The full-choke riotgun project got a few more little tweaks this week. While I was generally happy with the way the gun turned out, a few niggling issues needed fixing.
Most importantly, the factory Remington follower was giving me some occasional grief with the extended magazine tube. Remington has never seen fit to make extended one-piece magazine tubes, the way Mossberg does with their 590-series guns. If you want more than the 4 rounds that fit in a factory tube, you need to add a screw-on extension. Since you now have two tubes joined end-to-end, there’s the potential for slight misalignment between them.
This caused an intermittent problem for me. I’d go to thumb the fifth round into the mag tube (thereby pushing the first round in the tube out into the extension) and the follower would hang up at the juncture of the two tubes. I fiddled around with different techniques of installing the extension, but never could get absolutely 100% reliable loading.
The factory follower is a molded plastic cup-type piece, and it actually flares out very slightly at the rim of the cup. That little flare is just enough to snag on the transition to the magazine extension. Out it went, to be replaced by an S & J Hardware Type 2 follower. The design is pretty clearly inspired by the Wilson Combat/Scattergun Technologies follower, with a few small alterations. It’s a solid chunk of machined Delrin that has slightly beveled edges. So far, I have not been able to make it snag up.
Left to right: S & J Hardware, Remington factory, Wilson/Scattergun Technologies
This week’s other change was a new recoil pad. The Speedfeed short stock came with a rather stiff rubber recoil pad. I wanted to replace it with one of LimbSaver’s nice soft pads, famous for soaking up recoil like a sponge. A solid two months and many emails and phone calls later…
This really shouldn’t have been difficult. I wrote LimbSaver a nice email explaining that I had a Speedfeed short stock for a Remington 870. They told me they had a suitable pad and asked me to call in my order so they could be sure I got the right pad. Order was duly placed (for 2 pads, so I’d have a spare), and then… nothing happened. After a few weeks and two follow-ups, I got a box containing… the wrong pads. After another 3 follow-ups, the very nice customer service lady at LimbSaver finally succeeded in getting the right pads out to me.
As I understand it, LimbSaver used to make this pad as an OEM part for Remington police shotguns (hence the Remington logo molded into it). That’s no longer the case, and this particular part isn’t a regular-production item anymore, but they were willing to sell me pads they still had on hand. Apparently, though, selling a previously-OEM part via a retail sale just threw a monkey wrench into the works, causing considerable confusion and delays. In any case, I eventually got the recoil pads.
The LimbSaver is definitely softer and more pliable than the Speedfeed pad. Tomorrow’s range session will tell me just how much it reduces recoil. I’m hoping the answer is, “quite a bit,” because I have a 500-round class coming up…
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