[Music]
Hello my name is Heyward Horton and I'm here today to talk to you about gun fit
in particular shotguns and I've brought in one of my shotguns.
It's a EJ Churchill made in London back in 1928 and fit has all to do with how well you
shoot. A gun that doesn't fit makes it tough for you to be accurate and the
stock in particular on a shotgun is where the fit kind of comes together
with the barrels. Here let's start with cast.
Cast has to do with if the gun stock is kicked out to the right or cast on as they call it kicked out to the
left so if you're a right hand shooter you would want a gun that has some cast
to it or at least neutral but a gun with cast the stock will be kicked out
slightly to the right and so the gun fit for a right-handed shooter would be very good.
And various shooters require various amounts of cast. I'm a
left-handed shooter so this gun has cast and it wouldn't do too well for me I
need a gun that has a neutral cast or a gun that is cast on and that means the
stock is kicked out slightly to the left and we'll look at how you measure cast
here in a minute but if you're at a gun shop and just
wanting to kind of get a feel for if a gun has cast or cast on bend to the
stock the easy way to do it is first open it up make sure it's not loaded and
then close it back up and it's very unnatural to point a gun at yourself but
that's how you first look to see if there's cast and
so what you do is you take alignment from where the barrels come together at
the end and line that up with the trigger guard. Once you do that then your
line of sight can look at the stock in particular the the toe of the stock
which is this part of the stock right here. You can look at the toe as it
relates to the trigger guard as it relates to the muzzle of the gun and see
the cast and this one has what I would call significant cast so this would be
definitely for a right hand shooter and to demonstrate that maybe we can put the
gun down like so and then this ruler is relatively straight and you can see how
when you line it up from the muzzle of the barrels across the trigger guard and
it doesn't line up evenly with the stock. The stock is definitely cast.
Next, having to do with fit is the drop in the stock. I have what you might call a round face
and so I need more drop at the comb and at the heel then someone that has a
narrow face may require and so the way you measure for drop is to go across the
top of the barrels and then this distance right here has to do with the
drop at the comb this is the comb right here
and then the drop at the heel this is the heel is right here so for a gun to
fit me proper I need a drop at Combe of somewhere close to 2 inches and then a
drop at heel of right around 3 inches so if we took these measurements from the
plane of the barrel rib we could measure this distance right here that would give
us the drop at Combe and then measure here for the drop at heel