Not many people know that the first sporting clays guns were modified skeet guns.
Remember earlier when we said that we shot the first high rib guns in the game of sporting clays? Well, we did – and how do we know that? Gil made them for people all over the country. He made 26 of them. We shot them as we went to tournaments around the country, and people wanted them once they shot ours.
Back then, shooters would show up with all manner of guns. Most of the guns were field guns with short barrels. Some were semi-autos and many were O/U, and a sprinkling of pumps and SBs rounded out the field at most tournaments. Our background was in skeet, and as a result, we had skeet guns – both semi-autos and over-and-unders.
Our O/U guns were the old beaver-tailed Browning skeet guns with 28-inch bbls choked – of course, skeet and skeet. We both shot 4 bbl skeet sets with sub-gauge bbls to fit our 12-gauge frame, so we had Briley thread the 12-gauge barrels for screw chokes and started shooting sporting with them. They were clunky and front-heavy because of the large wide forearm that gave the gun its nickname “beavertail.”
We bought four new 12-gauge guns and Gil went to work on them to make a balanced sporting clays gun. He shaved the wide forearm down and did not stop there. He re-inletted the stock to a lower dimension, took them back to Briley, and had them back bore the barrels to the same diameter, lengthen the forcing cones, and install screw chokes.
He then took the barrels to Wright Machine Shop in Houston and had the barrels ported since this was before Briley did porting. Finally, we had some guns that were balanced to shoot this new game with, and so began our journey.
It wasn’t long until Gil was making those guns one or two a month, and then eventually they began to show up in the winner’s circle at sporting events around the country. They were called “Gil Ash Citori.” Not long after that, word got back to Browning that someone named Gil Ash was adapting their skeet gun and making sporting clays guns out of them. Who was this Gil Ash?
Browning found out we were from Houston and the call went out to Dwayne Ahearn, who was high up in the rep company for Browning. He was sent to seek out this Gil Ash that was changing their guns. We don’t remember where it was that he caught up with us, but he did. Eventually, Browning sent Jack Lannum and two engineers down to Houston to see us and what we were doing to their gun to make it a sporting gun.
Long story short, the evolution was the Browning Special Sporting and the Brown Lightning Sporting guns – the first sporting guns Browning produced. They were choked improved cylinder/modified, so there was enough metal in the barrel that Briley could install their thin wall screw choke system in them. Back then, guns did not come with screw chokes. We think the manufacturers believed that they (like sporting clays) were a fad and would pass in the night.
These guns were offered in 28 and 30-inch barrels. In fact, there was even a 28, 30-inch combo offered in the Special Sporting version with the high rib. They sent the prototypes to the NSCA National Championships at Minnesota Horse and Hunt club in 1989 for us to shoot. The rest, as they say, was history.
Why is this important? Well, these guns had high ribs and patterned 70/30, and shooting them we won everywhere we went. When we didn’t win, we were in the top 5. But back then, all the targets were straight lines and rising, which was ideal for that setup. But that didn’t last long.
The game, as well as factory screw chokes, exploded. With the explosion came target presentations that were anything but flat rising lines. They were curling, dropping, zigzagging, sliding… anything but straight rising lines. It became obvious to us that a high shooting gun would not be ideal for the evolving sporting game.
So, as with anything, to improve we had to change what we were doing. We went to flat-shooting guns. This made our results much more consistent and predictable because we did not have to shoot false lines to center the target in the pattern. To this day, we recommend shooters shoot a flat shooting gun for the very same reason. But as in underwear – some like silk or cotton, boxers or briefs – to each his or her own.
We have seen enough targets break by shooters shooting flat and high shooting guns to know that on the first shot of a pair you can tell yourself to shoot 10 o’clock on an outgoing rising right-to-left target instead of 11 or 11:30, but when that target is delivered as the second shot on a pair and must be taken quickly, the odds are that the gun is going to the true line at 11:30. And if you hit the target, you will be using the bottom left 10% or 15% of the pattern with a high shooting gun (if your gun mount is perfect).
Just this year at our Advance School, we were shooting a long, fast, going away, curling target off a 100-foot tower. One of our shooters shooting a high rib gun missed it five times before he “found it.” Every miss in exactly the same place, just over the top. When Gil asked what the correction was, he said: “lower.” The line of the target was clearly 10 o’clock and lots of lead, but because his gun shot high at distance he was below 9 o’clock to hit it.
Afterward, Gil put an extension on his gun and the shooter shot it with the low stock and missed under four times. He looked at Gil puzzled. Gil told him with that gun, 10 o’clock is 10 o’clock, after which he smashed 10 in a row.
Guess who’s shooting a low rib gun with a low stock now?
But we must say, in the same group was another great shot, shooting a high rib gun. He seemed to have no trouble with that shot or the others we shot on the incredible towers at the 74 Ranch.
What’s the point, you ask? Which is better: the high rib or the low rib?
The obvious answer is whatever is right for you. However, we do need to look a little deeper into why all of a sudden they became so popular again. We mentioned that we do a lot of gun fits each year, both in Houston and in our travels around the country. About 8 or 10 years ago we got very frustrated with trying to fix customers’ target guns because the stocks were so high and the combs so wide that they could not be bent far enough to fit anyone. We did not want to get into the stock business, so we didn’t know what to do.
We were at the shop one day, and Vicki came across Gil’s Remington 1100 that Gil’s dad’s boss bought for him when he was 13 years old. This gun has a lot of history with Gil – and some with Vicki, too. That’s a story for another day. But this old gun gave us a key to open the door to solve a lot of gun fit problems for our students.
If you ask anyone Gil’s age what the first shotgun was that you could really shoot well was, almost without exception they will say Remington 1100 – regardless of height, weight, facial characteristics, or current gun preference. When Vicki mentioned that she saw the old gun in the vault, Gil immediately went to find it and shouldered the gun. He smiled and disappeared into the shop.
About an hour later, he reappeared and said, “I got the answer.”
“What’s the question?” Vicki asked.
All the high stocks we have been trying to shoot and all the high stocks our customers have been trying to shoot that shoot high left because they can’t be bent enough to achieve correct dimension. When Vicki shouldered the gun that was to factory dimension (nothing had ever been done to the stock in the 50 years that Gil had owned and shot the gun) she said, “I could shoot this gun.”
What we found was something that we suspected from doing all those gun fits each year. The gun we measured had a lot of drop, no cast (was virtually straight) and the comb was very narrow – a trait that in our opinion has been forgotten by modern-day stock makers and gun manufacturers.
We have long wondered if those who design the stocks for our modern-day firearms ever shoot the products they design. If they do, we would like to see what their faces look like if the stocks on their guns are designed to fit them.
It was then that Gil went to the shop and cut their K-80 stocks down to the dimensions of his old 1100.
