The following is my experience with my Uberti copy of the Colt 182 Police revolver. It is neither a condemnation nor recommendation of the gun, simply my experience with it and observations of it.
Thursday I received the Uberti 1862 Colt Police revolver purchased from DGW and with the stream line shape and semi fluted cylinder it is a very attractive small hand gun. The operative word here is small…very small.
I shot it 35 times Sunday and discovered what I consider a fatal flaw in the gun. Mechanically it works just fine and it is essentially a scaled down 1860 Army/1861 Navy revolver. The load was 15 grains of FFFg Goex powder, a wonder wad, and a Speer swaged ball. It is very comfortable to shoot and seemingly pretty accurate at 10 yards.
The flaw is that the caps were not scaled down. With only seven cylinder loads (35 shots) I had to take the gun apart two times to remove cap fragments and fished one fragment from the hammer slot before it dropped into the works. No matter how careful I was to be sure the cylinder was clear there it was. Most of the fragments were of a size that my 1860 Army would have swallowed them and kept on running.
The gun was easy to take apart the first time for the most part with only a couple of the screws that needed “persuasion” to come out. The inside of the frame shows careful workmanship with no tool marks and only the factory grease needed to be cleaned out. There was some problem installing the hammer and hand, I am not sure why but after about an hour of work it all suddenly went in place. I am no stranger to the inside working of the Colt single action revolvers but this still has me stumped.
No matter which cap I used whether it was the #11 CC, #10 or #11 Remington or the German RWS Dynamit Nobel #1075 the problem persisted. Oddly enough the #10 CCI caps would not fit the factory nipples, so it appears there is no standardization of sizes for percussion caps like there is for center fire primers
I don’t think the Petifogger fix will work here because most of the cap stays in the nipple cavity and are not pulled out by the safety notch in the hammer, but little fragments fall out when the gun is cocked. There is just not enough room in the frame for little pieces of copper to accumulate.
Having said all that said it is a fun gun to shoot and only 5 chambers to clean I like it, but it really is not, in my opinion, a good choice for a beginning shooter.
Respectfully submitted ,
Bunk