Remington® VERSA MAX™ – the New Pinnacle of Autoloading Shotguns Any Load, Any Where, Every Time

The four Versa-Max guns out for 2011.

The guts of this shotgun are not like any other auto-shotgun. These twin pistols are unique.

The comb is removable and you can see the internal adjustments to fit the gun to you.

Remington Arms Company
https://www.remington.com/

Guns can sometimes be like laundry detergent. Year after year you hear the words “new and improved,” or “revolutionary new technology,” or even “completely new design,” but you open the gun up and it looks pretty much the same as it did last year. Something in the gun or the way it operates may be might be slightly new, slightly improved, but more likely it is a small incremental change and not something that you really have to wrap your head around to re-evaluate the way you think about how guns work.

That wasn’t the case when I stopped by the Remington booth today to check out the new Versa-Max shotgun today. I have owned many Remington 1100 and 1187 auto-shotguns over the years, and this gun looks nothing like them. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Remington has one of the truly unique stories this SHOT Show.

I think the story is the whole gun, not just one aspect of it, but as you can see from the accompanying video from Remington, the most visually newsworthy thing is the porting system that Remington has developed to handle different shell lengths. It is based on the premise of consistent bolt velocity, which makes a ton of sense.

These days you have shot shells ranging from extra short, reduced recoil, to 3 ½ inch reach out and touch that turkey full snot magnum. Just about every auto-shotgun company says that they can reliably shoot all the different sizes of shells. But you have to wonder, if they are using a lowest common denominator in the spring buffer system to do so, at what cost is it that they can do that? There has to be some fall off on both ends of the spectrum. In order to handle the extra hot shells, there has to be some risk of failure to cycle with light loads, and if the curve has been slanted toward light loads, that would mean that the heavy loads are most likely beating up the gun, the shooter, or both in the name of reliability.

The new Remington system uses the length of the shell to determine how the gun buffers the power of the shell. It isn’t some kind of electronic sensing technology though. They just drilled the gas port holes at varying distances from the breech of the shotgun. It is painfully simple and makes perfect sense. The shorter and weaker the shell, the more gas you need to capture from the powder burn to work the action of the gun. You want the maximum number of holes to capture that gas on a short shell. But on a longer, more powerful shell, you need less gas to achieve the same bolt velocity, so you let the shell cover some of those gas ports.

The result is that you are not forced to rely on one spring strength that was chosen somewhere in the middle of the curve. By equalizing the force on the bolt with a simple system of automatic gas regulation, one spring can handle all sizes of shells without any fall off in performance on the different ends of the spectrum, light loads to heavy loads.

According to Remington, this system has resulted in unparalleled versatility and reliability. There are fewer parts in this Versa-Max system than a regular auto-shotgun, so there is less to go wrong. In initial field tests the gun shot over 6,000 rounds with no cleaning and no failures. It is a 100% true gas gun, not an inertia gun, so this level of reliability will surely be a force in the marketplace. I witnessed the take down and cleaning of the gun, and it is far simpler and intuitive than any gas gun I have ever owned.

Recoil management is something that auto-shotguns are traditionally good at as compared to fixed breach guns. Examples of fixed breach guns are pump shotguns, single barrels, over/unders and side by sides. There is nothing to buffer recoil in a fixed breach gun, so your only ally in not getting beat up is the weight of the gun, and that isn’t enough.

With an auto-shotgun, the gun uses the forces of the fired shell to cycle the gun, and this dissipates the energy in other directions than back into your shoulder. They shoot somewhat lighter. Gas guns are generally far superior to inertia driven systems in this regard, but it is thought to be at the cost of reliability and ease of cleaning. It will be interesting to see if the gas vs. inertia argument goes away with this new gun. Remington added a patented new SuperCell recoil pad to the Versa-Max as well. And if their claims are true that the 12 gauge gun recoils less than a traditional 20 gauge, this could be a new standard by which all other shotguns are measured.

A lesser story on the Versa-Max shouldn’t be a lesser story but it is because most people don’t understand the ergonomics of shotguns. When I go into my favorite gun shop, Kittery Trading Post in Maine, on a busy Sunday in August, I see literally dozens of people lifting shotguns to their shoulders to see how the gun “feels.” They work their way down the rack like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears until they find one that “feels just right.” Little do they know that lifetime shotgunners and of course professional shooters actually “fit” their shotgun to their own body dynamics. They do this using different types of stocks, and some gunsmithing to make spacers between the stock and the receiver.

Remington has taken this system of fitting a shotgun and made it a part of the design of the Versa-Max. The “length of pull,” which is the distance between the trigger and the buttstock, can be adjusted with spacers that come with the gun. The inside of the stock itself has yet another spacer plate system that is adjustable with shims and an included wrench for “cast,” which is a left to right angle adjustment, and “drop,” which is the down angle of the stock from the bore-line. I will reserve judgment on this until we get a gun for a full review, but if it is as usable as promised, it means that if you go into a gun shop and pick up a Versa-Max and you don’t like the way it feels or points for you, simple adjustments can cure whatever aspect of the gun isn’t working for you. The comb on the stock is also removable and it comes with the flush version, and a 3/8” and 5/8” version is available from Remington.

Some other details you would might want to know is that every gun comes with a hard case, and in the black variety of the guns, five Flush Pro Bore® chokes (Full, Mod, Imp Mod, Light Mod and IC). Both camouflaged versions come with four Pro Bore Extended choke tubes (Flooded Timber, Over Decoys, Pass Shooting and Turkey/Predator). If you are a waterfowl hunter, one important detail of the gun is that all of the internals are made from either stainless or nickel-teflon coated so the gun doesn’t rust from the inside out. Right now the gun is in stores in a 28” black model (MSRP $1,399) and 28” Mossy Oak Duck Blind® (MSRP $1,599), and by spring there should be a 26” version in black and a 26” version in Realtree® AP™ Camo for the same prices respectively. All the guns come with Remington’s Platinum Service Plan. Free to all who participate, the plan includes one courtesy cleaning and detailed inspection within the first 12 months of purchase, 7-day turnaround on all repairs and free shipping on all warranty repairs.