Henry Rifle Forums

Uberti 1873 Stallion .22LR SA Revolver. One-handed, off hand shooting. Targets are six inches.
by PT7

I know that was fun! nice shoot'n PT. Beautiful Stallion also!

Nicely done Tex. That is a real gorgeous hog leg too.

Nice job, Bob! Fun times all around!

Thanks PT for reminding me that I need to have some fun with it’s twin brother.

Great post. Makes me want to grab a revolver and go shooting.

And thanks for reminding me you have the twin brother at your ranch, David. One other person on the Forum, Big Al (as far as I recall), has one also with the 12-shot cylinder. I'm copying Al on this note.

I had an issue when shooting the Stallion yesterday, which I believe is ammo related and not a problem with the revolver. So I'm writing to you both and suggest you not shoot Remington Golden Bullets 40gr with this revolver.

I noticed there was a mild "drag" on the cylinder rotation when loading it with that ammo. I was careful to make sure the .22s were seated all the way in because we have the "indentation" for each chamber at the hammer end of the cylinder. Thought maybe a round wasn't in correctly. I believe I had them all loaded okay.

But I had three really difficult "lock-ups" of the cylinder, almost impossible to rotate it, and couldn't cock the trigger back to the unload position. Fortunately, was able to remove the cylinder pin and with some needed force, freed up the cylinder. Found three bullets that I believe were the culprits in this problem.

Here are two pictures. The base of these three bullets all show scrape marks as they rotated in the gun, and were hitting the frame.

Look at the three GBs separated to the right. Bottom two show scrape marks right under the stamp "Rem." They almost look like the word Rem is underlined. Same three bullets. Turned the box and got the sun to hit the one on the left to clearly show scraping across the base of the bullet. Again, you can see the underlining scrape on the other two bullets. I like going to this indoor range because I've become buddies with an RO. He watched as I battled these lock-ups, and also took a good look at the revolver and bullets. We agreed it was the ammo that was the problem as seen in the photos. So there were 3 culprit bullets out of 28, and others in that batch that had some drag effect on the cylinder also.

So, an unusual batch of Rem GBs with a small discrepancy in OAL? I don't know, but I'll not use GBs in my Stallion again. After I got the last lock-up freed, the RO gave me a bronze brush and I cleaned my cylinder chambers. I pulled out a box of American Eagle 38gr 22s I had brought, and shot all of them without a glitch, zip cylinder drag.

The GBs work fine in my SGC, and are pretty accurate, too. So that's where that ammo will be used. Final comment. I called CT_Shooter since he has a Uberti Cattleman .22LR model, not a Stallion, but basically identical revolver. He also had cylinder lock-up with the GBs. Coincidence? Such is the way of it.

Whatever it's worth, that's my suggestion to you fellows. Happy shooting to you both!

PT7

RetiredSeabee wrote:Thanks PT for reminding me that I need to have some fun with it’s twin brother.

BigAl52 wrote: Copy to you, Al, since you own one of these .22LR revolvers...

Thanks for the tip PT I will watch for that. I have a bunch of those Remingtons that I ended up with during the 22 shortage. There not my favorite 22 round and in most guns I have tried them in they arent very accurate. But I havent shot my 12 shot in a while but I sure do like it when I do. Matter of fact Im overdue for a shooting day.

I can totally understand what happened in the revolver, however, in the short period of time I had my SGC, I shot some Rem Golden and some CCI Mini mags with almost identical groups. Depends a lot on the gun I guess.

Possibly an issue in rim thickness, rather than cartridge length, but I agree about avoiding any load that causes issues. As for rim thickness, competition shooters have been known to actually sort through their match ammo, measuring the rim thickness of each round for the sake of consistency. Consistency of rim thickness contributes to accuracy. It's one of the things you are paying for when you buy that super expensive match ammo. Consistent rim thickness is what you definitely don't get with the cheap stuff.

We also bought up a bunch of the Remington Goldens during the great 22 ammo crunch, but it's never done well in any of our guns. Probably should shoot it up at some point, though. Kind of sad, really, because way back in the day, the Remington Goldens were very good, considered to be one of the premier HV loads.