Bought myself one of these a week or two ago.
I went with 20g for ammo availability and lighter weight. Seems like all my rowdy friends are moving that direction, too, to paraphrase Hank Jr.
Initial impressions:
The metal has a dark finish that hopefully will do what it says and not rust. Its blacker than typical bluing. There’s some engraving, not super ornate, but not as plain as most budget workhorses. Its lightish, but not sloppy.
The wood fits the metal well; its not super proud. Everything fits as if it were hand-fitted, with a lean toward never getting loose. The action and lockup are super tight. Really tight. Consulting the manual, it is meant to be cleaned and lubed before firing, so I did that, and opened and closed it a bunch in dry fire. That helped, and shooting it helped, too. It now opens and closes quite nicely, though, if you open it super slowly, it hangs up just shy of being able to swipe the shells out. On that topic, this gun extracts, but does not eject, which is how I like them. I foresee many cases of shells of Acura-grade fitment with this gun.
The stocks are consistent with my preferences in a double. Splinter fore-end and english grip for light weight. The wood is aesthetically amazing at this price-point. Beautiful. The checkering is not sharp, but is accurate, with no drunken overruns. Very appropriate for such a gun. The comb is similar to a Benelli, and additionally, there is a slight cant and cast. This is a right handed gun, and the stock may as well be bespoke for me. Its perfect. The buttpad has a plastic top, so it does not snag my shirt when I mount the gun, whether low-ready, high-port, or port arms are used as the start point. This is, by far, the best stock I’ve seen on a budget gun, and rivals or trumps guns of much greater cost. As I said, it may as well be bespoke. It points and swings as such.
The chokes are screw-in. It comes with all 5 typical chokes. I’d have been happy with fixed IC and Mod, so that’s the ones I installed. I’ve also ordered an aftermarket Skeet 1 choke to play with. There are significant burrs on all sides of the wrench notches on all of the included chokes. Pretty bad, and I was concerned that they’d snatch the wad, negating choke. I attempted to remove the burrs on the Cylinder choke with light filing, and that reduced the sharpness, but there was still a hard buildup as if it were peened. Shooting a couple hundo rounds through the IC and Mod chokes seems to have removed the burrs/peening/whatever from those chokes. Unexpectedly easy peasy.
Shooting Trap, it did exactly what I’d expect. Clays got dusted. Excellent tool for that, so far.
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