While they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, it is surprisingly easy nowadays to upgrade an old shotgun for turkey season with just a few simple accessories. For this year’s Spring Turkey season, I decided to give my old turkey gun a couple of new upgrades to make it a little more handy out in the woods this year. The first and bigger of the two upgrades today is adding a red dot to the turkey gun. While some may say that adding a red dot is an unnecessary extra cost, the benefits are there. Unlike a traditional bead sight, a red dot lets you see completely around where you are aiming instead of just above it, letting you acquire and track that gobbler’s head a lot faster and more easily. Additionally, with most red dots having little to no parallax, you don’t have to worry about being high on the stock when trying to shoulder the gun in a rush with your adrenaline going as a gobbler is looking at you. So, wherever the dot is placed is where your shot should impact. Now, for this particular shotgun, it’s an older, early 1990s production Remington 870 with no real way to mount an optic to the receiver that doesn’t involve drilling or tapping.
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So, instead of taking the shotgun to a gunsmith, I chose to grab a Warne 6108M Shotgun Red-dot Rib Mount. This is a universal style rib mount that can attach to most shotguns that have a vent rib across the top of the barrel that is 6-10mm in width. This is a nice low-profile and versatile mount option that can take most larger style pistol red dot footprints like RMR or RMS.
Attaching one of the Warne Rib Mounts to your turkey gun is easy, and you only need an inch-pound torque driver and maybe a set of calipers to do it. Just follow the instructions provided by Warne to attach the mount to the rib using the torque driver to lock it into place.
This mount is compatible with a large variety of pistol dots, with Warne having a compatibility list on their website. So once you have the mount locked securely in place on your shotgun rib, go about attaching your pistol dot, in this case, a Holosun 407c, and lock it down in place using the screws the optic comes with.
Once the red dot is in place, take off the barrel of the shotgun and bore sight the red dot to get a rough zero before you take it out to the range. This will save time and ammo at the range, saving you a pretty penny, considering the price of turkey loads nowadays.
The next upgrade is super easy to do. Swap out your turkey choke with a quality aftermarket turkey choke. The right aftermarket choke can make a world of difference in an old shotgun. The right choke with the right turkey load can bring new life to an old turkey gun and give it a more effective turkey-killing pattern, even with the same turkey loads you had been using before.
Now, with everything installed, it was time to take my turkey gun out to the range to zero it and test it out. I used some regular target ammo first just to make sure I was in the ballpark. Once zeroed with the target loads, I switched over to the turkey loads to finalize the zero and made sure the turkey choke was doing the job. While the target loads did not have the exact same point of impact as the turkey loads, it was close enough that I was on target at 40 yards with just two shots. While I was pretty confident about the mount, I still did give it a little bit of a test with a few more boxes of target loads before calling it a day.
Now that I tricked out my old turkey gun, all I have to do is get in some more time in the woods this spring.
The post Old Shotgun, New Tricks – Easy Turkey Gun Upgrades appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.
