Rolling Block Pistol rebore / rebarrel....

[madbadger]

Does anyone have any experience in reboring/rebarreling the Navy Arms / Uberti reproductions of the Rolling Block pistol?

I have one in .357 Mag and an extra .22 LR barrel.  I'd like to play around with different calibers such as a .50 Special (aka Bowen) or .....  to try and approximate the original .50 Navy Rolling Block pistol (blackpowder cartridge).  Honestly, I don't know much about the strength of this design though I read that it's quite strong.  I'm not looking to make a super-thumper, that's what Encores are for.  Just a fun, relatively easy shooting big bore.

Thoughts??

I doubt that the .22 LR twist rate lends itself to a simple rechamber in some fun caliber - let me know if I'm wrong.

Thanks in advance,

MadBadger

[Ray P]

A few years back, I had looked at the same thing; reboring a rolling block pistol to a centerfire approximation of the old 50 cal Navy Rimfire.  
The difficulties I found were:

The Uberti RBP is scaled down from the old Remington action.  One of the 60's NRA gunsmithing guides* shows the original barrel with a 1-inch diameter.  I believe the Uberti barrel is 3/4-inch; not much meat left for a healthy 50 caliber cartridge.

*The Navy and Army Remington RB pistols were very popular for conversion to single-shot rifles back before the GCA of 1968.  Nowdays,  even if you could find one, you couldn't restore it to pistol configuration without running afoul of ATFE.

I had even gone so far as to see if that Texas RB action company would consider a run of full-scale pistol actions, but no interest.

So I bought a 45-70 barrel for my Contender, and I feel much better now.