doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Gun weights for specific applications?

Fighting a bad cold here today (sigh!) so I'm a bit housebound. Got a landscaping crew in my front yard abusing the neighborhood (with their equipment backup alarms) and while they are coming down the home-stretch for this job (building two rather large granite boulder retaining walls to replace a very dead juniper hedgerow [voles...curse them!]), I'd normally be out there keeping track of things but...oh well.

I'd like to discuss gun weights and then their specific applications in the field if I might. My more specific question would be fairly simple...does half a pound really make much difference in an upland gun?

I'm already very comfortable with the fact that 6lbs in the uplands is almost ideal (at least for me). What has surprised me is how sensitive I've become to anything exceeding (or failing to meet) that rather arbitrary number (a half a pound under 6-lbs and things start to get fairly whippy (unless I really concentrate).

Walking all day with a gun (or at least most of it) with a fervor {approaching something almost religious} has led me to several revelations...I certainly can carry heavier guns and still succeed, but at the end of the day things start to deteriorate a bit. That last trail might not be as productive as it could be or...it might not even get walked. Mind you, age is becoming a component here as well (as is conditioning) so I understand that we're discussing "the law of diminishing returns" here to large degree.

Ruffed grouse are the very definition of "light-skinned" game and light guns with minimal chokes and light loads seem to do just fine for me. Move up the scale to prairie birds and everything changes. For that game, faster and heavier shells (along with some more-serious "choke") seems to be called-for and at that point I'm looking to haul something along in the 6 1/2 to 7 lb range (6 3/4 lbs is an excellent compromise IMHO). I can do heavier guns here as well but the walking becomes much tougher in the afternoon for me (an 7 1/4 lb Parker hammergun last year was noticeably unwieldy after 5 or 6 hours of walking).

I have heavier shotguns, of course, everything from pumps to hammers to stack-barrels, but I tend to keep them for situations were the shooting is more frequent and the walking is less-so (waterfowl, turkey, targets, etc.).

What do the cognoscenti here have to say on this subject? Am I all wet here?



6lbs11 versus 7lbs6....

In 2000, I took a mountaineering class.
The most valuable take away from it was “the less you carry up the mountain, the less you have to carry up the mountain.”
Which is easier? Losing some weight and changing your gear, or building your strength and cardiovascular system up to where it doesn’t matter?

For shooting,
Your condition is the greatest determinant in the entire equation.

After that, it’s how much you shoot.

Practice makes your aim much more precise. Much more controlled. All the little muscles that control that are fit.

If a person worries about 8 ounces in a shotgun, for the purposes of hitting targets, that doesn’t imply a lot of practice, or a great deal of fitness.

We are working with site pictures that we have seen hundreds, nee thousands of times.
We reproduce them in fractions of a second and then pull the trigger.

The lower your condition, the more difficult that is.

Within the professional sporting Clay circuits you can’t help but see the ever increasing level of fitness in the top shooters.


Edited to add:
Time waits for no man.
Also, everybody should have as many Shotguns of as many types and styles as they can afford, and enjoy them freely in every possible way they can.

It ain’t always about hitting the target.

CZ: I sort-of figured the physical conditioning thing would get the first comment, and while I wholly agree...I'd love to be 35lbs lighter and 20-years younger (who wouldn't), but...grouse hunting (both forests and plains) requires several things to line up if you wish to be successful, the gun, the hunter, and the circumstances. For many (if not most of us) you must play the cards you've been dealt.

I'm faster with a 6lb gun, I just am and I can walk further with said 6lb gun without much fatigue. As the weights climb, the downsides begin to show up. My 16 brummy BLE is actually 5lbs14, my lightest hammer gun is 6lbs5 and I can tell the difference at the end of the day.

Surely I'm not the only one here that is able to make that sort of distinction?

Declining hearing, declining physical condition, comes together in an unintentional panic that jumps the ultra lightweight gun as fast as possible right through the site picture, to shoot 5 feet in front of the bird before it gets 20 yards. Or stop the gun to make the site picture work and then shoot behind the bird.
No truer phrase was ever uttered than “fast to start and fast to stop”.


You can listen to it all day in the grouse woods. pow pow, or pow pow pow.

I think people should shoot the gun that they want to enjoy that day, and if it tires them out before they get a full bag, well, that’s just how it is that day.

For water fowling or driven game, use the shotgun that gives you first shot kills.

Lloyd,
The 1/2 pound doesn’t matter as much in the morning as it does right before twilight, on the way back to the truck.

In our little corner of Valhalla, the walking is fairly easy, plenty of it, but, not much up or down and well tended grouse paths. I’m convinced a few of the areas I pheasant hunt only hold birds because most guys are either too old or too lazy, or, they lack a dog to help find and move the birds. Pheasant hunting without a dog in spots like these is not hunting, it is an armed hike. The extra half pound is a curse when you are navigating cattails, phragmites, and elephant grass, not frozen quite as hard as you might like, behind a dog that clearly has something feathered on it’s mind. The roosters cling a bit more tenaciously to life than the grouse do, and I often find myself grateful for a substantial 12, either the 6 1/2 pound 2 1/2” chambers Darne, or, the 7 pound Silver Snipe. When the weather gets cold I make no bones about feeding the Snipe a hot load of Federal 1 1/4 ounce 5s, a load that might just be on the edge of the guns standard Italian proof. I walk more grouse hunting with you, but, the walking is harder in those little public hunting hell holes, pursuing and attempting to remove a few of those gaudy Chinese invasives.

The Federal pheasant load doesn’t really belong in a lightweight gun. But, I’m not typically pursuing roosters for a whole 8 hour shift. I only need so many birds.

It isn’t as pleasant as it once seemed. I think gravity has gotten stronger. But, I intend to do it until I can’t.

Best,
Ted

To me, balance - how a gun carries - makes more difference than the specific weight.

A barrel heavy is a hassle to carry all day in the field (whether that's the grouse woods, or the prairie) where a well balanced gun can be fine, even it's 7 1/4 lbs.

I’m sure cognizant of the differences in my own fitness make to my enjoyment afield. To the point that some years I specifically train for it. We condition dogs preseason. Why wouldn’t we condition ourselves?

But having said that, like Ted, I pick the gun weight/ gauge/ load suitable for what I’m hunting.

If I’m hunting pheasant or sharptails on the Great Plains I find that a 6 3/4 pound gun, usually 12 or 16 ga, is about perfect. If it’s ruffies or woodcock that I’m walking through the forest for and hunting behind a setter then 5 3/4 to 6 1/4 seems about right.

James: We clearly agree on the gun weights (for forest birds and then plains birds) and... I do start my "training" in late summer (or earlier, just so I can walk those first few trails with some hope of efficiency) and as the season progresses, my "lethality" then improves as well.

Geoff: Balance is yet another critical component of any upland doublegun. Hard to define but easy to identify when you actually hold a "balanced" weapon. MOI (Moment of Inertia) measurements used to be performed by Rocketman here (is he still with us?) and other than saying "between the hands feel" and "at the hinge-pin" I still don't fully understand what makes a gun "lively" (but I do know it when I handle one). The few Boss guns I ever handled (exactly 2) seemed to have this critical quality in spades, and, really...all good "bird guns" seem to have this magic in them. I have even handled some fairly heavy doubleguns that seemed much lighter because they had this wonderful "balance".

Ted: Hunting "swamp creatures" is a whole other story. Those cockbirds are both tough and smart to have lived beyond the first few weeks (months?) of a season. A gun has to be heavy enough to digest those hotter loads (they don't die easy) but also trim enough to get into (& then out of) those swampy tangles. Not for the faint hearted, eh? It sounds like you have the right medicine for them too.

Back to my original question: it sounds like at least three of you here "get it", are there others here that do too?

Lloyd,
I certainly "get it". At 79 this month, my 5 lb. 12 0z. Churchill 12 as well as my 6 lb. 8 oz. Browning BSS-SL 12 get the most use. Try and train all one can, however age is what it is!
Karl

I have been going to a lot of gun shows the past few years. I have a hard time walking on the floors. I think they call them masonite- like you have in shopping malls and grocery stores. They hurt my back and I heard they are harder than concrete. In the winter I can't get outside because of the cold, so I walk inside my house. I do laps. My house isn't that big. About 25 steps from one end to the other. I circle at each end. 2 laps is about 100 steps. I calculated 2500 of my steps is about a mile. I'll swing by arms. It really helps......... I don't notice the weight of carrying a gun that much when I shoot. I can go all day and lug around a pretty heavy trap gun. Or a 12 gauge O/U sporting clays gun. If I shoot a lot, it keeps me in shape. Hunting is a little bit harder. The weeds dragging on my legs. But, I try to be in shape before the season starts. That's all I got.