Back when I felt like I had a Semiauto shotgun gap in my collection, I looked around for a Remington 1100. I kept finding all of these old Model 48 Sportsmans on Gunbroker, all of them super cheap. It appeared at the time, turkey hunting became all the rage and everyone was selling their old shotguns because they could only chamber 2 3/4" shells, and not the new 3" magnums. That's okay with me, as I can only reload 2 3/4" hulls with my shotshell reloader. I couldn't let a bargain like that pass by, so I purchased several of them, and another that was missing the barrel and stock just so I'd have extra parts (still had to fill out a 4473). My particular view is, that I'm not purchasing an individual weapon; I'm purchasing the weapon system. It may not be right, but that's just how I always looked at it. Anyway, most of them shot well directly out of the box. All of them came with an ungodly long barrel topped off with a Cutts compensator with a full choke. All were cut down to 18.5" and the magazine tubes were extended (which required the removal of three dimples on the factory tube) so I had 7+1 rounds. I later added a sidesaddle, but recently added some loop Velcro fields so I can use the 7 round nylon strip from "Spanker Elite Tactical" off of Amazon. Cutting to the chase, back when the tax was reduced to $0 for SBS, an evil (but legal) thought popped into my head: Now, this is not my shotgun, it's someone else's Browning A5 cut down to an SBS. The A5 uses an inertial operating system. So does the Model 48 and 1148 Sportsman. I should be able to cut down the barrel to the old, factory length magazine tube and have it function just as good as the original 28" barrels that came with it. That leads me to today, and the new SBS removal from the NFA. I'm going to wait a few months until guidance and everyone calms down that we have a new set of rules to abide to, or not. One of my Model 48's was always a little finicky and not wanting to operate reliably. Last year I kept playing around with the friction ring, to no avail. I'd shoot anything I could get my hands on- from high brass buckshot and slug loads to low brass birdshot. It only shot them one at a time; I had to manually cycle the action. Here it turns out it only needed a really good cleaning, especially in the friction ring area. My online friends cautioned me against cleaning and lubing the mechanism, claiming it will "go full auto" and such nonsense. It turned the shotgun back into the weapon it was meant to be- a semiauto shotgun. I was very happy with the results! This is probably the one I will cut down, if and when the rules are revealed to us:
I have my Dad's old Rem 878 from the early 60s >>> weak point with it and your 48s is the finger grip manual pull-back - it'll snap off if you try to clear a jam toooooo aggressively ;;;;;;;;;;;;
