Pietta's percussion revolver kits come in the same packaging with the same manual as the factory-finished guns. The revolvers are fully assembled and shootable, but the main components are unfinished. No instructions pertaining to finishing them are provided.
The exterior surfaces of the frame are mostly in the rough, cast-steel state, and have some excess metal around the edges of the recoil shield. The rough, gray surface is smoothed down to white steel where the serial number, date code, and proof marks are stamped. There is also some white steel on the sides toward the forward end where the barrel joins with the frame.
The trigger guard and back strap are unfinished and oversized, but are pre-fit where they make surface contact with other parts.
The grip is fit to the trigger guard, back strap, and frame. Other than that, it's the same unfinished blank as it was to begin with, having excess wood remaining everywhere else. At least in the more recent gun kits, the grips appear to be made with a lower grade of wood than those on the factory-finished revolvers. That's my limited observation anyway, based on two or three pictures and the two I've seen in real life.
The barrels of the 1851 Navy kits are blued at the factory, but are not polished prior to that. They are blued over dings, scratches, rotary-tool marks on the sides of the barrel lug, and milling lines from front to back across all the flats. The cylinder, loading lever, and action parts are the same as those on the factory-finished guns.
While working with the first 1851 Navy kit, I decided not to complete a proper polishing of the barrel. I polished off the swirly tool marks from the sides of the lug, but did not entirely eliminate the milling lines on the flats. Maybe later. For now, I like the look of the faint line traces as an alternative to the smoothly polished norm.
To match up with that, I replaced the finished loading lever with an old unfinished one that I bought on eBay years ago out of curious interest. It's a kit part from a time when they came with unfinished loading levers. 1970s or 80s maybe? It got an incomplete polishing also, down to a texture of fine circumferential milling lines along its length. I think it fits in nicely with the non-factory finished appearance of this revolver.
The first kit was a fun project with no major troubles, so I decided to get another one just before they all sold out. The second kit was not as good or as fun as the first one.
The most immediately obvious defect out of the box was that the barrel had a large casting void on the top flat directly forward of the forcing cone. It was a pitted depression about 1 1/2" long over the entire width of the flat, including the edges. There was no way to polish it smooth without thinning the barrel even further in that spot. And then what? Keep thinning all the way to the muzzle in the hope of achieving flatness on a flat?
Thinning anywhere on a flat would increase its width while decreasing the width of adjoining flats wherever the thinning was done. Cosmetically, this barrel was a lost cause right out of the box. I tossed it, as Pietta should have done, and substituted a spare 5-inch barrel that I had on hand.
I also had to replace the grip, after I broke it. It fell off a table onto a tile floor and cracked along the lower left side. There was some disordered-looking grain right where it broke, which was probably a structural weakness in the wood.
Due to these problems and other cosmetic issues that were not encountered in the first kit, the second one required additional expenses and more work to end up right.
With all the final adjustments completed, both revolvers have great actions, perfect forcing-cone-to-cylinder squaring, and precisely-fit arbor lengths. They both shot well at the range yesterday.
At this point, the one with a 7.5-inch barrel shoots typically a bit high, but with good grouping. The short-barreled one shoots closer to point of aim with shot-group tightness correlating more strictly to shooting skill and applied effort (which is to say that good accuracy with a short barrel is harder for me, but possible).
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