Charter Arms Pit Bull 9 Federal (rimmed)

ok.  picked the revolver up yesterday.  here's what we have :





it is a small revolver.  smallest revolver i've ever owned.  feels like my hand's all folded up on itself when wrapped around the grip.  for comparison with the srh :



initial impressions.  it's a roughly put together revolver.  but for a sub-$300 choice, i really wasn't expecting much.  the cylinder does not fully index when slowly pulling the hammer back.  again, a common afflixtion of a cheap revolver.  but when used double action or pulling the hammer back with some authority, it does just fine.  it feels fine in the hand.  there is solid weight there, but because of the size, it has that "toy" feel to it.

i'm still working on my handloads.  my choice for starters, rather then the costly expense of factory loaded ammo, was to use some trimmed starline .38s&w cases, size with 9mm dies and load with 9mm data for a 124 gr xtp.  i had been told by several pit bull owners that the revolver had a lip machined into each chamber of the cylinder at the case oal of both the federal and the luger (.754") so that, if the desire was there, standard 9mm luger ammo would headspace properly on the mouth and could be shot without issue, except for the obvious fact that the cases would need to be tapped out individually, as the extractor star wouldn't have anything to grab using a rimmless cases.

when i went up to my brothers shop to pick up the revolver, we looked at several things.  first, we wanted to test this 9mm luger notion.  brother had some of his handloads and when we dropped one into a chamber, it fell several thousandths below the face of the cylinder.  it was obvious, the firing pin would never reach the primer.  no go on the 9mm luger idea.  thought this was strange, in contrast to reports i'd gotten.  earlier, i'd talked with a fello poster from another site about semi-rimmed .38super brass being used.  my reason for going with .38s&w first was because we had it on hand mostly, but with it's mean case length (.780"), it'd require marginally less trimming then if i used .38super cases (.900").  well, seeing what we did with the 9mm luger ammo "falling in", just so happens my brother had some of his handloads for his .38super at the shop, too.  we grabbed a cylinder load of these (5) and low'n behold, they dropped right in, up to the rim.  we poured them back out and brother did some more digging into the cylinder.  in his opinion, it looked like each chamber had been machined longer then what the revolver originally delivered with.  and by the quality of the work, appeared to have done so quickly and without much care for precision.  the chamber walls were rough.  something that i had seen before with my dan wesson .375supermag and something that basically eliminated the use of top end pressure handloads cause they'd simply get stuck in the grooves of the wall.  i'd assume i'd see a similar thing with this revolver.  brother asked if i wanted to test out the gun by shooting the super loads.  figured, what the heck.

first one fired fine.  pulled the hammer for the second.  everything indexed perfectly.  it fired fine but then locked everything up.  and inspecting the cylinder, i could see that the third shot had slipped down under the ejection star under the recoil.  went into the shop.  the firing pin was still partially in the primer indention it had made when fired and that's what was stopping the cycle of the cylinder or the opening up of it.  little tapping here and there and we got things opened up easy enough.  regarding the semi-rimmed case slipping under the star, it's simply a situation where the chambers are very loose.  to loose to allow the use of such a slight rim.  the considerably larger rim of the s&w cases will eliminate this from happening.  after examining the two fired super cases, you could see where the machining started, as the mouth of the cases appeared to slightly roll in on itself.  using the shorter s&w cases should eliminate any portion of the case mouth coming in contact with this poorly machined portion deeper down the cylinder.

of course, we're just guessing with the machining issue.  from what i've heard and read about other pit bulls and cases they're capable of accepting as they delivered from the factory, it appears as if something was done to this thing.

i'm not going to panic with this thing until i get myself some mid-pressure handloads put together with the s&w brass.  6.6 grs of blue dot is printed as a max load in my hornady for the 124 gr xtp.  i'll drop that down to 6 and see what happend.  i'm not in search of a max pressure handload with this thing.  at this point, consistent and reliable function while putting the bullet center of mass on a chest target at 7 - 10 yds would suffice.

more to come   ......................

 

 

k

still with the 124 gr. .355 xtp :

6.8 grs averaged 923.0 fps
7.0 grs averaged 961.6 fps

a ways to go with this one. pressures are taking a more powder then printed data.  reasonable considering gap and longer oal. the revolver continues to be an accurate little thing. i'm starting to see a greater velocity increase per .2 gr powder increase so working pressures are starting to get there.

gonna skip a level     ...     next up, 7.2, 7.4 and 7.6 gr increments. if i can at least maintain that 40 fps increase per increment, somewhere within these groups should sneak me into that 1100 fps target velocity.

so far so good, though.

more to come ..................