Here's what's on the bench this weekend. This is an Armi San Marco 1858 Remington being converted to .44 Colt. I've lengthened and reshaped the grip-frame to mimic a Colt Bisley, lowered the hammer spur, converted a stock cap-and-ball cylinder for cartridges, made the breech plate from half-hard 4140 steel, bored it through and fabricated a rebounding firing pin and installed it. I've cut a loading port in the blast shield on the frame, installed a new barrel and modified the rammer. The hand was pretty soft and well worn, so I made a new one out of some scrap 5160 spring-steel.
Next I need to build the latch for the rammer, which now functions only to retain the cylinder pin, make a set of custom grips, make and install a front sight, then strip the gun and rust-blue it. Lot of work left, but with the gun functional and capable of firing the hard part is done.
BTW, this uses the original .44 Colt, not the cartridge that goes by that name today. This gets loaded with .451 heel-base bullets in the .44 case. You can see the ring from the collet-crimp die on the cartridge in the first photo. There are a couple of specialty ammunition loaders that offer this cartridge, but they're expensive as hell, so I load my own.
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