Pietta Dance Brothers Revolvers

Last week I ordered two Pietta Dance Brothers percussion revolvers from Jedidiah Starr Trading Co. in Michigan. I paid extra for two day FEDEX shipping and got them on Wednesday.

One is a gift to my father from my brother and I for his 80th birthday, while the second revolver was for me.

Both guns have "CC" in a box date code stamped on the frame. That translates to 2008, which means they have been sitting in stock for over a decade, which I found surprising.

The Pietta Dance revolver is a replica of guns built by the Dance Brothers in Brazos, Texas for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Only about 500 were made, mostly in .44 caliber. Some were in .36 caliber.

Original Dance revolvers were between the Colt Navy and Dragoon in size. As you can see from my pictures, stylistically, it resembles a Dragoon with the octagon-to-round barrel and straight cylinder.

Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons put out a nice video about the history of the Dance revolvers:

Mike Beliveau has a video in which he shoots a Pietta replica.

The most notable feature of the Dance revolver is that it lacks recoil shields on the sides of the frame, behind the cylinder. There are a couple of theories why the originals were made that way. One is that Dance felt that by omitting them the chance of cap jams was lessened. Another is that the frames were cut from iron or steel boilerplate, which was only thick enough for the frame without the shields.

The fit and finish of the Piettas is decent but not as good as my 1992-vintage Uberti 1851 Navy. I took down both of them. Removing the wedges took quite a bit of effort with a hammer and drift punch. After removal, I deburred the wedges and arbor slots.

I did a full, detail strip of both guns because they felt a bit gritty. Takedown is like any other Colt-type percussion revolver. While the guns were apart I took the opportunity to debur the internal parts, clean everything, and relubricated with Ballistol.

I lubricated the cylinder arbors and wedges with Bumblin Bear Grease from October Country. (I bought the jar of BBG on a lark a couple years ago. It works great but I'm not sure it's worth the price compared to Track of the Wolf's Mink Oil Tallow.)

With the mechanisms cleaned out and properly lubricated the guns cock smoothly.

The triggers have some creep but aren't too heavy.

The front sights are thankfully more like an 1860 Army than an 1851 Navy. The lever latch engagement is solid. The lever did not drop under recoil on my first range trip.

Last night I went along with Dad to his indoor range where we both shot mine.

I really like the gun, it’s a good shooter. This target is 18 shots, 1 handed at 7 yards. For ammunition we used combustile paper cartridges I'd made up ahead of time. The load was Hornady .454 ball on top of 25 grains of Swiss 3Fg, with no lube or wad. (The benefit of lube is to keep fouling soft in the bore. Chainfires are due to improperly fitting or missing caps.)

The lack of recoil shields makes it easy to cap and to see if you still have unfired chambers left. I'll note that if you do get a chainfire you'll likely get caps back in your face. Wear eye protection with one of these!

Dad’s cylinder was the last of the night, making 24 shots through the gun. By the end the gun was feeling a bit crusty and the cylinder didn't want to rotate without some manual assistance. I field stripped it for a quick clean before heading home (I'll do full clean today) and you could not see rifling. The fouling felt hard.

The gun has almost no barrel/cylinder gap so the arbor doesn’t get too badly fouled. I did wipe off the cylinder face and put a few drops of moose milk behind the cylinder, because it was getting sluggish.

I shot the first two cylinders with RWS 1075+ caps, the third with Remington No.10s, and the final with CCI No.11s. All worked fine but check this out:

Those are two RWS caps. I’ve never seen caps perforated in this way. Normally they bust wide open. The CCI and Remington caps fragmented normally.

Dad brought along a Nagant revolver with some 1978-vintage Soviet surplus ammunition. I put a cylinder through it. I find it remarkable that the Imperial Russian Army replaced the Smith & Wesson No.3 Russian with this clunker. Even the single action trigger pull is atrocious -- heavy and creepy. Given the choice, I'd take any one of my full sized cap and ball revolvers over the Nagant for anything other than punching holes in paper, including self defense.

After leaving the range, Dad came over for a bit of bourbon and conversation. All in all, a pretty darn good night.