S & W branded Shotgun:Look's like a Mossberg?

[justsurvivingincalifornia]

Does anyone here know anything about this shotgun.

It looks and operates like a Mossberg 500 series and had a stainless or Mariner type finish?(top mounted safety)

It also had a long magazine tube 7 or 8 rounds and 20inch barrel?(est)

It was marked as S & W, Smith and Wesson branded product.
I know that Mossberg made shotguns for several other companies with their brand names on them.
The dealer at the gun show was asking 350$ for it. Which, I thought was a little high, but if it was stainless maybe it was worth it. I was too late when I came back to his table to look at it a second time it was sold.

Did I miss a great deal or what?:banghead:

 

[Onmilo]

The gun you saw was a Model 916T-N.
They were finished in Electroless nickle, kind of rare, or it may have been a regular 916 that had been refinished.

$350.00 is a bit rich.
I bought a blued version of the same gun brand new in 1981 for $165.00 and while it was a decent gun, there was really nothing super special about it.

I traded it off for a Winchester 8 shot 1300 Defender when these became available.
Killed a lot of jackrabbits in Texas with that gun,,,,,,

 

[dfariswheel]

It's possible you avoided a MAJOR mistake.

The S&W 916 was a version of the old Noble shotgun design.
Exactly who made it is still not clear, but S&W didn't actually produce it.

The 916 was a major disaster for S&W, and did serious damage to their reputation.

In short, the ill-fated 916 broke.
EVERYTHING broke, and S&W's attempts to "fix" the design failed.
The 916 was quite simply a bad design, poorly executed.

Finally, S&W just dropped the thing as a lost cause.
S&W's reputation suffered so much from it, that at one point, upper management actually debated buying ALL of them back to restore their reputation with consumers.

Not all 916's broke, or gave problems, but enough did that among us older gunsmiths and shooters, the 916 is notorious.

One interesting "feature" of the 916 is that when one does develop a problem, the thing seems to take a malicious, hellish delight in quickly having other parts fail.
I've seen several cases that reminded me of one of those old silent movies where someone pulls a tiny part off a car, and the entire thing falls to pieces.

Later, S&W did MUCH better with the Japanese Howa-imported S&W Models 1000 auto and 3000 pump guns.
The 3000 was a close copy of the Remington 870, and had a following for several years.

When S&W dropped them, Mossberg picked up both models and sold them for a year or two.

Again, not every 916 failed, but enough did that S&W's reputation as a premium gun maker took a big hit.
If you have one that works, enjoy it, but when/if it does have problems, be warned that other things often go South fast.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I have a S&W 916 which not only has an eerie resemblance to the
Noble Model 66, the front face of the receiver is stamped "66" and
while it is thankfully not 666 I have had to replace a firing pin.

The story I heard is pretty much what others have heard: when
S&W wanted to enter the shotgun business, they decided to go
in easy and cheap by buying out Noble which was going out of
business and had the S&W engineers fix what problems they could
find before marketing the Noble 66 as the S&W 916. I have heard
the trigger housing and some other parts were an S&W product.
The butt stock is a shallow pistol grip design intended to get as
many stocks as possible out of a blank of wood. Mine is nice
walnut, though.

A home gunsmithing guide stated that when repairing a Noble
manufactured gun, one must realise that the cost of even minor
parts plus skilled gunsmith labor would usually exceed the value
of the gun. Some Noble guns had "trick" parts that wore out or
broke too easily.

Mossberg makes inexpensive shotguns. Noble made cheap shotguns.
There is a big difference between inexpensive and cheap.