Uberti 1876 Winchester

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 8/19/20 | M Nesbitt

[w1n1]

Our man with the black powder on his hands tests loads for the 'new' .50-95 1876 Winchester manufactured by Uberti.
One big difference between the old and new .50-95-caliber rifles is that the original Winchesters from 1879 had a rate of twist in their barrels of one turn in 60 inches. That was for the very short 300- or 312-grain .50-caliber bullets. Today’s copies of those guns, namely the Uberti version of the old Winchester Model 1876, have barrels with one turn in 48 inches. That simply means the new .50-95s will perform with slightly heavier bullets.

When it was introduced, the .50-95 Winchester was the largest member in the line-up of cartridges for the repeating Model 1876. All of the cartridges chambered in the 1876 Winchester were considered short-range rounds when comparing them to the mid range and long range cartridges that were available only in single-shot rifles at that time.

And the .50-95 was an express cartridge, shooting a rather lightweight bullet at a high velocity, listed at 1,556.8 feet per second, making it a powerful hunting rifle for thin-skinned game within, let's say, 200 yards.

THE UBERTI 1876 IN .50-95 has a 28-inch barrel, the same length as their other 1876 calibers. Along with a different twist rate, the groove diameter of the barrels on the new guns is a touch wider than the old Winchesters.
The rifle shot for this update had a barrel with a .514-inch groove diameter, and Mike said the original he shot with had a .509-inch groove diameter. These are simply little differences we should know about in advance of preparing any "special diet" for the newer .50-95. Another "new thing" that wasn't available when Mike did his loading and shooting for his book with the .50-95 was Jamison's brass or ammunition.
Jamison, now a division of Captech International (visit captechintl.com/products), offers both new brass and loaded ammo for all of the Winchester Model 1876 calibers, which includes the .50-95. Read the rest of Uberti 1876 Winchester.

[WilliamWallace1999]

SHOW ME THE BRASS. Jamison has shut down and sold all their equipment to the Chinese. A someone who has searched for the holy grail of 43 Spanish brass, I don’t need another gun with ammo that requires a home equity loan.

[Swordmaker]

Almost 50 years ago, my father and I were attending a gun show at an elementary school in East Sacramento (yes, they allowed gun shows in schools way back then) manning a table showing and trading/selling some of my guns from my collection.

One older guy came up and looked at some of the Winchesters I had on my table and said, “Are you interested in buying and old one like these?”

“I am always interested in adding to my collection. What have you got?”

“I dunno, but it looks most like that one,” pointing to an 1873 Winchester rifle.

“Why don’t you bring it in and let me look at it. . . “ I started to tell him.

“Oh, it’s at home in Bakersfield. . . But,” he said, “if you give me $35 bucks, I’ll mail it to you.”

For some reason, I felt he looked trustworthy. . . So I gave him $40, telling him to use the extra to cover the shipping (back then UPS was a lot cheaper), and gave him my home address.

My Dad said, “That was foolish, you’ll never see that forty bucks again!”

“You may be right, but I thought he looked honest, so I took the chance.”

Jump forward a week and a half. UPS showed up at our door with a long box. My dad was shocked. We quickly unpacked it and found a very carefully brown-paper wrapped heavy object inside that was obviously too large and heavy to be an 1873 Winchester. It was almost covered with packing tape. It took a few minutes to untangle it from the wrapping.

When we got it freed, what we discovered I had bought for my $40 was not an 1873, but a very fine condition 1876 Winchester Saddle Ring Carbine in .45-75. As I inspected it, I discovered something else amazing. It was Serial Number 76!

Many years later I sold my $40 carbine for multiple thousands of dollars. . .

[Swordmaker]

This example that was once auctioned off by James D. Julia Inc., is very similar, although not quite as nice as the one I received.

[Bonemaker]

I don’t know about Uberti replicas but my Miroku 44-40 ‘73 is a Rolex!

[This_Dude]

I’ll never forget my experiences with lever action rifles.

1. A new in box Winchester 94. Upon racking the lever, a bullet would seat on the elevator as normal, but upon closing the action, it wouldn’t raise quite high enough to meet the chamber, and did this each shot. I always had to put my fingers in the action to finesse the round where I needed it before I could lock the action and fire. Bear in mind, this happened each and every shot, without fail, for the life of the rifle.

2. A Henry (I think, been a long time) chambered in .44 magnum. Upon opening the action, only one bullet would come out of the tube, all others after it would stick and I’d have to beat the stock against the ground with the action open to get another round out of the mag tube.

3. A .444 marlin that wouldn’t pull rounds out of the tube AT ALL. No matter what me and my dad did, we were never able to get the rounds out of the tube short of disassembling the tube to remove the ammo. That rifle could only be fired in single shot. Open it, chamber a round, shut it, fire, eject, repeat. I guess I should be happy it extracted and ejected.

4. A .357 magnum cimmaron. Upon opening the lever, all the rounds in the tube would spring into the action and make some HELLACIOUS jams.

Never again will I spend my money on a lever action defect that only works in the movies. I hate lever guns intensely

[Terry L Smith]

1876’er’s are a right nice rifle ...yet, I prefer the lock-up of an 1892 series, in a standard load revolver caliber. I have fired .38 Specials, .357 Magnums, and .45 Long Colt. Oddball calibers, those beyond .45-70, or even these days .444 Marlin, could lose you a week’s supermarket trip! Yea I know, 1876’er’s are like a modern well-engined Mustang, but if the purchase doesn’t get ya, it’s the care and feeding that will!

Like the Karmann Ghia with that Porsche engine, I’ll take the 1892!!

[Oatka]

Maybe that was the one carried by cigar-smoking Montana mail coach driver Mary Fields :-) :

[MileHi]

Holy cow!

[Swordmaker]

Great American Photo. . . Most people are unaware that about 50% of the cowboys of the old west were black. That was suppressed. Western movies didn’t show that. Old west photographers didn’t show it either because they weren’t paid to show that.

Mary Fields looks like she means business. . . Her carbine certainly was built for it.

[Swordmaker]

Never again will I spend my money on a lever action defect that only works in the movies. I hate lever guns intensely

Having managed two gunshops, one of which was both a Marlin and a Winchester authorized repair shop, and having built my own 1886 Winchester back to a gun that looked a shot like a brand new gun, enough so that the owner of Fort Carson Antique Guns though it was a pristine 1886, I can tell you that everything you are describing is descriptive of poorly maintained lever-action firearms. Those that would not feed properly sound like dinged, damaged magazine tubes with weak magazine springs, while the .357 magnum Cimmaron sounds like a dirty action that prevented the magazine stop from fully deploying when the elevator raised. All of these are fixable and would be by taking them to a competent gun smith. They would not be expensive repairs. Most would be handled by cleaning the guns after shooting.

All of these are considered extremely reliable designs. For you to have so many guns that fail, all with magazine feeding issues, I would look at your gun handling habits, not the gun designs.

[Swordmaker]

Holy cow!

That’s about what my dad said.

[This_Dude]

I always clean my weapons after shooting and always have. I build AKs and sometimes ARs and now I am my own gunsmith, although at the time I was not. The Winchester was new in the box, as I said, the mag tubes had no visible dents on any of the aformentioned weapons, and all the ones with mag tube issues had seemingly ok springs with no visible damage and passable tension. I just chalked it up to bad luck and have written off all lever action rifles

I’m starting an AK building shop of my own on some land I just bought a couple weeks ago. Gonna build some custom competition and fighting AKs. Tooling is good to go, waiting on licensing

[This_Dude]

And there’s nothing wrong with my gun handling. It’s better than most. These were faulty when purchased, including the new one

[Tijeras_Slim]

https://www.buffaloarms.com/43-spanish-11-15x58r-cases-2-250-long-reformed-cases-43span

https://www.buffaloarms.com/50-95-winchester-cases-made-from-50-90-starline-5095win

Lot’s of obscure stuff there.

[schurmann]

“... new in box Winchester 94. Upon racking the lever, a bullet would seat on the elevator as normal, but upon closing the action, it wouldn’t raise quite high enough to meet the chamber...

...Henry (I think, been a long time) chambered in .44 magnum. Upon opening the action, only one bullet would come out of the tube, all others after it would stick...

...444 marlin that wouldn’t pull rounds out of the tube AT ALL...

...357 magnum cimmaron. Upon opening the lever, all the rounds in the tube would spring into the action...” [This_Dude, post 6]

Without questioning the veracity of Swordmaker’s experiences, I worked some 13 years in gun sales and repair at a small family-owned dealership. We saw malfunctions exactly like the ones you describe, plus some additional ones, in new rifles and old ones.

Sad to say, final fitting and general quality control have been declining slowly for many years. Parts are not fully machined, retain burrs or casting spillovers, or are improperly fit. How in the world the guns got through function checks and final inspection, I’ve no idea.

Not every gun is fully cleaned after manufacture, nor are they necessarily cleaned after test firing. Sometimes they are over-lubricated after final assembly and test firing, with preservative grease. Metal chips not completely cleaned out after fabrication can be retained: the gooey, sticky crud that sometimes forms from all these different substances mixing together lubricates nothing. It hides in nooks and crannies, outlasts routine cleaning, and can get pushed from here to there suddenly during cycling of the action. It can tie up the gun quicker than a handful of sand. Tighter too.

What was your 94 chambered in? Memory indicates that lifter-misalignment malfunctions happened more often with guns chambering pistol rounds like 45 Colt and 44 Magnum; the 94 action was initially designed for long, tapered cartridges (30-30, etc) and the modifications needed for the short cartridges put the system right against its limit.

94s were notorious for the cartridge guide retainer screws loosening. If this happened, the malfunction you described would occur, plus others.

Another problem occurred in 94s we could not explain. The operating cam at the upper rear of the lifter became mismatched with the activating lug on the bottom of the bolt. It threw off timing and movement of the bolt and the lifter, preventing proper positioning of the cartridge. How the mismatch occurred, we never could figure out: it was as if someone had installed different parts. Extensive grinding, filing, and polishing were needed to fix it.

We saw the Henry and 444 Marlin malfunctions often. If the cartridge aperture, tube seat, and tube edge were even slightly misaligned, or incompletely deburred, or improperly fit, rounds could be loaded with little trouble, but when forced back by the magazine spring, their rim frequently hung up on the tiny ledges and corners in their way.

Which Cimarron replica were you working with? This sounds more like a balky cartridge stop on a 92 than anything in a 73 or similar actions. The cartridge stop spring on 92s isn’t very strong on its best day. Didn’t trouble originals much: they enjoyed the finest engineering, materials, and workmanship Winchester could summon, at a time when Winchester occupied a favored spot among the world’s foremost gunmakers. Replicas don’t always have it so good.

It must be noted that the decline in American manufacturing sometimes has resulted in a bunch of parts that didn’t really fit the rest of the gun being assembled, but the assemblers pushed, twisted, and beat on stuff until all went into place. Sort of.

More than once, I removed the magazine tube plug from a Winchester 94, or a band screw, only to see the magazine tube or forend jump out of place. Happened with Marlins too. Major efforts were sometimes required to get them back in place. My employer sold many 94 carbine band screws every day, to people who had damaged their original screw, trying to reassemble their rifle.

[Swordmaker]

It must be noted that the decline in American manufacturing sometimes has resulted in a bunch of parts that didn’t really fit the rest of the gun being assembled, but the assemblers pushed, twisted, and beat on stuff until all went into place. Sort of.

Most of my experience predates all of the lever replicas and refers only to original makers which were pretty solid. Just as I was leaving the business, Rossi was importing a replica Winchester model 1892 but they’d been selling it for years in South America, and had started under license from Winchester many years before.

One caveat I’d add, there was a period in gun making in the mid sixties to early 70s where the quality coming out of Winchester, Marlin, and even Smith & Wesson went to hell in a hand basket. Colt kept their quality up. I wouldn’t own a Winchester 94 made in that period if you paid me. Many had parts mounted so loosely they rattled if you shook them.

Winchester essentially dropped almost all machining for sinter-cast parts and roll pins instead of solid machined steel. I saw some real crap shipped during that period, especially in their commemoratives. As part of this move to more simple manufacturing, they laid off a lot of journeyman gunsmiths in favor of lower cost assembly line workers. The new methods required less finicky fitting. I guess Winchester figured those commemorative rifles and carbines wouldn’t get fired as much.

Would you believe we got a mated pair of 1866 Winchester Centennials, rifle and carbine (the gold plated one), sent from Winchester direct (we were also a Winchester west-coast distributor) and when I was inspecting them as we did every gun we put on retail sale, discovered that although these two rifle barrels had factory inspector proof marks as having been test fired, proof firing would have been absolutely impossible because neither barrel had ever been chambered! Our gunsmith was floored. Winchester wanted them returned but we found four other 94 rifles with Chamber problems, those got returned. The owner sold the Commemorative pair to a collector friend for a considerable premium, like about five times the price for working guns!

S&W went with laying off vastly experienced grinders and polishers and figured they could hire low wage people and stick them with the finishing work. HAH! We were getting S&W Model 29 .44 Mag. revolvers shipped in in the early 70s (we were not a Rep for them) where the fit and finish had gone to hell. We got one where the blue was actually purple, another that had a big thumbprint on the side plate, and a nickel plated gun that looked as if it was more a third generation replate, there were so many dips and lost edges in the polish job, than a new gun. Even with S&W guns on an allocation system, we wouldn’t sell that junk and returned them as unacceptable.

Guns made prior to 1964 had much better quality than these post-64 made guns. They finally got thing back on track about 1974.

Another issue we saw was dented magazine tubes from guns that had been dropped. A dent even up in the forward of the foremen cap area could constrict the movement of cartridges enough that function would be impaired. Add an old weakneed magazine spring and you’ve got a feed problem.

We had one rice grower over in Yolo County whose idea of ostentatious waste was to buy expensive, engraved and gold inlayed guns and just throw them in the bed of his pickup truck to be exposed to all kinds of weather, then a year or two later bring them back, all weather beaten, scratched to hell and dented and dinged. Missing several of the gold inlays to trade in for another fancier gun, which he’d proceed to leave the protective leather case in the store, walk to his pickup and toss into the bed of the truck. He bought a Midas Grade O/U 12 gauge Shotgun every other year that way, bringing back the wreck for which we’d give him $200 in trade. He also did the same with a deluxe Winchester 94 with engraving and gold inlays. Same deal. If they got filched out of his truck, he’d call and we’d get him replacements. He didn’t give a damn. . . except to show off his wealth to his buddies that he didn’t give a damn.

We cringed when we saw him coming.

[Swordmaker]

I always clean my weapons after shooting and always have. I build AKs and sometimes ARs and now I am my own gunsmith, although at the time I was not. The Winchester was new in the box, as I said, the mag tubes had no visible dents on any of the aformentioned weapons, and all the ones with mag tube issues had seemingly ok springs with no visible damage and passable tension. I just chalked it up to bad luck and have written off all lever action rifles

‘ Does sound like you had a round of bad luck. Sorry about my comments. Your experience didn’t comport with more than a century and a half of this technology’s being perfected. It’s not that the manufacturing of these guns haven’t had their bumps and huge missteps in the past. . . some of which resulted in really bad guns being produced.

On your Winchester 94, when did you buy it?

[wardaddy]

Amen

I’ve owned many lever action long arms with no issues whatsoever except. No pointed ammo in the tubes

Not an issue just common sense

[This_Dude]

I bought the 94 in about 04 or 05 if I had to guess. Been a while