(shotgun firing repeatedly)
- [Voiceover] When John Browning was asked
to design a lever-action repeating shotgun
for Winchester in 1887, he told the company
that a slide- or pump-action shotgun
would be better for repeating shotguns.
Going by the numbers, Browning was right.
Who knew?
I guess the moral of the story is
that when John Browning tells you
something about firearms design,
then you listen to John Browning.
But this is a Chiappa T-series lever-action shotgun
cleverly named as an homage to the film Terminator 2,
and while impractical, this thing's pretty fun to shoot.
Based on the Winchester 1887 action,
the T-series holds 5+1 shell of 2-3/4 12 gauge
and is a non-NFA item as well,
which is pretty cool.
It has a rubber handguard and grip as well
and I wrapped the lever in paracord
to make cycling it a bit easier on the hand.
There's a lot of heavy metal moving on around
inside of a lever-action shotgun
as opposed to a small-bore rifle,
and I found that running a few boxes
without the paracord was not too comfy.
But let's take a look at a few of this gun's features.
When you pull the lever down,
it's almost as if the gun is its own cutaway.
You can see the vast majority of the action,
and this is pretty cool for a gun nerd like myself.
You can also decock the gun by using your thumb
and placing it on a grooved section on the hammer.
You'll notice that it does have a tube magazine
but it doesn't have a loading gate.
We'll get into that in just a second.
It does, however, have a cartridge elevator
like any semiautomatic or manually-operated shotgun
although you do have to give the lever
quite a wallop to activate it.
I've found this to be quite a problem
and really the only way to circumvent this
is be really aggressive with the gun.
Shotguns as low-pressure firearms do not require
an incredible amount of locking strength,
and you can actually see it lock here
as the lever fully locks into battery.
You can see right at the rear of the trigger guard
kind of, it slides up into that recess,
which locks the action.
So the way you load an 1887-style shotgun is
you push the cartridge elevator down
and push the shells in through the top.
This is actually kind of tricky too,
because if you do this even slightly the wrong way
you kind of tip the retaining lever,
and that ejects all the shells out the back.
You can see me struggling with it here.
So you have to do it with some care.
And I imagine that loading this in the field
while dove-hunting or something back in the day
was kind of arduous, but they didn't
know any better, of course.
Another feature is that you can of course do
the spin-cock thing as is present in the movie.
You're really supposed to have a large loop lever
to do this, but I made do with it.
So let's do a bit more shooting.
(shotgun firing repeatedly)
So I've got to say that the T-series is
a pretty fun and interesting gun to shoot,
but it is a bit finicky and not reliable enough
to use for something like home defense.
The lever-action shotgun was not
in the limelight for very long,
and when you shoot one you realize why.
It's a lesson that consumers learned the hard way,
but John Browning knew before he designed them.
That said, sending some lead downrange with this thing
will definitely bring a smile to your face.
Big thanks to Ventura Munitions as always
for helping us out with our ammunition needs,
and a special thank you for watching.
We sincerely appreciate it.