Had my 1st chance to shoot this 1891 gun at clays with a group of dedicated doublegun shotgun folks yesterday. As I had surmised earlier, it was the only American double present. It worked well-enough, absolutely crushing the clays presented when I did my part (& the extra weight of the gun really dampened recoil and smoothed-out my swing). I did find myself struggling a bit with the extractors not keeping the shells fully-extended for me to pull the empty hulls, and then it wasn't opening as easily after the first few stations. Now, I was using some older handloads that weren't as tidy as they perhaps should have been (clearly they'd seen many reloading cycles). I suspect that a deep cleaning would help here immensely. The back trigger has also become rather sharp at the tip and without gloves, it was abusing my shooting hand just a bit. I'll be handing it over shortly to be nicely gone-through and I'll make those points to my gunsmith accordingly. I have every confidence that when I get it back it will treasure to shoot and own once again.

I'll confess here that I switched out the gun for a much-lighter English one (an early Lang hammer) and continued to have a great time (all the clays seemed fairly close yesterday) but on longer shots this Smith would be just the ticket, no doubt.