By Phil Bourjaily

Dave and I are doing lots of radio interviews now to promote the Total Gun Manual. One question interviewers keep asking is, “What is the most important piece of shotgunning advice you can give?”

I usually respond with some variation of “head on the stock, eye on target.” The other day, after a horrendous meltdown in the dove field (I finished with a limit, but it was not a good day from a birds-to-shells standpoint) I flipped through the book looking for a tip that would have saved me. It’s there, Tip 241, entitled “Swing Your Shooter” which reminds me of all the things I was forgetting to do as my frustration grew in the field.

It reads: Tip 241 “Swing Your Shooter”
A shotgun is not aimed but pointed or swung at the target. A proper swing starts before you begin the mount. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

You thought you centered the bird perfectly. “Must have flown through a hole in the pattern,” you tell your buddies as it wings away unscathed. It’s a handy excuse…but it’s also the truth more often than you might think.

Ask Doug Ashby, of Kellyville, Okla., inventor of the Lucky Weasel. Ashby’s automated, computerized pattern analyzer counts holes in patterns that a bird or clay can slip through. It also determines point of impact, and figures pattern efficiency in an instant. Erik Carlson, product development manager for Federal Ammunition, which owns a Lucky Weasel, says, “It used to take hours to shoot and analyze patterns. Now we can do one a minute.” [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

This past week I shot Sporting Clays with a friend of mine named Charlie Yellott, who is not only a hell of a shotgunner, but a fine gunsmith as well. Charlie was shooting a Remington Model 32 o/u which had been built in 1934. He had rust-blued it and stocked it in an iridescent piece of black walnut. It was a reminder that wood can’t compete with chemicals for a working-rifle stock, but on a shotgun, wood is the only thing to have. (Unless, of course, you want to do something like hunt waterfowl or turkeys, and then who cares?)

A figured wood stock is like a snowflake; it is unique; there has never been one exactly like it and there never will be another one like it. Moreover, it will change over the course of time. Walnut usually darkens as it ages, and its colors get richer. One of the great satisfactions in working with walnut is sanding a blank as smooth as glass and then applying the finish. It is at that point that the thing is literally transformed. All the shades and tones jump to life in an instant.
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By David E. Petzal

There used to be a song whose refrain went: “Oh, lay it on the ground, and spread it all around, it’ll make your garden grow.” This could be applied to much of the advice I hear given about guns. The most recent piece which can double as fertilizer comes from a friend who asked me, very worried, if it was all right to use Birchwood-Casey Gun Scrubber on his rifles because the guy at the gun store had told him that “…it would dry out the wood.” This is so addled that it’s worth examining in detail.

But first, I have to say for the record that Birchwood-Casey Gun Scrubber is a gun nut’s best friend, and that right now I have one big can on my workbench and three more in reserve. It is one of the great boons of technology, along with big-screen TV and the Shu mine. But let us examine this statement that it will dry out your wood.

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By David E. Petzal

You have heard, no doubt, that if you chained a million monkeys in front of a million word processors for a million years, they would eventually replicate the works of Shakespeare. Similarly, if you gave a million unskilled gun tinkerers access to a million firearms and a million screwdrivers for a million years, they would equal the damage that was caused by the atom bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.

You would think that so simple a device as the screwdriver would require little or no skill. But, like the hammer, it requires a lot of skill. Melvin Forbes, who is handy with all tools, can drive a nail with two blows. Wham WHAM! The average person needs 20 or so, and three nails, and a trip to the doctor to look at his thumb. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

I once asked a friend in the industry why gun makers gun makers don’t offer “dove specials” if dove hunting is so popular.

“There is a dove special,” he said. “It’s called the 20-gauge Remington 1100.”

The 20 gauge is the classic choice for doves, and I would almost bet more doves have been shot in the United States with 20-gauge 1100s than any other gun. They are heavy enough — mine weighs seven and a half pounds — to swing smoothly and recoil mildly, and the 1100 gas system is among the very softest-kicking. [ Read Full Post ]