Ok, I am going to give you the honest evaluation. The gun shoots great; better than great, actually. Very low recoil, it is easy to control. The sights make it easy to hit with. Shoots both very tight buckshot patterns and slug groups. With the old Estate ammo I got patterns of 4-6†at 30 yards. With my “duty load†of Wichester XX 12 pellet 00 I get patterns of around one foot at 30 yards. I could have picked an round with tighter patterning, but I like the spread, velocity, and pellet distribution that the 12 pellet 00 gives me.
The gun gives very fast velocities, actually, which surprised me since it has such a short barrel, and ported at that. It gives faster velocities than my 20†barreled 870s.
At night, the gun has a very low muzzle signature, actually. The porting actually helps to reduce the light exposure a great deal, which is one of the advertised effects, I was shocked at how well it worked. The down side of the porting is NOISE! Also, the venting upward gasses are hell on the finish of the vent rib, and the area around the porting needs to be scrubbed down because the gasses dirty it up. Not that it effects performance, but I like to keep my gun looking sharp.
The surefire light is very durable and I haven’t had many problems with it, except sometimes triggering the light inadvertently when pumping the gun, which is partly why I put the switch blocker on. It still happens sometimes, though. It fires and functions perfectly with non surefire bargain batteries too
It is a very nice gun, and I couldn’t dream of a better weapon for close quarters battle (except maybe a nice flame thrower). Inside 100 yards, I would take this gun into combat over any other.
however......
The gun's biggest problem is inherit in the 870 Super Magnum design itself, mainly the flimsy metal bolt cover that they use on it. Basically, Remington was too lazy to create a full size solid bolt for the 870 super mags, so they modified a regular 870 bolt and attached a flimsy metal covering to the end of it to cover the rest of the enlarged hole.
The 870 super magnum was created to be basically an 870 express which could accept 3 1/2" shells, they made it as similar to the original as possible even to the extent of not only using the same 870 bolt, but retaining the original receiver as well. Instead of lengthening the receiver they created a collapsible bolt that would collapse upon firing.
When the gun fires, the bolt with, it's extended cover, slams back against the rear of the receiver. The flimsy metal piece is attached with a spring and a few hooks, that’s it! When it contacts the rear of the receiver, the spring causes the metal piece to compress and slide over the side of the bolt. This picture will help illustrate.
The rear part of the bolt (with the brown wear lines running across) is the cover, see how there is a little groove/indentation between the cover and the bolt making it look like three pieces? That is where the cover slides up over during compression.
Now, under normal use this is fine and it actually functions without problem. Now, by normal use I mean magnum 3" buck and slugs.... Fairly heavy stuff. The problem can come from when you fire magnum 3.5" buckshot loads. This is the problem I experienced. I was test firing 3.5" buckshot shells and had fired 15 or so. I was firing custom loads, so they were slightly higher pressure than the normal ones. One of the rounds actually caused the bolt to slam the receiver too hard and the flimsy metal thing got bent out of operation. This caused the gun to be jammed until I could disassemble and remove the metal covering
Now, understand, the metal covering serves no real function except to help cover the hole and keep it clear of debree and to look good, as it looks funny with a big hole between the bolt and reciever. The gun can be fired without it just fine, though. I fired it and used it without the cover until Remington could send a replacement.
I had Remington order me another one and according to them, it is not a common problem, though I have heard of other instances of this part breaking from other boards. Robar was even nice enough to refinish it for free (they also finished the Surefire light screws in NP3 for free).
Anyway, long story short, the covering works fine with just about all shells, except the heavier 3.5" magnum loads. I would recommend removing it temporarily if one wanted to fire heavy custom 3.5" loads because it could break. It might not, but it could. If you don't plan to fire 3.5" buck loads, than it's a non issue.
Anyway, aside from that, the gun has had no problems to speak of.
The barrel of the gun actually dropped, muzzle down, from a height of around three feet onto a rough road. It hit hard on the front sight and tip of the bore and all the damage that resulted were some minor finishing scratches on the front sight and edge of the barrel. These were easily touched up, and it is impressive that it resisted such a blow so well.
