I think we might all agree that they don’t make 870s – or a lot of other guns – quite like they used to.

A little while ago, I mentioned the 70s vintage 870 Wingmaster I picked up and made a mag-tube recoil reducer for. Once upon a time, it must have been someone’s duck gun, but  in these days of steel shot,  a 2 ¾ inch chamber and a fixed full choke is not what people want. The gun had been beautifully cared for,  the barrel was 30 inches long, the action was left-handed and the price was only $269. I grabbed it.

It’s a gem. The action, as Mike Meyers used to say on Saturday Night Live, is “like butter.”  The trigger guard is still cast aluminum, not steel, but it’s much more finely cast than the ones on modern guns. Even the lettering on the barrel and receiver is sharper and clearer than what you see today.

However, my gun had the same ugly, pressed-checkered stock as any other Wingmaster from its era and the stock had field dimensions, where I had bought this gun thinking to shoot trap with it.

Through Remington customer service I ordered a Classic trap stock and forearm, pad, a new stock bolt, washer and lock washer. They told me my parts would come in two packages. One contained the lock washer, the other had all the rest. Go figure.

I bought an 870/BPS/Winchester forearm wrench from Midway, which costs about $15, looks like a super-sized choke tube wrench and works way better than the decoy stake with two nails in it I used to use to unscrew forearms from pump guns. I pulled old wood off, put the new wood on, and voila, I had my 870 trap gun. Here's the cost breakdown:
 
Gun:  $269

Parts: $380

Wrench: $15

Homemade reducer: $8  

Total: $671

Yes, I know the parts cost much more than the gun. Even so, I put it together for at least $100 under the best price I’ve seen on a new 870 Classic trap. For $100 in my pocket I can live without choke tubes and besides, it feels good to give a neat old gun a new lease on life.

Shooting instructors Gil and Vicki Ash brought their traveling OSP school to town last week (that’s Gil, working with a student in the picture), and once again I got to hear the Ashes harp on the importance of tempo to good shooting. Matching the speed of the gun to the speed of the target is an under-emphasized, critical aspect of shooting a shotgun. Hardly anyone swings too slowly. Much more often, we move the gun too fast and outrun the target, whether it’s a clay or a live bird. The Ashes like to use the analogy of merging onto a freeway. When your car is moving at the same speed as the traffic, the speeding cars seem to be moving in slow motion. When your gun moves at the same speed as the target, the birds actually appear to fly slower.

Tempo is especially important on quartering targets. Too many people, myself included, want to swing away at quartering birds as if they were crossers and the result is a miss in front. I watched Ash work with Jim, an AA class shooter, on short, quartering birds, the kind that look simple and leave you scratching your head when you miss.

Gil let Jim miss a few, then said, “You’re moving the gun too fast. Make your move to the target softer. You can’t start fast and slow down. You have to start slow.”  Just like that, Jim started center punching birds, as if it were the easiest shot in the world. And it is, if you move the gun in time with the target.

I am looking forward to slowing down and crushing my nemesis, High 2 on the skeet field, and curing a few of those mystery misses on quartering roosters in the field this fall as well.

A woman who used to have a hobby farm told me about the sheep she used to have. 
They got dirty, and she called the county extension agent and asked how to wash them.

“Use Woolite,” he said, and hung up.  She never knew whether he was kidding or not, so the sheep stayed dirty. I was able to tell her that yes, some 4-Hers do wash their show animals with Woolite, but it was many years too late for the dirty sheep.

Like my hobby farming friend, I am comparatively wet behind the ears when it comes to reloading. While I have loaded a lot of shells in the past few years, there’s lots I’m still learning. Sometimes I don’t know if people are telling me the truth, pulling my leg, or just giving me bad advice.

I know about putting a dryer sheet in my powder bottle to control static cling, although I don’t feel the need to do it. The other night, though, one of the trapshooters at the club told me my reloads would never be consistent enough for me to break 100 straight until I started running wads through the dryer.

The heat supposedly spreads the wad petals outward, so that when they slide into the hull, none of them are folded in, and the resulting patterns are more uniform.

“Should I put them in a bag?”

“I don’t. Just throw ‘em in there loose,” he said.

So I ran some wads through the dryer on “high” for ten minutes, and the petals might have been spread outward a little. The bases were more flexible, at least, until the wads cooled. Does it make any difference? Beats me. I am not going to break 100 straight trap targets any time soon, but that has more to do with my attention span than my ammunition.

I had never heard this one before. Is someone putting me on, is this a good idea, or bad advice?

After some gun trading a couple of weeks ago, I wound up with a Browning BT-100 single shot trap gun. The 100 was made from 1995 to 2002, then discontinued in favor of the reintroduced BT-99.  I suspect Browning got rid of the 100 because the 99 cost less to make. Don’t get me wrong: BT-99s are also great guns, just not as great as this one.  It balances and handles better than the 99s I’ve shot, and, although it costs a small fraction of what you pay for a Krieghoff or Perazzi, BT-100s have one of the niceties of a high-end gun:  a removable trigger.

Push a sliding latch behind the trigger, and the whole mechanism comes out so you can adjust the pull, or switch from extraction to ejection.  I’ve got mine set for extracting, and the trigger now breaks at 3 ½ pounds.  The pull is so light and crisp that even I, who never notice trigger pulls when I shoot shotguns, can tell how nice this one is.

Theoretically, if you broke a spring in competition, you could easily fix it, or take your spare trigger out of the velvet Crown Royal bag you keep it in, put it in the gun and be back on the line in a couple of minutes. In reality, coil springs hardly ever break. The main reason I like this removable trigger is that it’s jeweled and finely made.  When I show my new gun to people, I can say, “Hey, check this out,” and pop out the trigger, show it to them, then put it back.

I did that for a friend of mine, who told me the following cautionary tale: he was at a sporting clays club on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and one of the shooters in his party had driven a couple hours across the bay from northern Virginia, showing up with a brand new Krieghoff K-80. K-80s are serious target breakers  starting around $10,000. The guy pulled the gun out of his trunk fully expecting to bask in the ooohs and aaahs his friends.
One of them looked at and said, “Nice gun. Where’s the trigger?”

It was at home, in a velvet Crown Royal bag.