I bought ‘em so I am gonna use ‘em. My S&W 1-1/2 tipup still has quite a bit of its blue finish and is very good mechanically. A slug of the barrel measured only .304” while the chamber mouths of the cylinder measured about .320”. I say “about” because I don’t trust the inside points of my caliper to be accurate to thousandths of an inch. As you know, these guns are not chambered. The cylinder is bored straight through and so the chamber mouths will be of the same size that will admit a cartridge. The rifling of the barrel is good, but has some areas of pitting and the forcing area has rather severe pitting on one side.

I chose to try out the shorter machined cases from Dixie Gun Works for this trial. They hold 3.5 grains of Pyrodex “P” with a CCI Noise Blank in position in the priming hole. I used Hornady’s swaged, .310” round balls and seated them lightly, as explained in an earlier post, so that the powder is not much compressed and the case mouths not expanded by the seating. By the way, the weight of powder in these blanks is 1.6 grains each. It consists of small, silvery gray, flattened balls and doesn’t look like any of the powders I normally use. The blanks so loaded are smokeless. It occurs to me that 1.6 grains of smokeless, say, Bullseye, would be a good load for the .32 S&W. However, a blank alone will not push a ball through the barrel so the powder must really have a lot less energy. The firing of these rounds took place without incident and a fair group was obtained at fifteen feet . Leaving out the flyer #2 in the pic, the group measures about 2.2”. Not to make lots of excuses, but the sights on these arms are tiny and the light was not too good in my indoor range (garage). Don’t suggest that I was loopy from the smell of burned Pyrodex because I have a ceiling fan that clears it out. I think I could get a better group with more work.

As I found with a similar test of a No.2, you definitely have the sensation of firing a gun, and the balls easily penetrated the piece of 3/8” plywood that held the target. I fired one of the longer cases that holds 5 grains of “P” in this No. 1-1/2 and the ball penetrated a piece of quarter-inch cement backer board AND the plywood, with expansion of the ball as it passed through. I think sometime soon I will more thoroughly investigate the penetrating properties of these loads.