Jack2427 said:
I have one with the 31/2" barrel, really fun to shoot. It is in 45 Colt and I see no reason to get another caliber. I do not know if the 45 Schofield will work in the 45 Colt chamber, but I don't intend to find out as there is enough 45 Colt ammo around to fit anything this gun can take. I bought it from a guy who had filed the front sight way down to raise the POI, and it shoots just fine w/cowboy ammo.
Yes, the .45 Schofield will fit just fine in the .45 Colt chamber. The only differences are that the case is shorter, and the rim is a little larger. In some .45 Colt revolvers, the chambers are so close together that you can only load every other one with a .45 Schofield round because the rims interfere, but I've never heard that to be the case with the Uberti top-break replicas. After all, the original S&W's they are patterned after were designed for the .45 Schofield round. They were shorter than the .45 Colt because the originals were based on the .44 American and .44 Russian rounds that are shorter than .45 Colt. When the U.S. Army wanted them to make it in .45 caliber, they obliged but the cylinder was too short for the .45 Colt round. The .45 Colt rim was also too small to be reliably grabbed by the extractor of the S&W design, so the result cartridge is a .45 Colt case that is cut down to fit in the cylinder, and with a larger rim for reliable extraction.
When Uberti came out with its replicas of the S&W Model 3 and Schofield top-break revolvers, they lengthened the frame and cylinder so it could accomodate the .45 Colt and .44-40 cartridges, which are far more popular today than the original chamberings of .45 Schofield, .44 American and .44 Russian.
They are generally well made guns, but with one big drawback compared to the originals -- they don't handle black powder at all. When Uberti lengthened the cylinders, they also omitted the gas ring that keeps gases and soot that is blasting out of the cylinder gap from fouling the cylinder pin. As a result, the Uberti versions tend to bind up tight after as few as 2 or 3 shots with black powder cartridges. They can be modified to work with black powder, but it's expensive work.
Still, if you only expect to shoot them with smokeless powder, they are well made, beautiful, and reasonably accurate and reliable. They generally could use some light polishing of the internals (as most modern revolvers do) to smooth them up, and the springs are not of the highest quality. As P95 pointed out, they use leaf springs that are prone to breaking. Just polishing the mainspring to remove the horizontal maching marks (which act as stress risers) helps a lot. The hand spring, however, is a whole 'nother story. It's a tiny little bugger, and seems quite fragile. I've found the best thing to do is just carry a couple of spares and get adept at changing them out, so you're not out of commission for long when one breaks on you.
