Stock Fit

Volumes have been written about shotgun stock fit. Most of us bumble along with factory fit stocks. Certain guns, like the Remington models 870 and 1100 series seem to fit a wide verity of shooters. Others not so much. In our land of mass production, the manufacturers try to produce guns to fit “the average American”. But every manufacturer has a different idea of what size and shape the “average American” is.
     My first gun, back when the only thing I knew about shotguns was that I wanted one, was an old Ithaca side by side. I couldn’t hit a barn with it, so I sold it to my brother. My second gun was an old Parker 12 gauge. Birds just seem to fall out of the sky wherever I pointed it. After reading a bit, I figured out the Ithaca was cast for a right-handed shooter and the Parker for a lefty. I am a lefty.
     Cast is when the stock is bent at the wrist to accommodate the shooter. A left-handed shooter wants the stock bent out to the left of the centerline and a righty wants it the other way. The amount the stock is bent depends on the shooter’s physique and a person trained in stock fitting can tell you how much it needs to be.  Some who measurer gunstock fit have fancy try-stocks that are adjustable in every imaginable direction. Cast for a right-handed shooter is called cast off, for a left-handed shooter cast on. Almost no American single barrel shotguns are cast and very few over-and-unders or side-by-sides are cast. In Europe things are entirely different.
     An early Browning Citori I owned wanted to shoot to the right. Bending the stock only a small amount corrected that. My go to shotgun for the last few years has been a Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Company RBL. It has a straight stock and it too wanted to shoot to the right. I first noticed this with birds crossing to the right almost always fell, but to the left was a different story. My tendency is to shoot behind fast flying birds but with the gun shooting to the right if gave me an automatic lead on birds crossing in that direction.
     Repeatedly I tried to teach myself to mount the gun with my left eye centered between the barrels. I thought I was getting better at it. But it is tough to teach and old dog new tricks.

     But then this past winter I dusted off an old Parker 20 gauge with no cast and stock dimensions that are identical to the stock of that RBL. The one difference was the thickness of the stock. Birds dropped this past fall as if by magic. When I bring the gun to my cheek my left eye is dead center looking down the barrels. The RBL came up to my cheek with the barrel centerline just a smidge off to the left. It was obvious that I needed to take a rasp to my RBL’s stock.
     Before starting, I made a template of the stock’s shape where the stock came to rest against my cheek. Using a rasp, I started to take away wood, checking with the template to see how much was gone. With an eighth of an inch taken away, the gun came up to my cheek exactly the same as the old Parker, my left eye looking straight down the rib between the barrels. The stock was then sanded smooth before refinishing it. Even when I explain what I have done to the stock, people cannot notice the missing wood.
     And what a difference it made to my shooting.

  

The RBL next to a dead grouse.