By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

At one time every American gun maker with any pretensions to class had a custom shop as part of its factory. These shops offered all sorts of optional engraving, fancy wood, elaborate checkering, barrel lengths—you name it. Remington was no different, but during the middle of the 20th century its Custom Shop in Ilion, NY, was noted not for turning out fancy guns, but for super-accurate rifles. If you showed up at a benchrest shoot with a Remington 40XB-BR, people wet themselves. I owned a 40XB in .222 for a while in the late 1960s, and it made the woodchucks dance for fair.

But over the 70s the trend was to pretty guns, and a typical Remington Custom Shop rifle was likely to be very good looking but otherwise not much different from a production-line gun. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. The Remington Custom Shop has a new manager, Carlos Martinez, and is getting a major infusion of new CNC machinery with which to build working hunting rifles that are as good as those built by anyone.

The new line of rifles (there are 4) look like run-of-the-mill 700s, but that’s as far as it goes:

• Each model comes in a choice of 56 calibers.
• The barrels (choice of 22 to 26 inches, depending on model) are stainless steel, button rifled (not hammer forged) and lapped right there at Ilion.
• The receivers are stainless steel, and blueprinted. This means that they are trued up so that all the radii are perfect, all the flats are flat, and the barrel screws in perfectly square.
• The trigger is not standard issue*; it’s a Remington 40-X target trigger, which is set at 3 pounds.
• The stock is from Bell & Carlson, and has a full-length bedding girder instead of bedding blocks.
• The aluminum trigger guard and floorplate have been replaced by machined stainless steel.
• In .30 caliber and below, the rifles are guaranteed to shoot sub-MOA.
• Depending on model, you can get black TriNyte finish, satin blue, or satin stainless.

I don’t know if the Custom Shop’s barrels can compete with those made by Lilja, Pac-Nor, Schneider, or others at that lofty level, but aside from that, I don’t see any steps that were skipped here. The rifles I looked at were very carefully put together, and I’ll be getting a loaner soon to see how it shoots.

Prices? The four models hover around the $3,000 mark, which is the low end for work like this. Even if you’re not about to order five, it’s nice to see the Custom Shop going in this direction. It’s what they should be doing.

*Remington’s X-Mark Pro trigger, which debuted last year, was better on the drawing board than in real life. The two that I got to pull extensively were, in a word, ghastly—4 1/2 pounds and creepy. Remington has taken note of this replaced it with the X-Mark Pro Adjustable. It’s set at 3 ½ pounds at the factory, and has a 2-pound range of adjustment that can be set by you, the shooter. Remington recommends that you stay above 3 pounds. So do I.

By Philip Bourjaily David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Browning recently unveiled its new autoloader, the Maxus, at its annual sales meeting. They just now posted this video on Youtube as their way of announcing the gun to the world:

Some of the footage was taken last September in South Dakota, where I shot pheasants and targets with the Maxus for three days. I make a cameo appearance in there somewhere – shooting the gun, and carrying a dead rooster

Overall, my impression of the Maxus was positive. Essentially, it’s a Gold 2.0, at least in terms of the gas system, and the Gold was already one of my favorite gas autoloaders. The gas system has been redesigned to work better with light and heavy loads, and to shoot cleaner. Only time and a lot of trigger pulls can deliver a final verdict, but so far it seems to work fine.

The forearm latch, borrowed from O/U guns, replaces the magazine cap. I am still trying to decide whether it’s cool or gimmicky, but I’m leaning towards “cool.” The “turnkey” magazine plug can be removed easily with a vehicle key without danger of launching the magazine tube spring. I suppose it’s cool, too, if you are always plugging and unplugging your gun. I leave the plugs in my guns so I never have to worry about whether they’re legal, so I could take the “turnkey” or leave it alone.

The Maxus is very light weight, probably just under 7 pounds. My contacts at Browning say that’s what hunters are demanding these days. Me, I prefer some heft to my autoloaders, because I primarily shoot them for targets and waterfowl.  Gas operation or no, if you shoot 3.5 inch shells or even a lot of target loads out of a sub-seven pound gun, you’ll get kicked.

The Maxus will list for $1199 in basic black, 3-inch, with camo and 3.5-inch models costing more. They should be available by the second quarter of next year. Anybody lining up to buy one?

By Philip Bourjaily David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Andy Fielder of Junction City, Oregon sent these pictures in asking for help in ID-ing this white goose. He shot it out of a flock of similar-sized western Canadas during Oregon’s early Canada season. He thinks it’s a pure albino Canada and his taxidermist agrees. Any ideas?  Whatever it turns out to be, at the young age of 19 he’s already bagged the waterfowling trophy of a lifetime.

Me, I have never shot anything all white, although there used to be a white squirrel that lived in a grove across the gravel road from my old house. I figured it had enough problems dodging hawks and other predators without me bothering it, too. My barber has a half-white wild rooster pheasant on the wall of his shop, but I’ve never seen one myself. Anybody out there shoot anything all white, all black or just plain weird? 

By Philip Bourjaily David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

When you have dogs, you spend a lot of time cleaning up after them. In the process, you learn more about their dietary habits than you ever wanted to know. For instance, I can tell you that Jed loves to eat foam earplugs even though I’ve never actually seen him with one in his mouth.

It could be worse. The earplugs pass through his system intact, and the day-glo foam stands out like little beacons in the backyard, making it easy to spot the messes for clean up.

Ike, my old dog, has a nose for chocolate. A few years ago my mom sent each of my boys a pound of chocolate coins for Christmas. She neglected to tell us what was in the boxes, so on Christmas Eve we put them under the tree with the other gifts. We came home after midnight mass to find Ike had torn open both packages, carefully unwrapped every single coin, and eaten them all.

Chocolate is supposedly deadly poison to dogs, I dialed my vet’s emergency number and woke the doctor on call at 1:30 Christmas morning. She was very nice, considering. She asked me what kind of chocolate it was – milk (not so bad) or dark (very bad)  – did some calculations and told me two pounds of milk chocolate was nowhere near the lethal dose for a 62-pound setter, although it might be enough to make a 10 pound Chihuahua very sick. To play it safe, she told me give him some hydrogen peroxide to make him throw it back up. (Hydrogen peroxide, I learned that night, works like a charm if you want to induce vomiting in dogs.)

Ike is infamous at my house for devouring the entire double batch of pepperoni balls my wife had made for a school function. Next day’s hunt he turned in one of the best performances of his life on roosters, although he had to stop frequently to expel pepperoni. Pam was not amused when I suggested she make pepperoni balls for Ike before every hunt.

I am forever amazed at what dogs can and will eat, so that’s today’s topic: “My dog at the _____.”