doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Ithaca Classic Doubles

Chuck, We are not saying that cast parts don't work. Stamped parts work, too...ask Remington. The point is, one is better than the other.

I think, if you were to compare an RBL to a Ruger Gold Label, you would find that one is much better made than the other.

Ruger is the king of investment casting. They have had more than a few problems with Red Labels not functioning properly. Having said this, they generally work. The RBL is, simply, a better made gun.

That's the point trying to make...a forged part is intrinsically better than a cast one. The fact that they work is not the issue.

I really think that cast vs forging is really not much of an issue today. I'm a mechanical engineer retired from Dana Corp.
One of my marketing/sales functions was to sell large univeral joint driveshafts to the steel industry for mfgr hot roll steel (2,300 deg F ingots) into steel coils in a half dozen passes through the rolling mill. These 42 ft long, 23 Metric ton driveshafts manufactured by our affiliate in Japan were powered by 5,000 and 6,000HP electric motors under extreme rolling mill heat, dirt, moisture, and heavy shock conditions.

Both the cast and forged steel U-joint knuckles equally withstood these operating conditions. Many customers insisted upon forged components due to past useage history - tradition fades very slowly in many industries and not only with shotgun actions.

I think tradition is about the most important thing in high end shotguns, no matter how unimportant some think it is. I'm sure laser engraving is on a level with cast receivers, one is as good as the other when compared with the traditional hand engraving and forged receivers. However, someone paying the big buck is thinking beyond "It fires every time I pull the trigger." Sorry for the sarcasm, but I wouldn't pick up a Ruger shotgun on the side of the road, whether it works or not. Were talking $20,000 Galazan Foxes here, not Rugers.

Like I said, tradition dies hard. The benefits of modern investment casting are in their ability to reduce machining, not eliminate it. An investment cast double frame could (and should) be fully machined and finished in the same manner a forging is. The reduction of the machine time is where a company could provide an equally finely finished gun for less money, if they chose. The bad stigma of casting comes from at least two sources; first, old methods of casting using cheap/less sophisticated metallurgy resulted in failures of things, including guns, and generally casting was used by low end manufacturers of a particular product (guns included), and second, current application of investment casting by the likes of Ruger who is targeting the lower midrange of the market and leaves much of the surface to be finished by nonprecision processes like hand polishing (no not like a H&H, more like a car bumper). Rugers have problems not because of modern investment casting, but in spite of it.

So, modern casting gets a bum rap without being given a chance in the mid range gun market, IMO. Fact of life. Galazan recognized this and changed to accomodate his market regardless of whether there was a difference in final product performance or quality.