doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com popularity of 16 guage shotguns

Ya'll have got way more patience than me. Pulling hulls out with your thumbnail? That's even worse than a normal extractor gun. At least with extractors you can use your thumb and first finger tips to pull them out.

SRH

What do you have to do? Do these chamber mates override even the extractor?

Since this is a 16ga thread, I should probably note that GaugeMate sold me a set of 20ga Silver inserts for my 16ga Parker with short chambers. Told me at the time that I could shorten the GaugeMates to match the Parker chambers. Don't know if this is still the case, but nobody else was selling 16/20 inserts. The other manufacturers were pushing the 16/28 insert which doesn't do much to solve the problem of ammo scarcity in small towns.

No brother Stanley is referring to the need to extract the fired hull from the Gauge Mate tube before loading a new shell into the tube. Like I said in my first post chamber reducer tubes can be a PITA but if you screw up and run out of shells and can't find the proper ammunition or you just want to burn up some excess smaller gauge shells they can be valuable, they may even save your hunting trip.

I have used savage 16-410 inserts for preserve birds with decent success. I find the reduced sound of the 410 and picking shots carefully is good for young dogs

I carry in the truck both 16-20 & 16-28 gaugemates other than test firing them once I have never used them in the field. Like many others I carry them for insurance in case beyond all odds I run out of shells and need to buy some locally. Because I carry them I have never run out of shells.

while the inserts are amusing to play with they are not really needed.

I have more than once said I carry a back up gun on long trips to ensure my primary never breaks. To date that has been a sound theory as my primary double has never broken. I have no doubt the one time I go with one gun it will finally break.

That�s the ticket right there I believe just keep them in the truck in case you run out of 16 gauge ammunition and have to buy 20 gauge at a small local gun shop. I'm guessing here but from all of your responses it seems that these chamber reducers are not made for high volume shooting.

GaugeMates and Chambermates are two very different versions of the same concept. Chambermates, which were available through Seminole Gunworks and is otensibly out of business due to divorce proceedings of the owner, have an ejector that functions with the host gun to eject empties, though they will only eject AA's or STS's and not any imported shell, which limits them quite a bit to those two brands. I've used my 12/20 Chambermates a lot in SC competition for 20 ga. events and they work great.

Gaugemates are just a stainless steel sleeve that has no moving parts, so you have to remove the entire unit each time to remove the fired hull, UNLESS you do a simple procedure of grinding away a small part of its rim to allow room for your fingernail to engage the rim of the fired hull and remove it and leave the GaugeMate in the chamber. It works just fine to do this, but there is a major drawback in that it is not well-suited to ejector guns.
JR

I have not had any issues ejecting/extrating AA hulls with the current 20 to 410 chambermates I used to use with a 20 Francotte I owned. So I am not sure all of them have issues with AAs or STSs

Noticed a visitor reading this thread last week and I wondered how the gauge was faring now some years later. That in turn brought back to mind an article by Greg McReynolds that I saw last fall in SS. With all the new guns being built for the 16b I�d say it�s doing alright.
https://shootingsportsman.com/sweet-over-unders/

I have more than several, I see no need for a 20