Range Report 04FEB2023: The Smith Carbine and an Uberti Colt 1860 Army

My new Uberti Colt 1860 Army reproduction.

This was a strange day.  I got a late start, and in rushing to get to the range I forgot my phone, so there are no pictures today.  I know people want to see photos, but we’ll have to settle for just the information today.

I recently acquired a new Uberti Colt 1860 Army reproduction.  I have always preferred Piettas because I have seen evidence that although Ubertis are prettier they are less historically accurate in their dimensions and often have bad springs and other problems; in short, they are about form over function, and to me, function is *far* more important.  Unfortunately, the last Pietta I got was absolutely horrible in terms of fit and finish, so I decided to try an Uberti.  This revolver is pretty nice looking, and although not perfect has significantly better fit and finish than my last Pietta.  When I took it to the range, however, I got some pretty bad results.  I fired .454 swaged round balls over a greased felt wad and 30 grains of Schuetzen 3F powder, and the resulting group sizes were horrible—so bad I didn’t even enter them in my range log.  They were probably in excess of 8 inches/round, which is monstrous; my last time out with round balls in my Pietta New Model Army I got averages around 3 inches/round or a little more.  In addition, although I had very few cap jams since I installed Slix-Shot nipples before even firing the pistol, the mainspring is very weak, and more than half of the caps had to be struck two or even three times in order to get them to go off despite the fact that I forcefully seated each cap with a plastic tool before shooting to make sure they weren’t sitting at all high.  Fortunately, this revolver is going off to be reworked in order to get it to accept paper cartridges (round balls are so boring!), and it will also receive a trigger and action job, a sight adjustment, have the chambers reamed and the forcing cone adjusted, and a few other things.  Hopefully this will bring it to the point where it shoots as well as my Pietta New Model Army, but I don’t have high hopes at this point.

110 rounds of Smith ammunition in historically correct cartridge packets.

My Smith Carbine was a very different story, but with some really interesting results.  This Pietta reproduction is a champion, especially since it was tuned up by David at Lodgewood Mfg.  I shot 50 rounds without a single weapon-related problem except that the screws holding the top strap and the hammer loosened over time.  I’m not at all sure why this is; Italian reproductions are notorious for having bad screws, and this may just be related to that, but I don’t really know.  Regardless, it’s just a matter of using the turnscrew on my handy Smith combo tool reproduction (thanks Josh Davis!) to tighten them down periodically.  Other than that, I simply ran a wet patch followed by one or two dry patches through the bore every ten rounds, and truthfully, I don’t even know how critical that is.  I need to do a test where I fire 50 rounds without cleaning the bore at all and carefully track the String Test results to see how accuracy does or does not degrade.

My goal for the Smith today was to compare different loads to see how they shot.  The original loads were 50 grains of 2F rifle powder, but the nylon tubes I currently use won’t hold that much, and most modern shooters get much better results with 3F powder.  I noticed, however, that after 5 or 6 refills the tubes seem to swell a bit, causing the bullets to sit lower in the case.  I considered adding a little cream of wheat filler to take up that space, but decided to increase the load to 40 grains to see how it would perform.  I also wanted to try loading with 2F powder to see how that worked since I am more concerned about replicating the military loads than I am in getting good scores.  In point of fact, these loads performed poorly, with 40 grains of 2F Schuetzen resulting in a 5.3 in./rd. String Test and the 35 grain load of 2F Schuetzen resulting in 5.2 in./rd.  Conversely, the remaining tables of fire I shot with 35 grains of Schuetzen 3F showed the kind of excellent results I am accustomed to, with scores between 3 to 4 in./rd. at 50 yards, which is close to what I have been getting recently.

When I had the carbine reworked, David added a large brass blade front sight so I could zero the weapon for 50-yard shooting.  I am very pleased to report that by using the procedure detailed in Mike Beliveau’s video on filing down the front sight on his Smith carbine (https://youtu.be/YxkcGEDNgo0), my piece is now shooting to point of aim at 50 yards so I don’t have to aim off, which can cause larger group sizes if I don’t estimate the sight placement well.

In addition, I continue to use the half-inch disks of nitrated paper inside the Smith tubes to keep the powder from shaking out through the flash holes, and this worked perfectly without a single misfire or hangfire.  It’s a bit of a pain in the neck to do since the tubes taper down at the bottom, making it hard to insert the disks because they tend to crumple up.   My new technique involves using a round-nosed hemostat to insert the paper disk.  I grip the disk in the jaws one half of the way across, then push it straight down and smooth out any bunching with the tip of the hemostat.  I sometimes just put a small piece of electrical tape over the outside of the flash hole when I’m being lazy, but that looks terrible and I find it a pain to have to remove them before every shot.

One bit of weirdness that arose is that I recently bought 1,000 CCI musket caps (the real ones, not the reenactor caps, which are not as good), and quite a few of them failed to fire, perhaps one in six or seven.  Looking at the ones that failed to go off, it seemed as though they had no percussive mixture in them.  The hammer did its job because the caps were split and splayed open as they should have been and it happened just as often with cartridges which did not have nitrated paper disks in the base (so it wasn’t that the paper blocked the fire).  I was very disappointed by this—with caps so hard to come by, this many failures demonstrates unacceptable quality control on the part of CCI.

The bottom line:  Uberti revolvers suck, the Smith carbine was the best cavalry arm of the Civil War, and my best load with the Smith continues to be 35 grains of 3F powder with an Eras Gone Smith Carbine bullet using a disk of nitrated paper in the base.

If you are not yet using the String Test as a way to track your shooting results, you should be since it is both historically correct and far more meaningful and useful than just looking at group size.  To learn more about the String test and how to use it, go to:  https://historicalshooting.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-string-test-measure-for-historical.html

To learn how I load cartridges for the Smith carbine, go to:  https://historicalshooting.blogspot.com/2020/12/ammunition-for-smith-carbine.html