Taylor's Smoke Wagon

That to me this is like a S&W with the lock , I will not buy one , I will buy a Ruger Vaquero instead . I have a Smoke Wagon Deluxe without the change and it is one of my favorite handguns .

Last year I had a thread about this change . My sister-in-law wanted my help with buying a Uberti SAA for my brother for Christmas . Well she didn't wait for me to help her order it , but when it arrived at the FFL dealers she asked me to go with her to pick it up . That was when I found out that she ordered one with the retractable firing pin . We sent it back for one without it . I spoke to a rep. with Uberti and he told me that all of their SAA were going to that system by June of 2017 . I told him they were going to lose a lot of sales and that I had sent one back because of that and he agreed with me .

I wonder if Pietta will be taking the same path? I hope not.

Not a fan. I really wish replicas would be replicas. The extended base pin safeties were fine and unobtrusive, but this automatic compensation stuff is ridiculous, and probably could still cause an unsafe condition with 6 rounds, especially if the moveable pin binds in the forward position.

I bought a new Uberti smoke wagon this year, and had the same problem with intermittent failure to fire. It was only then that I discovered this gun had a new "hidden" firing pin safety inside the hammer. The online description of the smoke wagon does not mention the firing pin safety.

For Uberti guns in the US, the importer (Taylor's) is responsible for warranty repair, not the manufacturer. So I shipped the gun back for repair.

When I got the gun back, it still had the intermittent misfire problem. When I spoke with the importer, they told me that Beretta (owner of Uberti) added the firing pin safety for liability reasons. They told me this safety was also new to their service department. The trigger tuning methods the importer had been using now appear to be incompatible with the new safety.

The importer apologized and offered to ship the gun back again at their expense and repair it. However the repair would consist of "de-tuning" the smoke wagon trigger by adding the trigger creep back. Even though I paid more for the smoke wagon tuning, the tuning would be removed. As you would expect, they refused to convert the gun the the old style safety (i.e. moveable base pin) or sell me any old style parts to convert it.

I did not send the gun back again, because I lost confidence in the reliability of the firing pin safety. I sold the gun at a loss to someone who was comfortable buying it as a "project gun", i.e. restoring it to the traditional single action.

That seems like a pretty bad safety feature implementation.

Nobody seem to like it,i don't own a Uberti's so I have no opinion.

Red Cent said:

Since this has just been posted on the SASS wire, I would have to surmise that the really fast cowboys are not shooting Ubertis.

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Howdy

I saw that thread on the SASS wire, and I replied to it.

The new models with the retracting firing pins are very new to the market. As such there has been very little in the way of user experience. The thread referred to is the very first information I have seen posted anywhere regarding the good or the bad of this new model. Only time, and more experience by the users, will tell if the retractable firing pin mechanism is problematic or not.

Red Cent said:

Seems you have keep the trigger pulled back long enough for the little rod to be in back of the firing pin.

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That is not how the mechanism works. If in fact there is a problem with the mechanism, it is not how long you hold the trigger back. It is how far you hold the trigger back. Once the hammer falls, the locktime is too short for pulling the trigger back farther to have any effect. If however, the hammer releases before the actuator has pushed the firing pin forward all the way, that is a problem. It is also unclear in the original poster's thread whether or not the gun is factory or had been worked on to make it a race gun for CAS. The traditional techniques for slicking a single action revolver may have to be modified for this design. Again, not enough user experiences yet with the new design.

Regarding not many really fast cowboys shooting Ubertis, that is incorrect. I attend a lot of matches, and almost all the 'really fast cowboys' are shooting either Rugers or Ubertis. However I have not run into anybody yet who is shooting one of the models with the retractable firing pin. In fact, I have not even gotten my hands on one yet to examine one first hand.

Don't get me wrong, I shoot Colts, because they are the real thing, but I am not going to turn my nose up at the new design until more first hand experience with them has been made public.

I've said as soon as I saw it this new so called safety feature was going to be a problem. I bought some of the old style hammers and parts while I could still get them to make sure I can keep my old guns working for many years to come.

I recently purchased another Cimarron old model P and they still have to old style hammer with no safeties in it. Hopefully that doesn't change.

They will be , Cimarron is just an importer like Taylor's and all of the Uberti SAA revolvers are going to that system , you just got lucky and got the old stock .

A 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

Years ago I had a SA clone - can't remember who it was branded by, but it was clearly stamped by Uberti - and it had some sort of hammer-block mechanism built into the hammer. The installation of the hammer block parts required the drilling of a long hole up through the hammer for an operating rod, plus some extra milling in the front surface below the (traditional) firing pin to accept the hammer block.

Eventually, and after not very many rounds, this revolver started having issues with the locking bolt not releasing as the hammer was cocked. I took it apart to see what was wrong. What I found was very troubling. The cam that operated the bolt was worn away, and was already about 25% gone! Obviously, in order to facilitate the extra machining for the hammer-block parts, they made the hammer out of something akin to firearms-grade Velveeta!

I made a half-hearted attempt to replace the hammer with something made of real steel, but ultimately was not successful. I disgust I threw the entire bad deal away!

Get ready for a re-run, I think!

Sounds more like a heat treat problem along with the typical "over-sprung" bolt spring. I had a Pietta loose it's cam in roughly 50 cycles from such a setup. In fact, that revolver was the subject of an article in a Magazine (Thanks Denis!!)
Needless to say, I don't cycle revolvers any more other than what's needed to check sear/notch engagement untill they've been serviced. The amount of heat treatment may be sufficient if the spring tension is taken care of early enough.

Mike