While considering the hazards of practicing Necromancy, I ran into this "old" re-run. I was a mite surprised I hadn't paid any real attention to this board. Anyway .........
The relative safety or "strength" of the reproduction 1876 rifles has ben brought up. Thought I'd address it. A bit of background, while building competition Toggle Link rifles (Henry, "66 & '73), a number of '76s also came I to the shop. The first questions were "can you Short Stroke it?"
then the requests changed to "can you fix it?" Also many requests to make them more user friendly. Let's look at "can you fix it?" first.
After the initial excitement when the Chaparral was released the problems started to surface. The guns were a mishmash of copied Winchester and Uberti design. Understand, the guns were built by what was left of Armi San Marco. The result was not pretty. The biggest immediate problem was sheared link pins. Initially, the U.S. rep sent me new pins, PDQ. The reason for the sheared pins was poor fit of the links to the bosses in the frame and on the BREACH block (bolt). When in battery, the front raidus of the front link should be in light contact with the boss in the bolt and the rear raidus in contact with the boss on the frame and everything in parallel. Stress is evenly spread between three sets of pins (remember the big knee pin). In the Chaparral, a couple of us could walk hand in hand thru the gaps between the link raidus and the bosses. The result was sheared pins.
We (the smiths) also requested new links to fix the link fit problem. The links we got from Chaparral were worse than the links we needed to replace. After we replaced the pins, we had to weld up the raidus on the links, re-machine the raidus, then hand fit each one. That got real expensive.
Next were the problems with the Breach Block, but that is a different subject.
While neither the Chaparral nor the Uberti has the same link design as Winchester's original. Winchester's original interlocked and took the stress load off the pivot pins entirely. Uberti simply went to much bigger pins along with a much better fit of the links to the frame and bolt bosses.
So: Is the Uberti (original question) as strong as (probably) or stronger (probably not) than the the original. I think the Uberti Is perfectly adaquite for the pressure levels generated by the cartridges its chambered for. I never received a Uberti In shop with sheared links. Now, as far as the Chaparral is concerned, in "out of the box" condition, not safe to shoot.
Coffinmaker