I had one of those in .45 Colt that I rather foolishly let go, because I thought I was going to get out of shooting that caliber. Yeah, that was dumb, I should have known better.
I'm not entirely bummed that I sold it, because I had the sporting rifle type and I wanted a "Border Special" short rifle.
Mine was imported by Legacy. It had a rather ugly and flimsy-looking pivoting safety lever in the top of the breechblock. I understand the EMFs and possibly the Navy Arms versions are also made by "Rossi" or whoever owns the Rossi line in Brazil now. I think it's Taurus, actually. The Pumas were made by Rossi in Brazil, but I think Taurus bought them out.
When I get its replacement, I'm going to have "Kiowa Jones" buy a short rifle EMF for me and do an action job on it before he sends it to me. Check his website, he describes this.
It really is a fine action, the 1892, and I think inherently smoother than the 94. My Legacy rifle was pretty good just as it came from the box.
However, I did do three improvements on it.
First, I installed a Lyman #2 tang peep sight. No problems there, it went right on once I had the right model.
Second, I kind of did an action job-- which I did by cycling the action 3000 times, without dropping the hammer. It was reasonably smooth before I did this, but afterward it was SMOOTH.
Third-- well, the Puma stocks are miserably finished. They're covered in a black gunk. I think they dip them in a tank of very dark walnut stain.
The reason they do this appears to be that whatever South American hardwood they use is very inconsistant in color. It's an excellent wood, hard, dense, with a good grain, but while most of it is a classic stock-wood color, it also has streaks that range from black to slightly greenish white.
Refinishing the stock is easy, although labor-intensive. I've done it on two rifles and it came out well each time.
First, you can remove the stain from the stock a little at a time using Hoppes No. 9 and paper towels. I figured that Hoppes is usually no problem on stock wood, and maybe it would take the stain off. It does.
It's going to take a lot of Hoppe's, and a lot of time. You can remove the black color a bit of a time until what's left is to your liking. In my case I kept going until I had a red-brown the color of the walnut on 19th century Winchesters as seen in some gun books I have.
The wood had a nice even grain, and looked like it might be walnut.
One of the rifles I refinished had black streaks and half the foreend that greenish-white color. I left the black streaks alone-- there was nothing I could do with them, and they looked kind of cool anyway. But for the white streak, I got some mahogany-colored gel wood stain and applied it carefully, only on the white areas. That brought its color down to the same as the rest of the stock. Looked very natural.
Then I put on a hand-rubbed oil finish, using Tru-Oil. Pretty common stuff, that- I think I bought it at Wal-Mart. It worked very well.
Pretty nice results, yupyup.