A Tale of Two Shotguns, Part 1

A while ago I posted about how Tom Knapp now carries the elusive magazine extensions for the 20-gauge Benelli Novas.

He sold me two of them, and in fact one of them came off of his own Nova. I thought I was getting two four-round extension tubes, but instead I got a four-rounder and a five-rounder. He even said so at right. No, I’m not going to frame the padded envelope with his signature like some gaga fanboy. (I’ll store it in Mylar and keeps it forever, my precious!)

 

Anyway, the other night I decided to sit down and install the things. It took me the better part of an hour. Why? Ever tried to compress a six-foot spring into a two-piece tube? You have to hold the gun with one hand while guiding the spring into the factory magazine tube with the other. You use the index finger of the first hand to hold the stuffed spring in place while the other hand gathers more of it to stuff into the tube. Then you run out of tube, because the extended spring just won’t compress all the way in, of course; so you try to hold this live snake in place with one hand while you fumble to fit the extended tube over the free end of the spring with the other hand. Then you have to compress the two tubes together until the threads meet and you can screw it shut. Go too fast, and the spring gets away from you and pops out like a Slinky. And you start all over.

With two pairs of hands, it’d be a snap. But my wife was laughing too hard and I was too damn proud to ask for her help with a widdle biddy spring.

A pair of pliers might have been useful in all sorts of ways, but of course I didn’t think of that until later.

 

Anyway, I got them installed, as you can see at left, but there were a couple of oddities. You’ll notice at right that I installed the barrel clamps on both guns very close to the thread connections, instead of out towards the muzzles. That’s because placing the clamps towards the muzzle resulted in the extension tube being tweaked at an upward angle. I may try it again sometime as I think the upward angle may have been my fault somehow; it just seems to me that the clamps should be installed further towards the muzzle to keep the threads from being stressed.