So back in April I picked up a Pietta Smith carbine off of gunbroker. Seller said he only had about 50 shots through it, and I believe it.
I got it in, and did some load workups:
https://www.n-ssa.net/vbforum/showth...ght=smith+work
best group was 33 grains of 3F Goex, no filler:
In the initial load workup, I put in the powder, a cardboard disk, and cream of wheat filler. The 33 grain load required no filler, which was nice, since it turned out to be the best.
However, during cleaning, I noticed that there appeared to be a drill bit broken off inside the receiver from when they were manufacturing the fire channel through the cleanout screw. This did not seem to affect the function of the firearm (though I did have a couple of misfires), but more troublesome was that there were only barely 3 threads for the cleanout screw, and on top of this, the hole for the nipple intersected the hole for the cleanout screw so closely that there were only threads for the cleanout screw about 3/4 of the way around. 1/4 of the threads were simply empty space. I was concerned about blowing out a cleanout screw during use.
Interestingly, the gun has 2019 stamped on the barrel, but 2015 stamped on the receiver. I do not think the seller had worked on the gun. I believe this is a factory screw-up.
Here are some pictures of the damage:
Full-sized pictures here:
https://imgur.com/a/nDKCtdf
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