The Full Monte

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 2/8/2017 | B Fitzpatrick

[w1n1]

Benelli's Montefeltro has made the journey from European novelty to the world's most respected repeating upland shotgun.

In 1911, as John Browning was finalizing his semiautomatic pistol stateside, Teresa Benelli was helping her six sons invest in a small automotive repair shop in Urbino, Italy. The brothers did well with their business and eventually began building motorcycles, selling their bikes in the U.S. through Montgomery Ward catalogs. By 1967, the brand had earned enough capital to allow Giovanni Benelli to design and market semiautomatic shotguns, a byproduct of his love of hunting. Little did he know that the gun that bore his name would reinvent the shotgun market in much the same way that Browning’s 1911 forever changed pistol design.

Although the name Benelli was stamped on the very first gun to leave the Urbino factory in '67, the real genius behind the gun was an Italian designer named Bruno Civolani. Civolani's system was different than the gas systems that were becoming popular in the States. One of the hallmarks of the Benelli design was that it was so simple and basic that it rarely broke and, as shotgun enthusiasts quickly learned, it required less frequent cleaning and could go hundreds of thousands of rounds before a failure.

That design was the Inertia Driven System, and it had three basic components:

• a rotating bolt face
• a bolt body
• a inertia spring

As recoil pushes the gun rearward, the bolt stays in place for an instant and the inertia spring compresses, eventually developing enough energy to unlock the bolt face. The bolt body is then forced rearward, extracting and ejecting the spent casing. The recoil spring shoves the bolt back forward and slams the bolt body back into place after picking up the next shell. The final step in the process is for the rotating bolt head to lock into battery for the next shot. Read the rest of the Benelli story here.

[Ken522]

... a self-loading shotgun???? What is this world coming to?? /s

[meatloaf]

Shhhh! The smell of fecal material is already strong enough. Let’s not cause more unexpected bowel movements by the leftists.

[postban]

Great shotguns,had a 12 and a 20. Little bit more recoil than the Beretta's that replaced them but still good stuff.

[wrench]

I wish I could find one to borrow or rent for the next dove shoot.

For a good bird gun, I prefer a hard buttplate instead of rubber, rubber tends to hang-up on a quick shouldering during a rise.

[Celtic Conservative]

Operating system sounds a lot like a remington model 8 autoloading rifle, circa 1908.

CC