Shotguns

Christmas 1986, the last gun Daddy ever gave me. Nothing much to look at, Ithaca Flues Model, twelve bore, field grade. Double barrels, double triggers, extractors. Bluing turned brown, stock too short, barrels too long, too much drop, too much choke. But a man might drink a lot of good liquor before he heard the tale this gun could tell.

OK, so you have $3,500 to spend on a new, break-open sporting gun. Now real quick, what are the first shotguns that come to mind?

The Browning Cynergy Classic Sporting.  Beretta’s SV10 Prevail or 687 Silver Pigeon II. The Caesar Guerini Summit Sporting. We’ve even seen a number of new Zoli Kronos Sporting models hovering in cyberspace for about the $3,500. And the Baserri Mari Elite should soon be hitting the dealers’ shelves in larger quantities.

Zoli is preparing to ship its new Bilanx over/under to the U.S., and Shotgun Life has obtained factory documents, as they undergo translation from Italian into English, that specify exactly what American shooters can expect from the next-generation in shotgun balancing systems.

Earlier shotguns used external hammers to cock the trigger springs. It wasn’t until near the end of the 1800s that design ingenuity permitted trigger springs to be cocked internally. But even long after so-called “hammerless” shotguns were readily available many, many astute shotgunners still preferred a smoothbore with outside hammers – and ordered their “bespoke” side by side shotguns with those hammers. I’m guessing at the date – but somewhere around the early 1980s thousands of these older hammer guns were brought in from England where they had been made – and the importers found a ready market for these storied masterpieces. One of the movers and shakers in this scenario was Houston’s Cyril Adams. There were others, of course, but Adams certainly had a lot to do with this importation of hammer guns – and with making them popular.

[caption id="attachment_1689" align="alignnone" width=""]The Baserri Chronicles Part I: New shotgun companies are a rarity these days, and so when one comes along we’re eager to track its progress. That’s the idea behind our series, the Baserri Chronicles. In this first installment, we see how Baserri Shotguns forged a key relationship with Briley International.[/caption]The shotgun industry powerhouse, Briley International, is backing newcomer, Baserri Shotguns, with full customer support and a forthcoming line of extended chokes.

An assessment of a new shotgun can go one of two ways: Either we concentrate on the specifications, measurements, features, and options, or we can look at the characteristics that really matter in a shotgun. Those are fit, balance, handling, and reliability.

Zoli is ready to introduce its second-generation Z-Sport over/under, which will feature a revolutionary weight balancing system, state-of-the-art mechanical trigger and additional refinements that play on the gunmaker’s reputation for dependability.

There are three versions of Winchester’s Super X (now shortened to the SX). The Super X Model 1 semi-auto first appeared in 1974. This was one heck of a shotgun, but production ceased in 1984 as the Super X was very expensive to produce because many of its parts were milled rather than stamped.

Question: Who needs it?

Answer: You do (if you qualify).

The question, in fact, arose from our initial reaction to finding the RBL12 Sporting Clays model on the web site of Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Company (www.connecticutshotgun.com).

The ultimate answer, however, revealed itself after we spent a few weeks shooting this unusual and remarkable side by side.