New caliber for one of my 1858 snubbies

[Tinker Pearce]

I originally finished this gun with a bored-through percussion cylinder chambered for .44 Colt, but decided a change of caliber was in order.  I decided to do a five-shot .45 Cylinder, and settled on .450 Adams as the cartridge. I already reload it for some of my antiques, and it's a pleasant shooter so why not?

I got a round bar of half-hard 4340, center-bored it and turned it down to size on the lathe, then turned down the section that would become the ratchet. Using a cut-off wheel I cut five equally-spaced lock notches, then mounted the cylinder in the gun and line-bored the chambers. I reamed them to .451", then reamed the chambers to .475 for the cartridge.  With this accomplished I cut the ratchet with an abrasive cut-off wheel in a flex-shaft tool. A little fiddling, a little filing and I had a new cylinder.

I test-fired the cylinder in the gun with my standard load of 4.0gr. of Unique behind a 200gr. LRNFP with a Federal Large-Pistol Primer and everything worked fine.  Accuracy seems fine, though truth be told I was more concerned with it functioning than seeing what sort of accuracy I could manage.  The load is very accurate in my Webley RIC, so I am sure it's fine.  After test-firing I finished the cylinder, stripped the gun and sanded the external parts to 320 grit and rust-blued it. You can see the results below-


I'm liking this gun a lot- next range trip I'll wring it out and see what I can do with it.  Oh, and I made this printable label to stick on my cartridge-box just for fun.

[Marshal Will Wingam]

Looks good. Those .450 Adams are interesting little cartridges.