Butch-M

Yeah, but ... back in the 1400's, could the Duke shoot like you??? And which part of my concern do you question? Women? Alteregos & Icons? Banter? LOL If it's icons ... our brains process a ton of information almost instantly, so it doesn't take long to have that stuff rattling around in there somewhere along with an impression that the icon conveys. An impression formed within the parameters of each individuals lifelong knowledge & experiences. You don’t have to obcess on something to voice a thought. If it’s women vs men hunters ... well I’ve hunted with men ... and I’ve hunted with some of my past girlsfriends. I’ve seen the girls go from predator while the ducks are flying early in the morning ... to “predator” during the boring mid-day lull. I was only wondering which Tucker was referring to. Okay ... I’ll admit it ... I was bored yesterday and was floating stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with Benellis and shooting ... looking for a little fun. Besides (here’s the part where I do like kids do ... deflect & portion out blame ) sbeIIfan started the post ... & Tucker mentioned women. (Have I protested too much) LOL

HMmmm ... she can look like a predator ahey??? That could be good ... or then again; that could be bad. But ... dealing with fems ... sometimes "bad" is actually really, really "good." Women, semantics, mystery, ... alas ... confusion!!! I better stick to ballistics, tree stands, binoculars ... stuff I can understand a little. I'll just go along picturing you as an Ironworker or Shipbuilder alterego with that rivet gun icon you use. Mudhen's icon is the one that has me scratchen my head. Sort of belies the turkey slayer reality. LOL

Besides the pure physics of body size & weight, bone structure, density, muscle mass and location vs the gun design, weight, powder load and shot weight ... recoil reaction or how we perceive pain is relative. You must stay within who you are. For a pro football player to tell a horse jockey to "suck it up" is silly and cavalier if they're both shooting 3-1/2" loads. I think about the worst thing you can do is feel forced into using ammo which will have you cringing each time you slap the trigger. You'll drop ten times more game using comfortable ammunition that you find a joy to shoot ... than more powerful, heavier loads which wreck your self confidence. Whatever advantage you gain in "more pellets," you'll surely give up in subconscious "flinching" and the accompanying technique or shooting form breakdowns. Dad wants you to be tough and be a man ... but sometimes being tough is thinking for yourself and respectfully and logically explaining to Dad why 2-3/4" loads are much better for you ... at least at this point in your life. Odds are he'll respect you for it and stop pushing you to use those big berthas. I know a guy who is a wildlife biologist & professional hunter. He culls more game in one year than everyone on this forum has shot in their lifetime. He'll shoot rings around most of us. He uses nothing except "reduced recoil" loads. Stuff we consider puny ... perhaps even unmanly. LOL

Can Do ... LOL

I've seen turkeys often enough out of permenent deer stands, but never noticed a pattern to their movements like deer. Not that I was paying attention. One thing I do remember now ... I'd see them coming through the winter woods a mile away ... heading straight for me ... and mysteriously ring right around me, out about 80 yards or so ... then be back on course again behind me. I didn't THINK I was moving at all. LOL I build pretty high up with walls & a roof, so I never went full blown camo. Perhaps they have eyes like a ... hawk??? They must know the range of a 1.5x.660 Rhino choke.

“When in Rome ... do as the Roman's do." (Or you ain’t shooten no ducks) sprigsss you may have the moral purist’s high ground if we assume the “technological” line in the sand was drawn before the advent of motorized decoys ... but either way, Tucker is surely real world right. As long as everyone is working within the same parameters of the pertinent game laws, it's hard to fault the guy who keeps up with technology. Besides ... big picture flyway game limits don’t care who is killing the ducks only the overall harvest quantity. Rather than investing a lot of energy and emotion admonishing the guy killing all the ducks using a legal robo on ethical grounds; you should turn your ire and effort to the people who can tailor those game laws to a level playing field ... made of course according to you and like minded people’s criteria. Since this thread has degenerated to name calling, accusations & grammar/punctuation castigating already ... if you can’t put together a majority of motivated hunters who agree that they don’t want robos out there ... you can always do like the Liberals do; find a sympathetic judge and sue to inflict the will of the few on the many. Of course ... Tucker & lot can sue to keep the Robos they’ve come to know and embrace. Personally, I see it more as a financial and therefore in turn a civil liberties issue. If Tucker is Robo-ing ... I’m being forced to Robo. He’s forcing me to go out and spend a couple of hundred bucks on this mechanical aberration ... or be resigned to go horse throated and cross eyed blowing away on the previous ultimate techno advancement ... to no avail. I think perhaps it’s a form of economic segregation. The “haves” getting over on us “have nots” again. Might even work “profiling” and mental anguish in here somewhere. Perhaps an onerous tax on Robos, quickly followed by registration & annual permit fees ... ostensively to subsidize Robo free only hunting zones for the antis. Tax em out of the marshes? And Jon ... is that “target practice” comment a thinly veiled advocacy of firearms violence as a means to an end??? Or ... are you so far up on the “haves” curve that you have enough money to use Roboducks for skeet? I haven’t duck hunted in a few years and want to get back into it with my Benelli. I have a few coil spring mounted decoys that gyrate around on top of ½" pipes I sink in the creek mud in my spread, but no Robo. I can see the written on the wall already ... anyone got a link for a good price on one? Butch

That's quite a "vest." I saved the website in case I start to get into turkey hunting. Right now I use one of three backpacs with a foam hotseat strapped on ... and boot blankets dangling if it's cold. Thanks for the advice ... I appreciate it all. I'm beginning to sift through the wheat and the chaff of information ... see that 50 yard shots are the thinking of a novice ... or a pro. (We know which I am)LOL The guys who sound self confident and experienced talk 35-40 yards as long. I'm reading between the lines and adjusting the information I'm reading posted by the guys who seem a little more taken with that extremely long 50-60yd shot they made. No disrespect to them. They might be THAT good. I find missing pretty uncomfortable for some reason; almost embarrassing ... so I try to practice a little more than the average Joe to know my limits and be confident within them ... and then keep things sane out in the field. I can see why the guys in the club had a gleam in their eyes when they were going out turkey hunting in the morning ... looks like you can really get into it. Here's one for you ... just an abstract thought ... has anyone tried hunting turkey out of a climbing treestand? Too easy to get busted with all the movement? Doesn't seem like it would be any more dangerous. Thanks again ... Butch

I saw your reply to the guy with the 24" barrel ... I found this article on barrels that matches your findings almost exactly. Since I don't know how to copy/past links in this box ... here it is: ================================= Short Barrel or Long Barrel? by Clark Bush Short Barrel – Long Barrel? When I started hunting turkeys in the late 1970’s there really wasn’t much debate about barrel length for shotguns. You just used whatever you had, maybe put a little tape on it and called it a turkey gun. An old “long tom” goose gun worked just fine. Camouflage was usually some old army fatigues, maybe some that new “tiger stripe” stuff or just a pair of pretty much worn out hunting pants. Then, largely due to that new start-up organization called the NWTF, turkey hunting started to get the attention of gun makers, clothing makers and a lot more hunters. It was about this time that most of us found out about the ability of the local gunsmith to install after-market choke tubes. He could cut the barrel of our old shotgun to a more “modern” length, thread it for choke tubes and we could use “that one gun for everything we could possibly hunt.” At least that’s what I told my wife to justify the expense of that particular operation. Gun magazines of the time extolled the virtues of short-barreled shotguns for turkey hunting. They were easy to carry, didn’t hit limbs or saplings when you “got on target” and generally just looked special. Now I could put some tape on my “new” short-barreled gun, screw in a turkey choke tube and attach a sling and be ready for old tom. It didn’t take long for the big gun makers to jump on that wagon. Soon we had short-barreled shotguns galore. You could get straight stocked or pistol gripped guns with 21”, 22” or 23” barrels and “wonder of wonders” with 3” chambers. Those little guns kicked like mules, bruised your cheekbones, bellowed like bulls but they killed a lot of turkeys. A lot of paint kits were sold to amateur artists who gathered leaves, sticks and anything else they thought looked neat to form patterns to camouflage their guns. We just kept getting beaten up by those short-barreled, fire belching, hard kicking, painted-up turkey killers. Then someone introduced us to barrel porting. Yeah! Now we could shoot that same gun and have less “perceived” recoil. For just a few dollars, you could send your barrel off, have it ported and have it back in just a few days. Now, that same fire belching, hard kicking, painted up turkey killer could also wake the dead every time you shot it. In the early 1990’s I purchased a Benelli Super Black Eagle with a 26” barrel. I wanted a shorter one but it wasn’t available and “I just had to have it right now”, you know the feeling. I’d just started patterning guns at that time and with an after-market choke tube, I could place 94% of my shot in a 30” circle at 30 yards. Hot Dog! I had a long barreled, fire breathing, 3 ½”, 2 ¼ oz. of shot throwing turkey slaying shotgun. It wasn’t much fun to shoot and second shots, if necessary, were hard to come by but by George, it was quite a gun. A year or two into that mission, a rascal, you know your name, talked me into having that barrel ported. That really helped! Now my long barreled, fire breathing, 3 ½”, 2 ¼ oz. of shot throwing turkey slaying shotgun was also LOUD. VERY LOUD! My pattern opened up but it would still kill turkeys, if I could remember that it shot about 6” low at 30 yards. One thing I can say for that gun, it doesn’t bruise my cheek like its shorter barreled cousins. It bruises everything else but not my cheek. Okay, so what’s the point of this long story? What does it have to do with how a long barreled gun does versus a short-barreled gun? Well, after about 30 years of patterning shotguns, I had the answer. Short-barreled guns just didn’t pattern as well as longer barrels. It appeared that if you went much shorter than 26”, you lost a good bit of density in your pattern. Short guns were much easier to carry to and through the woods. They looked cool and you could kill turkeys with them but they just didn’t pattern as well. When you only get one or maybe two shots each year and that trophy bird may just be waiting for you next time, you want your gun to pattern as well as possible, right? I finally figured out that 3 ½’ shells didn’t pattern as well as 3” shells. I learned to deal with my 26” barrel and I put a telescopic sight on that SBE so that I didn’t shoot the turkey’s legs off. I had it all figured out and was content to let others go with their short-barreled guns with factory camo. Then what happened? Well, in 2000 some guy has to go and shoot something called Hevi-Shot in the NWTF National Still Target Shoot championship and get something like 42 pellets in a 3” circle at 40 yards. He wasn’t shooting a 32” barrel either! Now, it was back to the drawing board. In the last 4 years, I’ve shot various makes of shotguns, with various barrel lengths, most available shot shells and most commercially available turkey choke tubes. I’m convinced, from my personal experience, that you can have a barrel that’s too short to pattern reliably and to achieve what the proper ammo and choke tube combination is capable of achieving. How short is short and how long is long? My experience says that a couple of inches can make a big difference. My experience says that 26” is an optimum length. A much longer barrel, especially if you’re shooting a semi-auto shotgun that will chamber a 3 ½” shell, makes a gun that is just too unwieldy to take to the woods. A shotgun with a barrel much shorter than 24” just doesn’t shoot as well for me. Now, before you tell me all about your 21” side by side that throws 100% patterns at 65 yards, I’ll concede that some guns do better than others and that some shooters can shoot better than others. I’ll also add that the proper ammo makes all the difference. For example, I was not always a believer in Hevi-Shot. I bought a box and ran it through my SBE. I wasn’t impressed. It didn’t do any better than other brands, if it did as well. A lot of conversations later and a lot of competitive losses later, I thought I’d try it again. I learned that the proper constriction for a choke tube made all the difference. With the right length barrel, the right choke tube and the right ammo, I was shooting dense patterns, when I did my part. Short barrel – long barrel? You’ll have to decide for yourself what’s most important to you. I try to optimize my chances. I shoot a 26” barrel (most of the time) and Hevi-Shot, all of the time. Good luck and good hunting. Clark This article was published on Sunday 28 March, 2004.

Two votes against optics already. Seeing the whole field without an optic makes sense ... I didn't think of that. Probably makes sense to see what happens out in the field before I go through all the gyrations of research, buying and mounting optics ... and find out I'm digging for an allen wrench by 9:00am on the first hunt. September 2004, I bought an SBEII slug gun for hunting deer in NJ. As the season closed I ordered a shotgun barrel for the gun; figuring to use it for 2005 waterfowl ... which I haven't done in a few years. I have a 14 foot aluminum "V" hull "duck" boat w/25hp Mercury & a slew of decoys for our coastal marshes around here. Anyhow, the slug barrel with the 3-9x40mm attached is the one that comes off. The boys in the NY Lodge were doing spring turkey ... seemed like a good excuse to play some more and buy some more gun stuff. The new 28" barrel seems a little long, not a big deal ... but I might have gone for the 26". I have a Browning B2000 that at one time was my do it all shotgun; with three barrels, 26"ic, 28"mod, 30" full ... before screw in chokes came into fashion. The Benelli 28" "feels" as long as the Browning 30". I've heard of Rhino chokes pretty often. I'm surprised about the terror tubes ... I see them mentioned quite a bit. All good to know. 7-8 after market tubes sounds like a pretty dedicated shooter to me. I'll take the Benelli out in July; shoot some clay birds with it; pattern some of my various ammo I have around; and try the different chokes. See what happens at 40-50 yards. I'm sure I'll realize then that an aftermarket tube is necessary to do it proper for turkey. Another question ... have you found much of a benefit from 3-1/2" shells? I'd assume that on turkey; trying for a rifle like density ... it would help. Even though I usually subscribe to the “if a little bit is good; a LOT is better theory” ... I found the 2-3/4" magnum shells performed about as well on waterfowl as the 3" stuff. (I'm not much of a "sky buster" though.) Butch

Well, I picked up my new 28" SBEII barrel with 5 chokes yesterday after waiting almost 5 months for it. Seems my dealer had a $60,000.00 order placed with Benelli, accepted half of it to sell ... and my barrel was at the end of the second half. Benelli didn't want to send it out of sequence for some bazaar reason. Finally; when the dealer jokingly asked if they're suggesting canceling $30,000.00 worth of product to re-sequence a $400.00 barrel?, the salesman got them to send the barrel in three days. Capitalism??? Anyway, now that I have this baby I have a few questions for you more experienced guys. I'd like to use the barrel for both waterfowl and turkey. It's drilled and tapped for optics. While I've read about turkey hunting over the years, and some of the guys in our club are "into" it ... I've never really done it before. 1. My thought is to mount a Picatiny rail with some type of quick disconnect rings and a turkey optic which I can easily remove for waterfowling; leaving the rail attached to the barrel. I don't "think" the rail would be a problem because I never really see the barrel when I shoot and the ventilated rib appears as if it will be higher than the rail anyway. Any opinions or options??? 2. Optics for hunting turkey? I'm kind of leaning towards some kind of illuminated reticle or red dot. Any magnification? Thoughts on that Bushnell Halo Sight? Rings? 3. Choke tubes: The full and improved modified choke tubes are engraved "not for steel shot." I've read of super tight Briley, Terror Chokes, Trulock, etc, etc, for turkey. Are those chokes only for use with lead or Hevi-shot? How extensive are "no lead" regulations these days? Thanks ... I appreciate any impute ... Butch

I vote for the .300 WinMag for the versatility. You can own it for a lifetime and use it on anything in the Americas, no mater what you may decide to hunt ten years from now. Without getting into the custom stuff, I own a Winchester Model 70, a Browning BAR, a Remington 700 BDL and an Encore ... all are excellent guns. I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Ruger either. For a scope ... depending on your budget; Leupold is good, Kahles is better: Zeiss and/or Swarovski are the best. Personally, if you have it ... I'd suggest investing any extra money you have in the scope ... you won't regret it. 3-9x40mm is enough scope and they're very common, but anything from a 2-7 to a 3-12 will work fine.

Glenn: For what it's worth ... I have a muzzle brake on my .300 Browning BAR w/BOSS system. Works fine; BUT ... be prepared for horrendous deafening noise with each and every shot. In all my years of hunting I can't remember really hearing the gun go off ... until I shot the BAR. If you hunt with hearing protection ... and I never met someone who did ... you might get away with a brake. Personally, I think whatever you're going to gain in "muzzle jump" staying on target ... you're going to lose three fold between the "ports" which are aimed down & back sending a substantial shockwave stirring things up around/under you and the disorientation factor (whatever the degree) in the hellacious roar. I find myself pulling my hat down over my ears everytime I see a deer these days. LOL One of these days I'm going to get around to buying the unported BOSS piece for using in the field.

I have both a Bushnell and a Leica ... Leica by a wide margin. Actually, I USED to have a Bushnell ... my brother the golfer snagged it as soon as I started using the Leica. I think the swaro is pretty pricey.

What's a true hunter look like? I never thought about it before. Tall? Short? Average? Dumb looking? Smart Looking? Agile looking? Marine look? Wild Bill Hickock look? Predator Look? ... or is it in the clothes? The clothes make the hunter? You look like Jeremiah Johnson -Tucker ... ??? Now ... can a WOMAN look like a hunter?

Cutting through the falderal ... Short=quicker ... long=steadier swing. Right?!

You guys make my head hurt. LOL

I agree with you 100% and subscribe to the same speed theories. Trust me ... if I could get my muzzleloader 240gr XTP's going 2500fps rather than 2300 ... I would. I may have had a bigger/slower epiphany in 2001 ... but it still isn't ingrained. I've been avoiding testing a container of 200gr SST's in my Possibiles Bag that are singing me a siren song of addition speed. LOL Now ... we're stretching this .45 vs .50 a little here, (there ain't THAT much difference) but just for fun. Tucker, you're a dedicated marksman who obviously prides himself on hitting where he aims ... and has the self discipline to take nothing other than shots which almost guarantee success. The reality is ... 99% of hunters aren't. Sort of like giving a .410 shotgun rather than a 12ga to a new hunter ... the average guy is going to cripple a lot of game that he would have harvested with the 12ga. I think the larger bullets in many ways compensate for less accurate firearms, less committed shooters or simply the less than "idea" angles or conditions in which most hunters find most of their deer. A "safety factor" for less than perfect hits so to speak. I hunted alongside the professionals from White Buffalo, Inc. who have culled thousands of deer with "tiny" .22cal bullets.(centerfire) The key is each guy shoots tens of thousands of rounds practicing each year; NEVER take anything other than a perfect shot ... and ... like your experience with your .243 ... the bullet gives up ALL it's energy inside the animal. When they're forced to use shotguns ... they use the slowest "reduced recoil" slugs they can get ... for energy transfer. My 150grs, 200's, 240's and even my slovenly shotgun slugs invariably pass through, exit the other side ... and carry a lot of the energy we drool over in the ballistic chart ... into the dirt behind the animal. Even at 312yards ... I got a pass through with a 165gr. Hornady btsp. Your .243-70gr giving up all of it's 1,600 ft/lbs @ 100yd ... does a better job than my .300 using 1,000 ft/lbs to pass through and dumping the other 2,000 ft/lb into the dirt. If I wasn't so enamored with speed ... trying to reap the accompanying additional range & trajectory gain ... clearly I'd be better off slowing all these bullets down so they would give up all that truck like energy INSIDE the animal. BUT ... "IF" ... I hit a bone, or my treestand sways, or buck fever, or I get stupid over a big rack and I don't get a textbook hit ... the big bullet is taking down the animal. (Unless I got REAL stupid) Hence my vote for bigger & slower. LOL (With understanding and respect for your smaller & faster) So ... if sbeIIfan is still even remotely interested at this point ... for deer hunting ... a .45cal @ 195gr or .50cal @ 200gr? Pick your poison. Whatever attracts you. Sometimes you can find good sales on .45's because dealers are looking to move them out of inventory ... shop around ... you might get more gun for your budgeted money if you're lucky.

I couldn't agree more about the speed and trajectory on those .45cal 195gr bullets. As I mentioned, I've shot a .300 most of my life for the speed. Poured over the ballistics tables; reloaded and swore by Hornady 165gr. In 1996 I added a Browning BAR with the BOSS system to my old glass bedded, trigger worked Winchester M70 ... the BOSS system is a NIGHTMARE. Burned tons of costly ammo trying to find the right setting for my 165's ... tried different brands & weights of ammo too. Even sent it back to Browning ... nothing wrong. FINALLY, after it came back; when I was doing the preliminary setting of the remounted scope with some old Federal Premium 200gr ammo I had laying in the bottom of my ammo can ... it grouped very well. It was such a horror before; I figured I'd live with the grizzly load for whitetail. Low & behold ... the deer started being better anchored. I've read the complex charts on "knock down" or killing power of various weights @ various velocities which tend to favor bigger bullets ... but they sort of fly in the face of the clear and understandable ballistics tables. A 150gr @ 3,500fps triggers the image of a sexy Ferrari and a 200gr @ 2,800fps a slovenly truck. When I bought the muzzleloader in 2001 and started shooting 240gr XTP bullets @ about 2300fps ... and had all eight deer drop directly in their tracks, I realized why the old timers used big, slow bullets ... because they work! Now ... I never lost a deer ... the 150's killed them just as dead as the 240's. (Just like the Ferrari will splatter you about as well as the truck) BUT ... the farthest I ever had an animal go after being hit through the boiler room was with speedy 150's. What I've seen ... seems to indicate that the bigger the bullet ... over all ... the shorter the distance they go after impact. BUT ... we're just debating degrees of dead here. Thinking in terms of a 30.06 or .308 or your average deer rifle ... 195gr is in reality a HUGE bullet. Fully capable (and some might feel superior) for doing the job you're asking it to do. My thoughts when I went with the .50 Encore were that it's versatile enough to handle really BIG bullets (over 400gr) for any game in America if I ever get the urge or opportunity. It's a little similar to the 20gauge vs the 12 gauge argument ... in my opinion the 12 can do everything the 20 can ... but the 20 can't do everything the 12 can. The 20 may do a very limited number of things a little better. When I can afford it ... I try to buy stuff to last a lifetime ... so I tend to figure in a lot of "what if's." Bottom line is ... you won't go wrong either way ... you decide. LOL One last thing ... the PowerBelts vs the sabots ... I shoot XTP's because I've had 100% success so I'm scared to change. They take a Herculean effort to load by your third shot. My buddy with the Optima shots Powerbelts dead on accurate ... and can shoot a dozen, no problem.

I shoot a TC Encore since 2001; which has performed flawlessly on 8 deer out to 147 yards. I won't get into a friendly debate about .45 cal. vs .50 caliber but my theory is that a good big gun will do everything a good small gun will do ... and more. Not one animal moved more than three feet! I've shot a .300 WinMag for 30 years using everything from 150gr to 200gr bullets and I seldom have them drop in their tracks like that. If you prefer the break open action as I do ... a friend of mine bought a CVA Optima and took it on our Ohio hunt last season; I was very impressed with the quality, feel and fit. It shot dead on too. They're a touch above your $160.00, but it looks like a muzzleloader that would serve you a lifetime.

All the previous information is on the mark. I've read that sabots through a smoothbore MAY actually become unstable, pitch & yawl in flight ... roll rather than rotate. Go to ww.tarhunt.com and click on the tab labeled "Shooting Guide." Work your way through the headings down the left margin. They will not directly address your smoothbore situation, but you will learn a lot about the differences between shooting a rifle and shooting a slug gun. There are small but very significant shooting technique differences that make a HUGE difference in accuracy. How you use your front hand on the stock forend for example is critical. I did a lot of reading on slugs, slug guns, ballistics and the foibles of sending a single projectile through a shotgun, before purchasing an SBEII slug gun, mounting a 3-9 x 40mm scope, and testing $$$ worth of various high end slugs. The results of which lead to harvesting 15 deer in the "shotgun only" state of NJ last season. I spoke with and shot alongside a lot of guys who were shooting smoothbores and many of them were having excellent results with the relatively common, readily available and well proven "Remington Slugger." I've read that Brenneke type slugs work well through smoothbores and are good for tough game like boar because they penetrate deeply with little expansion. One suggestion is to do as much practicing as possible at 25, 75 and even 100 yards as well as the recommended testing of ammo at 50 yards so you know how the gun/slug combination you choose shoots when that big one shows up on your radar screen. It will define your equipment/shooter limitations. Oh ... and after you clean the gun, be sure to send a "fouling shot" down the barrel before the hunt. A lot of the guys first shot after cleaning their gun was 2, 3 or even 4 inches higher than normal at 50 yards. Plenty enough to cause an unexplained miss when magnified out to 100 yards or so. Another thing I found was that different ammo brands and even different loads in the SAME brand produced huge differences in point of impact. So bring enough of the brand and load you choose after testing. Grabbing a few odd slugs from one of your buddies during the hunt because you run out ain't like borrowing #4's during a duck hunt. Hope this helps ... good luck. [ 06-14-2005, 07:57 PM: Message edited by: Butch-M ]

If you have a range in your area, you might want to check out the Trap & Skeet guys ... they're often pretty serious about getting things right. They might know who is good and who has fair prices. Call em.

It all depends on how the gun fits your particular physique ... you gotta get measured & then fit the gun to your measurements. (as mentioned by coloradoryan) Seems to me the technical end of this has been well covered above. My two cents worth of advice ... If you can swing the cost, you would do well to bring a professional into the loop. If not; you could probably just try different shims, shoot; see how you're hitting or patterning; and keep working trial & error until the pattern is dead on everytime you quickly mount and fire. I think heating and bending stocks is rarely required, so I wouldn't give that a second thought. Either way, it's going to take a commitment in time and effort that few people are willing to invest to do it right. I'd venture a guess that well over 90% of the shotguns out there don't really fit the shooter. Manufacturers build them to fit the "average" adult male ... whatever that is (5'-9", 165lbs???) So, in most cases, the shooter is compensating and adjusting to the dimensions of the gun. That's often why a guy hits well with one gun and can't hit a barn with another brand ... one brand just happens to be closer to "his" natural fit. The gun should inherently point where you look when you swing it up to your shoulder. It's difficult to tell what you're doing wrong with a shotgun when you're missing; we usually blame our technique. Which is true enough, if gun fit was correct. If not correct; our "form or technique" becomes convoluted to compensate for the gun. Thereafter, if we don't make the same subconscious fundamental "corrections" we're automatically going to miss before our actual shotgunning "technique" even comes into the equation. You can imagine how difficult it is to be consistent or good with an improperly fitting gun. Something like a rifle that shoots 6" to the right at 100 yards. As long as I teach myself to point 6" left on every shot, I'll get by ... but in the heat of battle what happens??? We revert. LOL Which brings up another point that NOBODY thinks about ... RIFLES should point where we look too!!! (Scopes mask that need) Anyway ... I'd say if you're one of the 1% that has a gun that fits ... you'll reap the rewards, joys, satisfaction and self confidence that comes along with it. And the investment you make now should last for many, many years of shotgunning fun. Good Luck.

I like my Marlin lever action too. I should take it to a gunsmith to correct whatever is making it jam because the gun is a lot of fun. My cousin gave it to me just before he left for JFK's "Bay of Pigs Invasion" @ Guantanamo Bay, Cuba back in 1963. (He was a Navy Seebee) (Cuban Missile Crisis) I was just a kid. I thought he gave it to me because he thought he might not make it out alive ... it just occurred to me that maybe he gave it to me because it jammed. LOL

Thanks cherok. Mine has 2-3/4" chambers; not a "Lightweight." I only used it for grouse and woodcock, and the occasional rabbit if I was in the mood and the shot was a challenge. Used a #7-1/2 Remington "high brass" in the IC barrel and a #6 Winchester XX high brass in the IM barrel when hunting. After being too busy to use it for a few years, I took it with me up the Catskills last weekend and shot (at) a box of skeet. I used to reload 10 gallon drums full of AA's and had a few one gallon pails still sitting around. After some humbling frustration and needing two shots to break each bird ... things started coming back. I started to remember why I enjoyed shotguns so much too. A lot of fun. Really like the gun. Now if Benelli will only send my dealer the shotgun barrel for my SBEII slug gun. LOL

I've heard a lot good about the Thompson ... even thought of getting one. I see 22's as mostly fun guns; although I have one I use just for serious working on rifle shooting technique, so I don't beat myself up putting a hundred rounds through a .300 magnum. Consider getting whatever suits your fancy. Or ... they're cheap, so you might decide to get something like the very accurate Thompson for serious working on your rifle shooting technique and a lever action for plinking & bottle busten. Personally ... if I were going to choose just one, I'd research and buy the most accurate production model out there ... disregarding the exotic expensive stuff. As far as jambs go; I have a Remington and a Browning that I can't remember ever jambing and an old Marlin lever action which jambs fairly often. No knock on Marlin, I suspect it's my particular gun. But, for some reason jambs aren't as scary in a 22 as in big guns.