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This
space is a personal "blog" of sorts, which I'll
update fairly regularly -- hopefully on a monthly basis. Remington will introduce a Generation-X version of the 870 pump called the 887 Nitro in 2009. Covered entirely in a space-age polymer, it looks and functions like a Benelli Nova and is priced to be competitive with the Nova and the Mossberg 835. Fire control system and bolt release have been redesigned. This is the design they scheduled for introduction two years ago and scrapped at the last minute. The 105Cti autoloader that made such a splash two years ago but was frought with problems, has been fixed. It'll be called the CTi II, featuring a redesigned gas and feeding system. Anyone who has problems with the original design will be able to have it updated to a CTI II for free. Remington is jumping on the modern slug shooting bandwagon, introducing the 870 Super Slug -- a 12-gauge 870 with a heavy, fluted, 24-inch barrel rifled at a 1-in-28 twist rate rather than Remington's traditional 1-in-35. Barrel is pinned to the receiver and there is no cantilever. Sweet trigger and the scope rail is mounted on the receiver -- all features Rem guys had seen on my customized Tar-Hunt DSG-12 during a hunt in 2007. Mine didn't have the goofy Shur-Shot stock or 24-inch barrel, which they found to be optimum from a velocity standpoint. I should have one for testing by November and will hunt in Iowa with it in December. Meanwhile, H&R's 980 Slug Hunter always went from good to excellent as a slug shooter when you sent it back to the Gardner, MA, factory for a $20 trigger job. They took it down to 3 pounds from the 6-8 setting it had when it initially left the factory. Turns out that was something the H&R service guys, all avid hunters, were doing on their own. Now that Cerrebus and Remington own H&R, and the Gardner facility was closed with all manufacturing now going to Remington's Ilion, NY plant, the trigger jobs have stopped. H&R's new Ultragon rifling in the slug gun looks the same as conventional rifling to the naked eye and is discernible only via a bore scope on a cross-sectioned barrel. But it does make slug shooting marginally more efficient. Cation is doing the rifling with an
EDM electro-chemical process rather than button. Edges of the rifling grooves are rounded rather than sharp and the floor of the grooves have a slight belly similar to parabolic rifling. This leads to less slug distortion, and a better gas seal. That's going to mean more consistent velocity and theoretically longer barrel life. H&R being added to the Remington family essentially signals an end to Remington's importing of Russian-made Baikal shotguns and rifles. Similarly, Remington will no longer import the Serbian-made Mauser 598 and 599 rifles. NEF has been importing a Chinese-made knockoff of the 870 for three years call the Pardner pump. The most inexpensive pump available today, the Pardner has made a serious name for itself. While SAAMI notes that the average defection rate (guns under warranty returned due for defects) for pumps is 3 percent, the Pardner pumps have been returned at a percentage of less than a half percent. There will be a Pardner rifled slug gun in 2009 with a cantilever barrel. BATF won't allow the importation of rifled shotgun barrels so Hawk supplies the barrel blanks and Cation rifles them on these shores for NEF. The goal for the new NEF/H&R is to have the rifle/shotgun/MZ barrels interchangeable by the owner (like TC Encore and Knight KP1) rather than at the factory as it is now. Look for that in a couple of years. Turns out that when Marlin bought H&R/NEF several years ago, it did not buy the handgun manufacturing aspect. That "Saturday Night Special" tooling is still out there.
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