My Uberti 1849 pocket has never shot well. I ended up getting a .22 conversion for it and forgot about it, but recently I decided to see if I could get it to shoot better with balls and powder.
I always knew there was some taper in the cylinders, but actually brought it into the shop tonight to measure. The cylinders taper from .320 down to .314. Apparently they don't like changing reamers at the factory.
I measured the bore on the comparitor, it's .3095/.3198 land/groove.
So best case scenario, with a full chamber of powder, I'm maybe just barely filling the grooves. If the ball gets pushed down at all it swages down to under bore size.
I'm going to bore out the chambers, but what size do I go to? Straightening them up to .320/.321 lets me use .323 cast balls and just barely fills the bore, but I'm pretty much limited then to .323 cast. I could go up to maybe .325/.326 and try to see if .330 buck will press in (antimony and all) and that also allows me to use the eras gone conical which is .330 OD (right now they won't load, .320 is too much to squeeze into. Insert comments about your prom night here). I also have some concern about how much is too much over bore? Will .326 swage down to .320 safely in the forcing cone? Am I stuck at .323 forever? Why did Uberti pick such odd dimensions? Why don't they change a reamer with .007 of taper?
Thoughts appreciated.