit stiff from the start, and got a little stiffer by the end of my range session.
The good news is, I fired all 36 rounds without having to clean the arbor or anything else. The cylinder would still turn well enough to fire, although it was a little bit stiffer that when I started. That is definitely better performance than my Remington. I usually have to clean the cylinder pin/arbor on the Remmy after about 3 cylinders worth or so.
The bad news is, I think I had only one time when I was able to fire all the chambers of the cylinder without a jam. Most of time the jam was clearly caused by a spent cap, usually getting caught between the cylinder and the recoil shield. I had one failure to fire, and again, I am fairly certain that it was caused by a spent cap. There were some jams that seemed to be caused by a timing or other mechanical issue. During those times, it seemed I had to rotate the cylinder back and forth with my other hand in order to get it to free up. Often, I would find a spent cap stuck to the hammer face. I know that I can fill in the notch on the hammer face with Epoxy, and this may eliminate some of the issues. I have just not brought myself to make that modification yet. I am still under the illusion that the notch might be a useful safety feature if I want to load all 6 chambers. Those little safety posts between the nipples on the cylinder surely are short, though.
So, any suggestions on how to fix this (other than filling in the hammer face notch)?