Pietta Remington Pocket Pistol

hi I'm Mike bellevigne I'm the black-powder editor for guns of the Old West magazine and today we're going to be shooting a remington pocket revolver this is a 31 caliber revolver it's made by a birdie in Italy and it's imported by tailors and company in Winchester Virginia and today we're going to take it to the range and put it through its paces Colt virtually invented the pocket revolver market with its 31 caliber and baby Dragoon but that was just too lucrative a market segment for his competitors to let him keep to himself and a lot of firms entered the business including Remington and what a lot of people don't realize is that Remington's first revolvers were actually 31 caliber pocket revolvers so they look quite a bit different from this replica the 1863 Remington you see here remington made a fortune building high caliber 44 caliber and 36 caliber revolvers for the Armed Forces during the Civil War but in a way they were the victims of their own success because after the war there were so many surplus versions of this pistol around that they just couldn't sell any new ones and that's when they turn back to their earlier business of arming the civilian market with pocket pistols and they developed in 1865 this little pocket pistol that we're testing today are we going to start making their new pocket model in 1865 and eventually they made about 25,000 of these and they made them in three basic variations the first and the rarest because so few were made was a model that had an all brass frame and that really didn't last that long the second variation had an iron frame just like this one but the trigger sheath was brass and then the third model was all iron and that's this a replica that we're looking at right now these share a lot of design features in common with the bigger 36 caliber in 44 caliber remington arms and among them are the patented that of keeping the base pin in with the loading lever but something that's a little bit different on this pistol is the trigger instead of a conventional trigger and trigger guard this has a spur trigger that resides in a sheath until it's caught just as with the originals Taylor offers this replica with the standard cap and ball cylinder in with an optional cartridge conversion cylinder and today let's start off shooting with the cap and ball cylinder well loading the 31 caliber remington is just like loading its Big Brother pretty simple put it on half [ __ ] I'm going to use a little powder measure I'm going to load it with 10 grains of 3fg go X and I'm going to use this little funnel just because that's such a small chamber to hit so I'll pour in the 10 grains and you can see we got our powder charged in there going to take a 31 caliber ball and then I'm just going to ram it down oops with it actually and it Rams pretty well you wouldn't think this little lever would be effective but it is so I'm going to do that three more times I'm going to leave one chamber open for safety because it's only a five shot even though it has the little notches here I'm just just going to go say fall away and then I'm going to grease the the chamber mouths not because I don't have any 31 caliber wads if I had wads I'd use them but it's not worth getting wads for the little I'm going to shoot this alright I've got four chambers loaded I've got a mixture of lambs tallow and beeswax I'm just going to grease the mouths of the chamber with that that's really just for lubrication the ball is tight enough that I am NOT going to be getting any chain fires off of this but this is just to provide some Lube to keep the powder fouling soft I'm just going to grease up all four that I load it and then we'll be ready to go you may notice cuffs on my jacket here it's mid May as I film this but we are having one the coldest Springs ever take that global warming it's just been freezing and today even though it is mid May it's barely barely hitting the 50s right now all right so with the chamber mouths greased I'm going to take a remington number ten cap and just slide them on unfortunately there's just no room to use a capper on this baby and that is most unfortunate I only get these caps because my big clumsy fingers have to try to get on but I'll get that done I'll get off war capped up and I'll be ready to go ah have to retrieve that cap not good at doing this left-handed I'm so used to using a capper okay so I got to get one more cap out of ten and put them on but then we're ready to go shoot poor evil Roy he just never learned air he is up to his old tricks again so we've got the remington pocket revolver 31 caliber evil Roy is seven yards away because this is no long-range sniper rifle and let's see if I can even hit them my experience with this so far is that it shoots at least a foot high even a seven-yard so we'll be working to keep it on steel but see how it does actually thing is pretty accurate well now let's give it a go with the cartridge conversion cylinder shooting 32 Smith & Wesson's tailors offers an optional cartridge conversion cylinder for the 31 caliber pocket pistols and it's pretty easy to use the back comes off of it the typical howls type Rd type cartridge conversion and then the bullets go in I'm going to keep the one after the pen empty just so I know where that empty chamber is and you close it up to remove the percussion cylinder you put on half [ __ ] drop the loading lever pull the base pin and that came out way easier than I expected and then you just reverse that procedure to insert the the cartridge cylinder yeah and there's my pin so this is my empty one so I'm going to put it down and we're all good to go now we're loaded with cartridges well evil Roy is still downrange and this time let's see how we do with the cartridge conversion cylinder shooting 32 Smith & Wesson well to unload the cartridge conversion cylinder you've got to remove the cylinder from the gun so we'll put it on half [ __ ] drop the rammer exit the cylinder remove the backplate and then you've got to poke them out a little screwdriver here come on keep coming so this is not exactly a fast reload but compared to loading captain ball it's not bad so there we go we're ready to go again we'll finish up with the bad guys for you the remington pocket pistol you

Channel: duelist1954

Views: 291,298

Rating: 4.8923917 out of 5

Keywords: Shooting, revolvers, pistols, handguns, pocket pistol, Remington, Taylor's, Taylors, Taylor's & Co., Taylor's & Company, .31, .32 S&W, .32 Smith & Wesson, Evil Roy, Mike Beliveau, black powder, muzzleloading, cap & ball, cap, ball, Civil War, Pietta

Id: EfwSKV3UuXk

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2013