Several years ago, before my first trip to Africa, I started shooting a .375 H&H Magnum rifle from U.S. Repeating Arms. I found it intimidating at first, but I learned to shoot it, and gradually became accustomed to the heavy recoil.
Then last summer I had a collision with a big dog. It wasn't anything serious; we just disagreed about whether or not to close a gate. In the process I wound up getting my right arm--my shooting arm--yanked back a little. At the time I didn't think anything about it. But two days later I was so sore I could barely move. After spending more than a year in physical therapy, I still have some limitations in mobility, limitations which I may keep.
As a result, I'm looking for ways to reduce recoil on both my .375 and on my shotguns. I recently spent an afternoon with Art Alphin, president and CEO of the A-Square Company, discussing alternatives for taming the recoil on big guns.
Alphin has some diverse interests and experience which have combined to make him ideally qualified to work on firearms design. He's been shooting since the late 1950s, and graduated from West Point in 1970 with a degree in weapons system engineering. He's shot competitively both in the Army and in civilian life.
Alphin says a lot of people are intimidated by recoil, including a lot of men. That intimidation can keep you from shooting well for several reasons.
"Recoil prohibits you from shooting well in insidious ways," he says. "Flinch is certainly one thing, but it also keeps you from maintaining good posture. It inhibits you from leaning into the rifle; it inhibits you from taking a solid position. The more stable you are, the less you wobble and move, the less the rifle wobbles, the more accurately you will be able to place the shot."
Alphin says long guns can be modified in one of three ways to lessen recoil. First, you can add some kind of mechanical recoil reducer to the stock of the gun. This can be a hydro-spring system, a spring-loaded weight, a tube of mercury, or some other system. They all reduce recoil to a certain extent, and are relatively inexpensive compared to some of the other methods we're going to talk about in a minute.
"All suffer the disadvantage that they add weight to the rifle," Alphin says. "That's not necessarily bad. But the weight is non-distributed, meaning there is a big, heavy lump of stuff in one end of the rifle, and all of a sudden you've got a firearm that's unbalanced. Instead of recoiling smoothly it's going to tend to go either muzzle up or butt up on recoil."
The second alternative is a muzzle brake. A muzzle brake--sometimes called a compensator--can be a device attached to the muzzle, or it can be holes drilled at a precise angle into the end of the barrel. In either case, the purpose of the muzzle brake is to redirect some of the propellant gases from the exiting bullet backward. It results in a 10-20 percent decrease in recoil.
Again, it's a fairly inexpensive proposition, but it has some serious disadvantages.
"The price is a 40 percent or greater noise increase," Alphin says. "A muzzle brake causes permanent hearing loss--period. It makes your ears ring, and if you are tracking a wounded game animal, you don't need ringing ears, you need to be able to hear."
The third way of controlling recoil is with a custom-designed stock shaped to fit your body. That's where Alphin comes in. A-Square produces guns which are ergonomically designed to minimize the recoil you must deal with.
"We try to anchor the firearm, the left arm, the right arm, and the head of the shooter so their mass is added to the total recoiling mass of the body," Alphin says. "By doing that, we reduce the perceived recoil. We say we are transmitting the recoil energy without causing pain or damage."
He looks at several aspects of the shooter's body when designing a gun. Pitch--the angle of the face of the butt--is important because it affects whether the gun tends to tip up or down on recoil. Cant--whether the toe of the butt turns in or out from the shooter's body--is another factor.
"We're also talking about cross-sectional area of a butt," Alphin says. "We're talking height and radius of the comb. We've gone to a great deal of effort to properly position the comb so when you put your face down on the comb, it's like putting your face down on your pillow at night."
Along with that, he looks at the shape of the grip and the fore-end. Adding all these factors together creates a stable unit comprising both arms, the head, the body, and the gun. They all recoil together, which spreads the recoil energy out as much as possible.
For the most part, A-Square works from scratch when building guns. Alphin says he will not alter an existing stock, since most stocks cannot be modified to fit his design standards. Nor does he like to work from existing actions.
"We might possibly do one," he says. "But we prefer to stay with our own brand of new manufacture rifles. We have, on occasion, restocked a gun using stocks of our design principles, older rifles such as the Winchester Model 70, the Ruger Model 77, and certain Mausers. We do have stock patterns for those which adhere to our design principles."
One big advantage of a custom stock like this is that it takes into consideration the possibility of injuries such as the one I'm fighting. With many off-the-shelf stocks, Alphin says, the rotator cuff and the muscles tied to it are stretched forward with each shot. While this may not be a problem with small calibers, once you get into larger calibers and shotguns, it's a rotator cuff injury waiting to happen.
"Rotator cuff injury is the great insidious thing of recoil," Alphin says. "It's the injury that ends most athletic careers. When some people complain about bursitis in the shoulder or some other recoil problem, it is actually rotator cuff."
His stocks are designed to prevent this kind of injury.
All this expertise doesn't come cheap. While a custom-designed stock of this kind is certainly the ideal solution to recoil problems, it also will make a dent in your budget.
Restocking of existing actions starts at $750; new A-Square rifles go up from $2,995. That includes all stock fitting, your choice of caliber and barrel length, and your choice of a Teflon or blued finish on the gun.
For more information about A-Square rifles, contact: A-Square Company, Dept. AO, One Industrial Park, Bedford, KY 40006, phone 502-255-7456 or fax 502-255-7657.
Copyright (c) 1996 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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