New from Browning: Citori 725 Feather 20-Gauge Shotgun

1. Citori firearms are one of the finest stacked barrel shotguns not-entirely-stupid money can buy.

   I think you need to have a look at some of the Italian guns, in particular Caesar Guerini. There’s nothing wrong with the Brownings (other than they tend to be ferociously tight when new), but there are other reasonably priced (ie, less than a Krieghoff or Perazzi) O/U guns out there that have proven themselves quite well.

   Going to a mechanical trigger is nice. Of course, Browning used to have a mechanical trigger in the gun they produced just before the Citori – the Liege. There were triggers available for the Superposed that were also mechanical.

2. The same thing will happen with “Made in China.” One day their products will no longer be cheap crap. And our standard of living will even further suffer.

   • That time is coming very quickly. I’m just 43 and that’s young enough I don’t remember a time when Japan meant “cheap crap” at all. And, most of the cheap crap that comes out of China now is because that’s what the customer ordered. Order quality and be willing to pay for it, and China can–and does–produce it.

     • Well, yes and no. Much of the crap that comes out of the PRC is “made to a price.” In other words, if it costs $1000 to make a competent shotgun, and you’re an American company run by Harvard MBA’s and you want a seven-figure salary that year and the only way to get it is to improve your profit margin by 10% or more, and the American market won’t buy a gun that costs $1100+, the Harvard MBA’s running American corporations tell the PRC “Make me this product for $800.” And the PRC companies do just that. They cut corners here, there and everywhere. They don’t care. The American company then puts in a big customer support group to replace or repair the defective products in the market, and the American consumer mostly goes along with this.

       When the PRC then wants to peddle “quality,” they “inspect the quality into the product,” that is, they don’t do a better job up front in the product cycle. Instead they just have one of their flunkies at the end of the line, eyeballing the river of crap coming off their line, cherry-picking the least screwed up products that come off the end of the line. They then sell these cherry-picked pieces for a higher price under a different name.

       That’s never going to result in actual quality.

       The Japanese, on the other hand, had pride in what they produced. They have for a long time had pride in their craftsmanship; their problem post-WWII was that they had to transform their bombed-out industry to allow mass manufacturing of high quality consumer products instead of high quality, lovingly hand-made products or heavy industrial products made for war. The Japanese industrial policy people realized they had a problem on their hands, and if they really wanted to create the post-war economy they really wanted, they needed to become known, like the Germans, for high quality manufactured goods.

       Into this situation stepped an American electrical engineer/mathematician from Powell, Wyoming: W. Edwards Deming. Most people here have never seen Powell, Wyoming, so allow me to describe it to you: Neat as a pin. The entire town seems incredibly neat and well groomed, as are the farms surrounding it. It wasn’t when Deming’s family moved there in, I think, 1906. No, it was like much of the rest of the Big Horn Basin – a very arid, high desert valley. With irrigation water, the early settlers of Powell transformed it into what it is today – a very nice, tidy, farming community, without the usual sort of trash and crap you see in much of rural America. Deming said that his early days in Powell instilled in him a sense of thrift and and a hatred of waste like few other upbringings could have done. To Deming, getting products all the way through the assembly line, only to be rejected for quality issues at the very end, was a huge waste of material and time. Quality products must have regular inspection and checking all the way through the production of the individual components, up into sub-assemblies and then final assemblies. Deming’s idea is to catch QC problems as soon (and as cheaply) as possible.

       Deming had been sent to Japan immediately after WWII to help the Japanese improve their agricultural yields. Deming had been a statistical wonk on the application of fertilizer and was an early mind in the field that later became known as “agronomy.” The Japanese saw the efficacy of a mathematical approach to policy, and in the 1950’s, when they realized that the only way the Japanese were going to win customers away from American or European companies as to produce high quality goods, the Japanese engineering and industrial community called on Deming to give them ideas.

       The rest, as they say, became history. Deming’s ideas on statistical process and quality control, adopted with a nationalist zeal by the Japanese, transformed Japanese industry into the high-quality reputation consumer product powerhouse it is today.

       Meanwhile, throughout the 70’s and early 80’s, Detroit was still asking “Huh? You don’t like American cars? Whaddyamean you have problems with beer cans in the doors of your car?” It took American manufacturing until the 1990’s to finally discover Deming’s ideas and put them into practice.

       The problem for China is that their economy is still fundamentally a command-and-control economy. Commies are like that. I’ve had a few Chinese-made clone guns through my shop. They’re all rougher than a cob on the inside, clearly made to a very low COGS and with a Alfred E. Neuman attitude towards quality.

       • It certainly seems to me that the best blades are either American, German or Japanese. Ditto for guns. I don’t use Chinese blades for anything other than opening flare boxes. I wouldn’t bet on a Chinese gun for self defense or hunting.

         But I have made some good use of decent Chinese flashlights like the Olight M2X-UT, M20, M30, and M31. Then again, I use Streamlights and Surefires on guns and at work.

       • If you’d ever seen the halfassed gouged up “finish” on USSR-built airplane interiors, you’d probably rather have walked than trust the turbine bearings weren’t made by the same guy.
         Commies are like that.

         The problem with China is when you pay for Grade 2 bolts, that’s what you get. When you pay for grade 8 bolts, you still get the 2’s with a different head stamp. It isn’t just lack of QC and building to a price…it’s often outright cheating.

     • You have to keep in mind the distinction between the PRC and ROC, i.e. China and Taiwan, respectively. The ROC has been making some very high quality products – including original products for quite some time. I don’t know if there are any firearms from the ROC, though. We sell them arms and train their military.

3. Mfg. by Miroku………….in Japan.

   Where common folk cannot own them?

   Kind of like guns made in New Jersey or New York…………

   gotta love the irony.

4. I love a 20 ga. Unfortunately my experience of hunting in CA with steel shot leads me to retire my 20 and stick to the 12.

   • I like the 20 gauge just fine, I just don’t want to pick up another caliber – er, gauge.

5. I do like the 20 gauge as I get older…

   • Says the man that takes big bore hunting rifles to the dark continent.

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