Which is Better, the 870 or the Model 12?
Editor Dan Nelson and Writer Joel Vance Square Off
By Dan Nelson, Editor
When I was a kid the Winchester Model 12 was the gold standard of pump shotguns, an urban legend, and like every other young Nimrod of my generation I suffered from Model 12 envy.
If a genie had puffed from a bottle and offered me the choice between a weekend at an Italian villa with Sophia Loren or a Model 12, I would have taken the Model 12 and answered to my raging hormones later.
My situation—Model 12-less—was the result of age, poverty, circumstance and bad timing. About the only summer jobs available for teenagers in those days paid a penny a bale or a buck-and-a-quarter an hour, hardly enough to save up $160—the price of a Model 12 in those days—even if you were lucky enough to find employment.
My hopes of owning one were further dashed in 1963, my senior year in high school, when Winchester ceased production of its legendary pump gun after 51 years. Some eulogists say the “Perfect Repeater” simply ran out of customers because the danged things never wore out, and there was probably some truth to that, but Remington Arms may have hastened the Model 12’s retirement by introducing a reliable and affordable competitor, the 870 Wingmaster.
The 870 escaped my notice at first, and I wasn’t the only one. According to Remington historian Jack Heath, the company’s young thoroughbred stumbled out of the gate because of its Plain Jane appearance. The corncob fore-end was not much bigger than the magazine tube and the stock looked like it had been finished by a finger-staining kindergartner.
The designers added sun-grain etching on the stock and fore-end, a ventilated rib and a recoil pad, and the facelift, along with a price tag less than 100 bucks, jump-started 870 sales and got my attention.
Affordability was the secret to the 870’s initial success. The average American family made less than $3,000 in 1950, the year the Wingmaster debuted with a selling price of 70 bucks.
Prior to that time all guns were made by the expensive and time-consuming process of hand-fitting milled parts one firearm at a time. During World War II Remington developed a process for stamping metal parts, and that led to the development of the 870.
Remington designers Ray Crittendon, Phillip Haskel, Ellis Hailston and G. E. Pinckney set out to develop a replacement for the out-dated Model 31 pump gun utilizing components from the 11-’48 autoloader.
Remington sold a million Wingmasters between 1950 and 1966 and another million by 1973, equaling the Model 12’s sales total in half the time. In all fairness, sporting shotguns weren’t much in demand during the two wars and the Great Depression that occurred during the Model 12’s production run.
Remington, on the other hand, introduced its entry in the pump-gun sweepstakes during the prosperous post-war years, and the 870 quickly became the baby boomers’ shotgun of choice. There was a new kid on the block, and by the early ‘70s, Remington was advertising its All American Special Trap Gun as “the finest pump-action shotgun ever made.”
Is the 870 the heir apparent to the venerable Model 12 or is it, as Winchester aficionados insist, a pretender to the throne? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know my 870s—there have been several over the years—have always performed royally. Its affordability may have been the reason I purchased one, but the 870’s durability is what impressed over the long haul.
I have no idea how many rounds have been fired through my first 870, but I can say with some certainty I’ve killed a couple thousand ducks, pheasants, grouse, doves and partridge with it, and missed thousands more. And that’s to say nothing of all the clay targets I’ve dusted, chipped and flat-out pooched since 1968, the year I finally broke down and bought my first 870.
During the Halloween blizzard of 1991 I killed daily limits of pheasants, partridge and mallards while 45 mile-per-hour winds whipped several feet of snow for several days and nights. Every other gun in camp became hopelessly clogged with snirt, a gritty mix of snow and dirt, and had to be torn down and bathed each evening, their parts scattered across the tables, counters and floors like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
My 870 shook off the crud like a Labrador sheds water, requiring no more than a quick wipe with an oily rag to prevent rust and a spray of WD40 to keep its moving parts moving.
I’ve carried that gun up the slope of Hell’s Canyon for chukars and through the draws of the Missouri River breaks for pheasants, sharp-tailed grouse and Huns in 90-degree heat, and once used its butt-plate to punch holes in an newly iced pond so we could set mallard decoys.
I killed the last birds my favorite dogs ever retrieved with it.
The only signs of wear are the magazine tube, where the bluing has literally been erased by the repeated back-and-forth action of the fore-end, and a faint grove worn in the carrier by thousands of shells being thumbed into its magazine.
Other than that, it’s no exaggeration to say my 870 still looks and performs like it did 40 years ago, which is a lot more than can be said of me. I have no doubt it will faithfully serve another generation or two of hunters, maybe more, before it’s retired. A few years ago visitors to this web site voted the 870 the best waterfowl gun ever made. With sales exceeding 10 million, it’s easily the most popular shotgun ever made, but is it the best? Is it even the best pump gun? The Model 12 received a surprising number of votes for a firearm that hasn’t been mass-produced in almost half a century.
That magic genie never did show up with a Model 12 and, regrettably, I’ve never pulled on the trigger of the gun dubbed the “Perfect Repeater.” But I can report that after thousands of rounds, my old 870 has never been in for repairs, never misfired and never failed to shoot exactly where I aimed it, which is usually a foot or two behind the intended target. What more could anyone ask of a shotgun?
What’s the best pump gun ever made? With all due respect to Joel Vance’s aging Model 12, but with no apologies, my vote goes to the Remington 870 Wingmaster.
...Veteran Outdoor Writer Prefers Model 12
By Joel Vance
I’m older than dirt, but it’s far older than me. It was a veteran of sleet-driven north winds and iced-in decoys when I was born at the tag end of the hottest summer in modern history.
It is a Model 12 Winchester pump action shotgun, without a doubt the finest repeating shotgun ever made. Winchester nicknamed it “The Perfect Repeater” and for once that was not advertising hype. It surely is the best pump gun ever and among the top few American-made guns of any persuasion.
Winchester made Model 12s for 51 years, from 1912 to 1963. The first were 20 gauge (priced at an outrageous $20) and then the company added 12 and 16 gauge in 1914 and 28 gauge in 1934, the year I was born and wouldn’t I like to have one. Those who unaccountably prefer the .410 can get a close cousin of the Model 12, the Model 42.
There is no other shotgun able to take the abuse that a Model 12 can. It absorbs the grit of big river sandbars, the mud of swamps, being stepped on by rambunctious Labs and anything else you can throw at it and it still shoots every time and loads another shell when you shuck the slide.
Perhaps the reason Winchester is out of business as a gun maker is that the company made guns that never wore out. Why buy a new one when the one made nearly 100 years ago still shoots as good as it did when it left the factory?
Mine is a little younger than the first Model 12—it dates to 1917 when young men in America were more concerned with the Boche as targets than they were mallard drakes. But some of them came back from the Meuse-Argonne and other killing grounds and perhaps one of them retrieved this gun of mine and took up less hazardous shooting than what he had been doing.
Or it could have been the gun of an old codger market hunter who didn’t go to war, but stayed back, grizzled and seamed from decades in the marshes. I don’t know the history. My father got it in a swap and now I have it.
We’ve both added our sweat and oil to the stock and forearm and we have helped to slick the bluing off until the receiver is mostly silver. It was 17 years old before I squalled into life and more than 30 years old before I was grown enough to pick it up and run my hands over the satiny stock and shuck the slide for the first time.
It has been my turkey gun for the past 30 years and I possibly am the first owner to have killed a gobbler with it, although someone could have back in the day before seasons closed and turkeys largely vanished.
Now, turkeys are everywhere in my Missouri woods and if I’m lucky or unusually skillful, a gobbler will parade in front of the long muzzle of my Model 12 on a crisp April morning and pay the price. It throws a dense lethal pattern at 30 yards, result of its full choke.
While it fits comfortably in my lap as I sit against a tree and wait for dawn on a wooded turkey ridge, the Model 12 and I both are creatures of the marsh. We were hunting waterfowl long before we hunted turkeys.
The Model 12 is the quintessential duck gun and almost seems out of place in the turkey woods. However, steel shot nearly doomed its use in the duck blind. I wouldn’t risk the tight choke and relatively thin barrels with the hard iron balls that clatter toward the muzzle.
It seemed like using a fine race horse to pull a farm wagon. So for years the gun rested in my gun case except for the few weeks of turkey hunting each year. I took a modern gun to the duck marsh and pined for my old long-nosed Model 12.
Then came bismuth shot and the Model 12 once again became feasible for times when I slog through the shallows into a crude blind, before sunrise and breakfast.
Bismuth is the only one of the approved alternatives to lead shot that is safe to shoot in old guns—both Holland and Holland and Purdey okay it for their high-dollar doubles. The metal is next to lead on the table of elements and similar in density—the key to effective penetration. But it’s very expensive at about two dollars a shot, an incentive to shoot well.
Sometimes, though, expense is not the criterion by which something is judged. You wouldn’t, for example, fret about the cost of a diamond necklace for Angelina Jolie if it made her eyes soften and look at you as if you were a chocolate éclair.
Thomas C. Johnson headed the design team that came up with the Model 12 (he also was the boss of the Model 21 double barrel, which became the crown jewel of the Winchester line). Johnson was born in 1862 and began designing guns for Winchester in 1885, a job that would continue for 49 years.
The Model 12 debuted in January of 1913 (with a 21⁄2-inch chamber). The gun was the successor to the Model 97 which had an external hammer but otherwise looked much like the newcomer.
Every metal part was machined, not stamped, and the result was a sleek gun that worked with the precision of a Swiss watch. It was hell for stout—keep it clean, dry and lubed and it would last…well, mine is going on 90 years without any noticeable wear or loosening of its workings.
The Model 12 was an instant smash, selling 100,000 in its first two years of production and more than two million in its 95-year life. My late best friend, Foster Sadler, shot a 20-gauge Model 12, full-choked, at quail. While I missed quail at close range with open chokes, he practiced what legendary outdoor writer and shooter Nash Buckingham called “the art of restraint” and let his little targets get well out before he lowered the hammer on them.
That was good in the days when quail flushed in the open, but today’s adapted little bomber is likely to be in thick brush a couple of seconds after it flushes, if it doesn’t run into the brush and then flush. I wouldn’t shoot mine at upland birds even if it were effective. At almost eight pounds it would be like carrying a baby elephant by day’s end.
Foster’s sweet little pump burned in a house fire, though, and it was as if a piece of his life burned with it. Model 12s often come to be part of the family.
Although the Model 12 was a duck gun from the get-go, it wasn’t until 1935 that Winchester released a version of the Model 12 called the Heavy Duck Gun, chambered for 3-inch shells. The gun came either with nickel steel or stainless steel barrels, 30 or 32 inches long. Mine is 32 inches long, a length that Winchester discontinued in 1948.
Some Model 12s have 2 9/16-inch chambers or 21⁄2 inch, which would be a problem with today’s standard 23⁄4- or 3-inch shells. Buyers beware!
The Model 12 also was a fearsome trench gun in World War One, the original Street Sweeper. Winchester made about 20,000 of the short-barreled cannons, some with bayonet adapters to make it even more frightening. It later became a riot gun for domestic use.
The trench gun holds seven shotshells, as does the civilian model, but legally you can only shoot three, so hunter’s guns have a plug, a wooden dowel four shotshells long. I can’t imagine anyone fast enough to shoot more than three shots at waterfowl anyway, but it can be done by trick shooters.
Winchester shooter Herb Parsons would launch seven clay targets and break them all before they hit the ground. He held the trigger down and jacked the slide as he followed the targets and the gun fired as a new round jumped into the chamber. Parsons, who died in 1959, would have been 100 years old next year.
The Model 12 itself officially died in 2006 when Winchester ceased shotgun production, but it had been ailing since 1963, available only in commemorative issues. Still, of those two million children, many thousands still exist and you can buy a Plain Jane model (without a ventilated rib or any fancying up) for anywhere from $600 for a 12 gauge to God-knows-what for a 28 gauge (well in the thousands, if you could find one which you probably can’t).
Most 12s were field grade, but Winchester also manufactured skeet, trap and pigeon grades, as well as the Heavy Duck Gun and the Trench and Riot versions. The Featherweight was a three-year introduction between 1959 and 1962.
The higher grades were beautiful guns, but my old war horse was the one most grizzled duck hunters slung over their shoulders as they slogged toward a distant blind on a bitterly cold early winter day, hoping the decoys weren’t frozen and that they had enough clothing on (knowing they didn’t).
I remember my first date with the old gun as clearly as my first kiss. I was about 14, carrying the long-barreled gun for the first time, and my father and I sneaked carefully to the banks of the old Chariton River. The river had been jerked straight by those who don’t care about rivers—land gutters, environmental marauders or, more sadly, those who just don’t know any better. They left behind a series of oxbows, the bends from the original river.
Those potholes were duck magnets and the one we sneaked on had a pair of mallards who thought they were safe from prying eyes. They flushed, a long, going away shot at an angle and slightly down from the high bank on which we stood. My father didn’t shoot, but I did and the drake went end-over-end and splashed into the muddy water. I was dumbfounded and looked at the old gun the way King Arthur looked at Excalibur when he gave it a jerk and it came free of the stone.
Maybe my father wanted to get the gun back when he saw that happen, but at the risk of a classic father/son squabble he decided to pass the torch to me.
Now more than 50 years later the gun may have lost a little more bluing, but it slides as smoothly, shoots as reliably as it did when it came from the old Winchester Arms plant. Whoever made it is long dead, gone, I hope, to a place that rewards those who create timeless wonders.
And I stuff a few bismuth shells in my pocket and heft the Model 12 and head to my duck blind to wait for a half-hour before sunrise and the sound of wings overhead.
Joel Vance is the author of Grandma and the Buck Deer (softcover $15); Bobs, Brush and Brittanies (hardcover $25); Down Home Missouri (hardcover $25); and Autumn Shadows limited edition, signed $45). Available from Cedar Glade Press, Box 1664, Jefferson City MO 65102. Add $2/book for S/H.