A while back I purchased a Beretta Laramie from a gentleman on a SASS board. As you may know, the Laramie is a reproduction of the S&W #3 target revolver as built by Uberti for Beretta. Before I acquired it, the gentleman had added repro vintage S&W grips (very classy), and removed the firing pin block from the frame. In this particular model, the firing pin block is nothing but a headache, usually keeping the gun from firing at all. That was the case with mine, before the block was removed. Anyway, when the gun arrived, it looked great and had a decent trigger pull. The honeymoon ended on our first trip to the range. While the gun is chambered in .45 Colt, my original intent was to only shoot .45 Schofield in it. On my first range outing, however, none of my Schofield reloading stuff had arrived, so I was shooting my normal .45 Colt load of a 255gr RNFP over 8.5gr of Unique. Accuracy is DISMAL, measuring over a FOOT at 25 yards, with SERIOUS lead spitting issues from the BC gap. Point of impact was 18 inches over point of aim. Not good.
When I got the gun home and cleaned it, I noticed that it had NO FORCING CONE. None. Nada. Transition from cylinder to rifling was abrupt, to say the least. This explained the lead spitting, and most of the accuracy issues. I sent a note off to Alex Hamilton at Ten Ring Precision, explaining the problem. He told me to send him just the barrel assembly, and he would take a look at it. Less than three weeks later, the barrel assembly was back in my hands with a freshly cut forcing cone AND a recut barrel crown. It seems that it was no where NEAR square OR round, further explaining the accuracy problems.
My next few range trips were like night and day. By this time, my Schofield dies, brass and RCBS 230gr RNFP mould had arrived, so I casted a bunch of bullets, sized them to .452", lubed them with SPG and loaded them over 6gr of Unique. BINGO! My first group, off of a rest at 25 yards, went into an inch and a half. After some carving and drifting of the back sight blade, I got the point of impact down where it was supposed to be, and point of aim and point of impact are in the same place.
I also loaded up 25 rounds with The Holy Black to see if the fouling would tie up the gun. I keep hearing on the SASS boards how the Schofield repros (along with the Laramies and Uberti Russians) have no gas ring and will tie up within just a few rounds of BP loads. Such was NOT the case with mine. I ran through all 25 rounds without a hitch. I just wish I had had more bullets available. I am curious to see how many rounds it would take before it seizes up.
Anyway, the moral of this long spiel is that the Uberti Schofield repros are nice guns, but don't expect perfection out of the box. It may have some issues, but working through them for the final product might be very well worth it.
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