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Thread: Pump action: Designs with function issues

  1. #31
    STAFF Hambo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Navin Johnson View Post
    NOT an SME
    Clearly. Go and shoot with Rob or Matt Haught.
    "Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA

    “It worked pretty good if you could shoot.” -Pat Rogers

    "Expect to get shot at. Don't let it freak you out."-VCSO deputy

  2. #32
    Member
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    Aug 2014
    Location
    Lower Michigan
    My dim view of the Ithaca 37 stems entirely from the perspective of a college kid teaching himself with no quality instructional help.

    I used the heaviest loads I could find (in an age before there was any low recoil buckshot anyway). Additionally, I had a mid-70s era Singlepoint sight on it and spent a good bit of time shooting slugs from the bench. "Gee, this thing is brutal."

    Although I give myself credit for never caring about slam-firing as a technique I did try to run it fast. I believe that's when I ran into my functional issues with short stroking.

    So, my memories of what is probably a perfectly fine design carries little weight. Which is part of the reason I asked people who know better.
    My apologies to weasels.

  3. #33
    Quote Originally Posted by 314159 View Post
    ... "Gee, this thing is brutal."...
    The 37 is a slim for gauge and relatively lightweight pump which will buck harder than some. The design was so light and handy that some upland bird hunters have run them by choice, particularly the 16 and 20 gauge frames which were small enough that many could hand carry them by the receiver itself over miles of terrain. That said, push-pull still tames the beast quite well.

    A proper maintenance cycle takes care of the rest. The design had a bit of a reputation from cops who worked for agencies which couldn't even spell "armorer" and refused to replace shell stops. After some slide hammer style pounding from the ammo in the tube while on the road and qualification cycles, the shell stops would wear out and start dumping rounds. Keep a good one in the gun and no problem.

    Beyond that, some people do complain about the lack of a side ejection port preventing port loads. These tend to be the same guys who complain about guns not having AR control layouts and refusing to think about a different design. Some people can, with practice, get good enough to slip a shell all the way up into the chamber without issue; others, like me, get hung up in the prongs of the lifter. A workaround to that is to shove a shell in the magazine tube as normal and run the slide to chamber it. The time difference between that and a port load is pretty small, particularly if you measure an average time over several reps which start to catch and account for bobbled port loads.

    Getting into the less time-sensitive shotgun skills, the 37 again has some complain about inability to or difficulty in conducting a slug-select. There are options there. Run the gun -1 in capacity as many do any pump-action and do a slug-select like them: shove a slug in the magazine and cycle the slide. Or cycle the slide, slip a slug in the magazine, cycle the slide again. I'm personally in the -1 camp.

    The 37 was a slicked-out and optimized field gun pushed into general use. With a bit of thought to address a couple quirks from its intended application, it is still a very slick and handy pump that will do what it needs to.

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