P.O. Box 320, South Hero, VT 05486-0320  www.herosarms.com   E-Mail: sales@herosarms.com   Phone 802-372-4789
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TIPS FOR SELECTING A SHOTGUN

The Home Page has an alphabetical list of all guns in stock, and notes which guns have been sold.

Hero's Arms will close for vacation on Saturday, May 10th, and will re-open on Monday, May26th, 2008. During this period E-mail will be checked occasionally. Telephone messages will be returned, and shipments will resume, on Monday, May 26.  If you wish to put a "hold" on a gun during this period it is best to do it by E-mail.

If you could only have one shotgun, a 12 or 20 gauge multi-shot (pump, semi-auto, over/under, side by side) with a 28 inch barrel and screw in choke tubes would allow you the maximum number of hunting and clay shooting possibilities.  That said, most of us do one kind of shooting most of the time and would like to have a gun particularly adapted to that kind of shooting.  Fortunately, as well, many of us can afford more than one shotgun. In all cases the gun should fit you, and you should feel comfortable shooting it.  The Gun Measurements used by Hero's Arms provide a guide to fit and comfort. There are standard bore and choke diameters and constrictions, though some manufacturers deviate considerably from the norm. 

Here are some simple general suggestions. There are, of course, exceptions to all of them.

Upland Hunting generally involves walking around all day, perhaps following dogs, and shooting very quickly at birds which are not far away.  Gun Fitting is critical because the gun has to come to your shoulder precisely. A light gun, perhaps a smaller gauge, with a 26" barrel is often favored.  Hunting guns often come with automatic safeties which go on when the gun is opened and have to be taken off before shooting - because walking through the woods risks an accidental discharge. While the recoil of a light gun may be significant, it is infrequent in most upland hunting.  You will be carrying the gun all day and a heavy gun gets heavier by the hour.  Upland Hunting High Volume Exception:  High volume shooting such as in Argentine Dove Shoots, which may involve thousands of shots a day, call for a heavier gun to tame the recoil.

Waterfowl and Turkey Hunting:  Duck, goose and turkey hunting is often carried out sitting in a blind so the gun is not being constantly carried.  It also often involves longer range shots at tough targets, so a semi-auto or pump with 3 shots gives a measure of security for finishing off a wounded bird.  Magnum shells of 3" or 3 1/2" length are often used, so recoil can be significant.  As lead shot cannot be used for waterfowl, modern shotguns with screw-in chokes allow the use of non-toxic substitutes. Many wetland hunters favor heavy semi-auto shotguns which spread out the recoil impact into more of a shove.

Clay Target Shooting in general involves from 25 to 400 shots in a day, so a heavier gun is appropriate to keep the recoil from beating you up. Generally target guns have non-automatic safeties so that you will not miss a target because the safety was on.  At the extreme, some trap guns, such as the Browning BT-99, have no safety at all - safety being assured by the rule that you only load when standing on the pad waiting to call for the target.

Trap can be singles or doubles, so trap guns can be singles, doubles or combos.  They tend to be heavy, and have high combs (that is to say a smaller Drop at Comb) so the gun will shoot high as the targets are always rising when shot.  Trap shooters favor longer barrels, 32" and 34".  Partially, this is,  I suspect, for historic reasons, longer shots used to require longer barrels in Black Powder days, but also for smoothness of swing.  I know many trap shooters who object to being hit by shells ejected by their fellow shooters' semi-auto shotguns, so this might be a consideration in your choice.  Generally trap shooting calls for a tight choke constriction, Modified, Improved Modified, Full, or for 27 yard handicap, perhaps Extra Full.

Skeet always involves doubles so a gun capable of two shots is a necessity.  Most skeet shooters favor over-under, or perhaps side by side shotguns, because they do not throw their shells on the ground as pumps and semi-autos are wont to do.  Bending over and picking up shells slows down the round, and gets old after a while.  Barrel lengths of 28 or 30 inches are common, and the choking is minimal, cylinder or skeet is normal as almost all shots are within 22 yards.  Skeet competitions involve all four gauges, 12, 20, 28 and .410 so there is logic in buying a four gauge set (you only have the stock fitted once, all gauges point and swing the same), or buying a sub-gauge tube set which allows the 12 gauge with tubes installed to be used in all competitions.

Sporting Clays and Five Stand involve many different types of shots and varying rules which sometime allow 3 shots.  Aside from the need for a heavier gun for high volume shooting it is difficult to specify specific gun characteristics.  Many Sporting Clay shooters favor 30 and 32 inch barrels, and often use Improved Cylinder chokes as the best all-round compromise. Exception: Some Sporting Clays shooters change their choke tubes at every station to fit the situation, and carry a battery powered choke wrench to do it.

Home Protection shotguns may have to be be used within a house at short distances.  A short barreled gun is easier to maneuver and has a slightly wider spread at short distances, so a pump with an 18" cylinder bore barrel or a coach gun with skeet or more open choking is the preferred weapon.  Having a light on the gun allows you to be sure of your target.  Hero's Arms recommends that whatever you choose for home protection be of good quality (e.g., Remington, Winchester, Mossberg), rather than the cheapest possible imported pump.  You don't use a fire escape very often either, but you wouldn't build your escape stairs out of rotten wood just to save money. Shoot a few boxes of shells through it to be sure it works and that you are familiar with it, then clean it and store it safely, considering your circumstances.

Youth shotguns are distinguished by having shorter Length Of Pull (LOP) than other shotguns.  They may also be chosen for lighter weight, lower cost, lesser recoil, etc.  Ideally, the short length of pull can be lengthened by adding spacers or putting back a cut-off piece of stock as the youth becomes an adult.  The least expensive are single shot, followed by pump, followed by semi-auto followed by double or over/under shotguns.  Generally, I recommend 20 gauge shotguns for young people because the ammunition is inexpensive and the pattern is dense enough for serious shooting.  If the gun weighs 7 pounds or more the recoil will be acceptable for most. The 28 gauge is nice, and has less recoil, but the ammunition is expensive.  The .410 is really an expert's gun, and possibly frustrating to learn with.  Some of the same considerations apply for shorter and lighter adults.

Left Handed shooters, in general, are not well served by gun manufacturers. Very occasionally one can find a shotgun with "Cast On" from the manufacturer, or a pump or semi-auto that ejects to the left and has a safety that disengages from the left.  The first thing that a left handed shooter should watch out for is not to buy a gun that is set up for a right hander, with cast off.  Generally a gun with no cast is acceptable, and an over/under or side-by-side, or bottom ejecting pump with the safety on the tang is the best a left hander can expect out-of-the-box.  A stock fitter is recommended for a left handed shooter who wants a gun that actually fits.

Recoil

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There is no way to reduce the amount of recoil, all we can do is change it from a sharp snap to a strong push by changing the length of time it works on our shoulders.  Imagine a prize fighter punching your shoulder with a roundhouse right clenched fist, then imagine the same force being applied over a half-second as a flat handed push.  What a semi-automatic gun, a recoil reducer, a thick soft recoil pad, a hydraulic stock absorber, or a heavy gun all do is lengthen the time the recoil is applied to you. In the 19th century W. W. Greener stated that a shotgun should be ninety-six times heavier than the shot charge it fires, for the comfort of the shooter and the longevity of the gun.  Modern steel and alloy formulations allow guns to take more recoil, but our bodies have not evolved as quickly. 

Some people are more tolerant of recoil than others, but prudence suggests that you will have more fun for longer if you minimize the recoil you experience.  A day's hunting with a six pound gun shooting 1 1/8 ounce loads five or ten times may be tolerable, shooting 100 rounds of skeet with the same combination may leave you punch drunk.  At the extreme, I have a skeet gun, which, with its extended stock, recoil reducer, thick recoil pad, and Briley sub-gauge tubes, weighs just short of 10 pounds.  The recoil is only 4 feet per second for .410, 6 feet per second for 28 gauge and 7 feet per second for 20 gauge, as you can see from the table below.

Fixed breech guns, pumps, over-unders, side-by-sides, have sharper recoil than semi-automatics where the mechanism spreads out the recoil. A stock that fits you, over-boring, porting, and long forcing cones all may have some minor effect in reducing perceived recoil.

The values in the Table below were calculated from a calculator on the website of  huntamerica.com

Shotgun Fit

On a shotgun, your eye is essentially the rear sight.  When you raise a shotgun quickly to your shoulder the two beads on the rib (if you have two) should line up on the target and be stacked on top of one another in a figure 8 as you see them.  There are numerous adjustments to shotgun stocks which may be necessary to make this happen.

The best way to be sure you have a shotgun which fits you is to have a professional stock-fitter such as Klaus Hiptmayer adjust the stock for you.  There are many possible adjustments, drop at comb (DAC), drop at heel (DAH), cast-on cast-off (Cast) which can be carved into your stock, or which can be set in a stock with an adjustable comb.  The most important dimension, however, is the Length of Pull (LOP), which is the distance between the center of the trigger and the center of the buttplate/pad.  Some few guns come with, or can have added, adjustable Length Of Pull mechanisms.  Others, such as the Franchi Renaissance have different recoil pads which can adjust the Length of Pull.  Frequently Length of Pull is adjusted by cutting the stock to a shorter length or adding a thicker recoil pad, jobs which most gunsmiths do frequently.

The classic method for estimating Length Of Pull is by holding your shooting arm down at your side, elbow bent at a right angle so that your forearm is parallel to the floor, and measuring from the inside of the elbow to the first joint of the trigger finger.  Unfortunately this is hard to do consistently, one can push a yardstick back into the elbow a half inch, the fingers can be differentially crooked, etc.

I measured a number of shooters at the Franklin County Sportsmen's Club who had had their stocks professionally fitted (mostly by Klaus Hiptmayer because he is the closest stock-fitter around here).  I measured the length of their arms, the LOP of their guns and asked their height and weight.  I then did a regression analysis to see what the relation between Height, Arm Length, and Length Of Pull was.  I found that Height, measured in Inches, which is displayed in the following chart, was a slightly better predictor than arm length of the actual fitted Length Of Pull.  This is handy, because everyone knows how tall they, or their wives, husbands, or children are, while almost no one knows their arm length measurement. 

The way to use this chart is to go along the bottom line to find your Height in Inches (say 5'9" or 69") , draw a vertical line up to the slanted line, mark where this vertical line crosses, then draw a horizontal line to the left hand scale of stock LOPs (in this case slightly over 14.4").  This will give you your approximate length of pull, generally accurate within plus or minus a quarter of an inch.  Most guns are, or used to be, made with a 14 3/8" length of pull, which is perfect for a 5'8" person.  a 5'2" person would take about a 13 1/2" stock, a 6' person would take about a 15 1/4" stock. There are, of course, always other factors which may be important, some short people have long arms, some tall people have short arms, some people may have longer necks, narrower or wider heads, some people may have unusual stances, etc., which is why a professional stock fitting is best.

Gun Measurements used by Hero's Arms

When Hero's Arms advertises a shotgun on its web site there are around a dozen photos of the gun, as well as a series of measurements.  These measurements will likely differ from the measurements found on the manufacturer's web site because Hero's Arms measures every individual gun and the manufacturer gives a general average for a model.  One of the largest variations from the manufacturer's listings is in Weight because the density of wood varies greatly. I recently measured two identical Browning Citori Satin Hunter 12-28 guns, one weighed 8 pounds, the other almost 8 pounds 8 ounces, close to a half-pound difference. Here is how the measurements are taken.  Click on any hyper-link to see a photograph of that measurement procedure.

Trigger Pull (Back to Table)	Inside Diameter (I.D.) of Barrel (Back to Table)
Chamber Length (Back to Table)	Rib Width (Back to Table)
Gun Weight (Back to Table)	Length Of Pull (Back to Table)
Drop at Comb (DAC) (Back to Table)	Drop At Monte-Carlo (DAM) (Back to Table)
Drop At Heel (DAH) (Back to Table)	Cast On [left], Cast Off [right], (No Cast in Photo) (Back to Table)

Photographs:

The photographs you see one each gun's individual web page are taken in a home-made studio with a Nikon D70 digital camera.  The gun is suspended in mid-air by monofilament fishing line, which accounts for the diagonal lines across the grip and the barrels.  Here is a photo of the photography set-up, surrounding mess and all:

   Bore and Choke Constriction and Diameter Tables

For an excellent discussion on chokes provided by Briley, click here.

Sub-Gauge Inserts and Sub-Gauge Tubes

There are two basic choices, short gauge-mate or chamber-mate tubes which are not much longer than a shotgun shell, and full length standard or fitted tubes.  The prices go up rapidly.

Short Inserts

Cabella's offers a "Gauge Mate" tube at $34.99 a pair (Product code SD-22-5925).  These do not have an extractor/ejector built in, they are a solid tube which is likely to get ejected with the shell when the gun is open.  You may have to carry a stick to push the spent shell out. They work, but they are not very convenient.

www.cabelas.com and search for "Gauge-Mate"

Seminole Gun Works and Briley both offer "Chamber-Mates" and "Sidekicks" which are short tubes with extractor/ejector mechanisms milled into the sides.  They are considerably more expensive, typically around $200 per pair, or at Seminole $650 for three gauges.  You can get more details on Seminole Tubes at:

http://www.chambermates.com/

Briley also makes chamber tubes, which they call Side-Kicks, which are $600 for a three gauge set.

http://www.briley.com/

In terms of full length tube sets Briley offers a choice between universal tubes which they call "Companion" and fitted full length tubes which are custom length and turned to exact barrel inside diameter.  They are on the same web page as the "Sidekicks", but cost between $1,150 to $1,595 for a three gauge conversion.


 The North American standard for 12 Gauge barrels is .729 ID.  Any of the sub gauge chamber reducers or tubes should work well in a barrel that is close to standard size.  The only guns where I  have had a problem with the tubes are overbored guns like the Ruger Red Label which has a barrel ID of .745, causing the chamber mates to fit too loosely and for blowback to destroy the O rings (particularly in 20 Gauge because there is so little difference in diameter between 12 and 20), and for full length (non-fitted) tubes to rattle around.

In my experience with sub-gauge devices, you get what you pay for.  The shorter tubes do not work nearly as well as the full length custom fit models.  The chamber inserts (in a 12 gauge shotgun) tend to have blowback in the 20 gauge, work acceptably in 28 gauge, and pattern inconsistently with .410s.  The only drawback with full length fitted tubes is that they add about 3/4 of a pound to the gun, so the swing is not exactly the same with the sub-gauge tubes installed.  The answer to this (again you get what you pay for) is to go to a four gauge set, or to a gun which has a carrier tube in place of a barrel and uses tubes for all gauges. These tend to run from $3,000 to $8,000.

		P.O. Box 320, South Hero, VT 05486-0320  www.herosarms.com   E-Mail: sales@herosarms.com   Phone 802-372-4789
By Principal Shotgun Uses	By Brands	By Shotgun Characteristics	Buying & Other Information
Home Page | All Guns List | All Purpose Guns | Collectors | Home Defense/Police | Hunting | Skeet Guns | Sporting Clays | Trap Guns | Chokes-Barrels-Cases |	Home Page | Beretta | Browning | Franchi | Fabarms | Huglu | LC Smith | Mossberg | Other | Smith & Wesson | Remington | Rizzini | Ruger | SKB | Weatherby | Winchester	Home Page | Bargains | Compact Adult/Youth | Gauge And Barrel Length | Right/Left Handed | Semi-Auto & Pump Guns | Side-By-Sides | Used Guns	Home Page | Contact Us | Tips on Selecting a Shotgun | Photographing the Guns | Reserving and Buying Your Gun | Lay-Aways | Seven-Day Return Privilege | Ducks Unlimited Guns | Vermont Club Schedules