Home Forums Birds & Dogs Shotguns Winchester 101's - Hate em or Love em

My son's old 101 field-grade with 30" fixed-choke barrels at work last fall. He has been using it for 20+ years and still loves it. I use an old 20-ga. 101 Pigeon Grade with 28" fixed-choke barrels. Both stocks have been modified to fit their owners.



101's were pretty light, which made them recoil more, plus they had very short forcing cones. But the real killer was that unless you got a trap model they had a bit too much drop, resulting in that "up and into the cheek" recoil so commonly complained of. As with a lot of the finer things in life, they were great but not perfect. The solution was to fix them, not ditch them, but few people know how or are willing to go to the trouble. You just need to find a good gunfitter and a good stock bender. Mike Orlen in MA is a great bender.

Here is a nice K-gun getting some of the cast-right taken out of it. On the 101 20-ga. I had to bend some of the drop out, a couple of times actually, to get it to perfect. One can always have an adjustable comb added, too.



Any accusation that the old 101's cracked easily is complete BS. All makers' wood stock were susceptible to cracking, but the 101's were LESS likely to crack than most. I saw a Perazzi crack before it made it through 2 boxes of mild target loads. Many Brownings, Kreighoffs, etc.

101's were not Perazzis, but then a spare Perazzi trigger group cost more than most of my 101's. Kodensha-made 101's have always been a great value -- a gun that did not cost much but which you could count on to shoot straight and be extremely reliable. The Pigeon Grades' triggers were not like a P- or K-gun's, but they were very nice. The field grades' were also mechanical, which are generally considered better for hunting than inertial.

I have never wanted to carry an expensive gun in the field (too many ways to damage them) but my 101's allowed me to carry a light, superbly balanced, reliable shotgun wherever I hunted, from the mountains to the prairies. There is nothing else I would have rather had.

A 12-ga. 101 Pigeon with 30" bbls with Briley chokes at work several years ago: