I recently stocked my 16ga fox sterlingworth. As I have done a few times in the past, I made a pattern stock with bondo, etc until it patterned the way I wanted it...about 55/45. I sent the stocks off to be duplicated and comenced using my other bird gun, a light 20ga O/U.
....scene changes to january, bird season is over and my Fox has a scrumptious piece of black walnut on it, balances on the hinge pin and fits me perfectly--measurements are identical to the pattern stock. Except for one thing...I can't hit a thing with it. I shot skeet two weekends in a row with it and had the lowest scores of my life. Thinking I was out of practice, I kept shooting and kept missing. The next weekend I took out my 20ga O/U (also a light bird gun, not a target gun) and commenced crushing targets as well as I ever have. Now convinced that it was the gun not me, I got out the graph paper and traced the outlines of both stocks onto the paper...the SxS is about 1/4" longer LOP with the DT's but it is also 3/8 of an inch higher at heel--I figured it was shooting higher than I thought. To test this I put both guns on paper today. The O/U shoots perfect patterns right where I'm looking, and the SxS is hitting 6" LOW at 16 yards! Both patterns were 5 shots snap-shooting at paper at 16 yards, and both 5-shot patterns were quite consistent.
What the heck is going on??
Last edited by David Furman; 02/08/09 03:03 PM.
