Bushcraft My Shotguns & Hunting Gear

hi there guys is Mike from Embassy he bushcraft here in the last couple of days I've been a doing a bit of shooting down by the case line again I'm in a beautiful area and the weather's amazing but while I was out here and I'm just taking a bit of a break this morning I've just brought the full by floor up to this top field and just chilling out here enjoying the weather I thought I'd just make a short video just showing you the guns that I use and just talk a bit about them I've got two shotguns in front of me here I've got a 12 bore and a 410 both side by sides and these are the two guns I own and use I'll also wanted to show you some of the gear that goes with it like ear protection gloves kind of cartridges that I use and also some of the cartridges that I reload just to give you a bit of an idea in a clearer picture on what I do with these guns and how I use them so the first gun I'll show you is the twelve ball signed by side and this is it just here and this is made by five DeStefano in Italy and if anyone's familiar with that manufacturer it's three sisters and they make some beautiful guns and this is probably one of the least expensive ones and I bought this from new some time ago for about 700 pounds and going back in time and hindsight's always a wonderful thing if I went back in time now and I was starting shooting again I knew what I knew now that's always the case isn't it that everything in life and I would probably buy a secondhand aya or BSA for around about two hundred and fifty pounds and it would almost be identical in performance and what it could do and it'd probably be a bit of a rough a gun being secondhand and you can use it a bit more confidently in the field without worrying about knocks and dents but this one's quite old now despite the fact that I look after stuff pretty well I do really look after these things but I'm not afraid to use them at the same time I just employ some good maintenance after I use it but you can see the barrels covered with big scratches and dents I mean it's it's a tool at the end of the day and got to use it and that's the way it goes but the specifics of this gun I don't know the weight of it but I'll put all of the other information in the description because I've forgotten a lot of it and the manual doesn't actually tell you an awful lot about it to be quite honest with you but it's not loaded just so you know it's a really lovely well-balanced gun and that's why I love side-by-sides and guns built for the field as they spin on a pivot if you're walking like this quite quietly and you've got your eyes open really perceptive something makes a sudden move you can make really fast and take that shot and just do it on instinct and most of the time you can get a good shot on instinct it's on the clay range that I find you think about the shot too much you get too much time and then you start missing to you you're overthinking it you've got to go a bit primal really when you're hunting but this has got 28 inch barrels which is a good length for all-around field use I'd probably go longer if I was into wild failing I wouldn't go any shorter the chokes are a quarter on the right barrel which goes off first and a half on the left barrel which goes off last and it's a single trigger ideally I would like a double trigger like my little full tender but as again hindsight it's a wonderful thing but it does make it quite quick on the mark you don't have to switch triggers which is one advantage of it but the disadvantages with it with a gun like this is he you can't have two guns in one in some respects with a a double trigger you could have one cartridge in here that's different to the cartridge loaded in there and you can decide which one goes off first so if you're walking along you spot a rabbit at distance and you've got a heavier cartridge loaded in this barrel here on a tighter choke and you can get that range and decide to take that first with this you're fixed with right barrel going off first then left barrel and that's the disadvantage with it another feature of this gun has its cottage actors you may say well what are a jacket is and if you look at the actual breach section of the gun you'll see that there's an extended part of the breach that actually pops out when you break the gun if I do this and pull this lever here and right the bowels you'll see that these ejectives popping and what will happen is if I five one-shot a little spring pop site in the cartridge ejects away now again that has its pros and cons if you're out hunting you can load really fast but you don't want to litter the ground with your cartridges so you will have to pick them up so I usually type the stock under my arm and just catch the cartridge like this now I can pop it in my pocket or just toss it on the ground so it doesn't fly into a bush and I can never find the cartridge over all these guns are very easy to look after you can actually service them yourself if you're competent with with taking them apart I've taken this whole gun apart many a time to do various things to it it's not loaded by the way but you can see if I push this button at the top here just here the foregrip comes off I can take that off and for a security measure as well if traveling it's always good to take that off it means if your car gets stolen for example the gun is useless because this is part of the trigger mechanism and the pins cannot [ __ ] without it and the gun is effectively useless and then to get this component it would cost double what the gun costs to get it manufactured because these guns are handmade and you can't just go and buy one of these off the shelf it needs to come from a manufacturer safe a good little security measure to take that off you can read about that if you get into shooting and you just put this braking lever there and the browser's come off and then you can clean the barrels clean the breech there and do all the necessary bits and bobs to it that you need to do but in terms of the issues I've had with this gun I had to redo the entire stock I split the stock on it basically all the way down there I cracked it and I cracked it by putting really really heavy cartridges through it which you shouldn't really do with a side-by-side but when I was new just shooting it was all about you know I want to try big cartridges and he sort of get carried away with reloading them he tried various relating recipes and you know you just get silly with it sometimes don't here's how you learn by breaking things a lot of the time but I fired a shot I wasn't testing this and I was doing some field testing had some targets a fired fired a shot and basically notice when I got home that the stock had split and I was pretty disappointed I sent it back to the manufacturer they'd ain't warrants have a warranty on on stocks and I know a lot of gun manufacturers won't do that these days simply because there can be parts of the grain that a week and they might not realize it and then it just splits I've seen some really pricey guns and some lovely bharata's riddled with cracks they still work fine but you know they're just natural weaknesses in the wood fortunately since refinishing this I've had no problems and to refinish it and to take this off it was only in oiled stock so it didn't have any lacquer on it I had to boil it in a barrel and I boiled it in the barrel for ages and got all the oil and all the dirt out it raised all the grain up I had to sand the grain down boil again raised the grain sand again I did that about 6 or 7 times until the grain stops rising and it's very very smooth and then I used Troy and I finding the first five coats of oil with maths or white spirit I can't quite remember so it gets a real deep soak and that's how you get a nice shimmering effect on the stock and that those coats soak in you apply them sort of a couple of coats a day and then you use Thicket royal and apply it on and this is an in the wood finish rather than an on the wood finish meaning there is no layer like lacquered layer on the actual wood it's not like varnish this has been soaked with oil and the oil sets how Troy works and the water beads office this now it's solid as a rock and obviously I had to epoxy all of this and put a small piece of dowel in to hold the split together it was a bit of a pain but unfortunately I had no choice you know how to do it so I just sort of taught myself how to do it I haven't redone this bit yet you can see a slightly darker than this part here well I will get around to it one day you do have to mask off this checkering will the etching here on the actual stock or else you can really soften it down by sanding it but it's a good project to do i reboot the barrels on this as well just cold bluing just why I willed a lot of it down and had to re blue quite a bit of it and you can sort of heat it up with a heat gun and everything and and do it the proper way but it is a field gun at the end of the day and it's covered in scratches and dents but this is the twelve ball hopefully I've covered everything about it and if you have any questions do ask me I'll try and get back to you I get a lot of comments these days and and messages and stuff I don't really get time to answer all of them but it's a beautiful gun and obviously you can watch some of the hunting vids on the channel if you're new to this video you don't really know a lot about me or what goes on on the channel and you can see it in action the second gun I've got here is this little 410 and this is a fantastic field gun very lightweight brilliant for scouting around it folds down as well it's called a poachers gun so it folds in half like this so you can put it on the side of your pack or stow it into a backpack but you can see it just clips in and there we go just locks the barrels and you've got a lever there and it breaks the barrels like so and you've got the button on this side push that and fold it up and it fits very nicely on mylk 35 actually just slid down the side in between the pouch and the actual backpack so if I go off and do a bit of wild camping or any kind of excursion where I want to travel light I can take this gun with me and the fantastic thing is the cartridges weigh almost nothing in some respects for a shotgun shot and cartridges are incredibly heavy if you think about how much these weigh now at 32 grams we'll well let's say 40 grams including plastic and brass and etc and powder you think about how much any times that by hundred cartridges you've got an awful lot of weight there and you're suddenly carrying tons of weight it's not a very practical gun for carrying in the field on trips like this when it comes to weight of actual ammunition but a little gun like this is fantastic and has the same range as the twelve ball exactly the same range and a very similar pattern is just a lot less dense because there's less lead it's us two full chokes on the end so these are the tightest chokes you can get two full chokes which is beneficial on a small gun like this because you really want to kind of maximize that shot pattern on such a small amount of lead it does have 28 inch barrels and it's hammer action so you can see you've got two hammers there the right trigger operates the first hammer the left trigger the second hammer so right and left it's pretty easy in terms of recoil has very little recoil it's a very lightweight gun that a child could use quite happily if they were getting into shooting then it's in great condition for something around about 200 pounds it's a fantastic addition to go alongside the 12 bore for when you need a bit of a lighter gun and you only have a license for shotguns like myself and you want something quite small to take out in the field going any smaller and our rifle would be even more useful and much quieter the disadvantage with an air rifle than letting a lot of people who don't know a lot about guns don't realize is you can't take game on the run an air rifle requires a whole different set of skills and an awful a lot of patience and you can't just startle things and take a shot hoping to hit it but a lovely gun and fantastic for packing away so hopefully I've covered those guns in enough detail for you that you've got a bit of an idea of why I use them and what I use them for and why I like them and although some of them aren't ideal you end up with things and you make them work for you and I wanted to tell you a bit about the gear I use alongside the guns and one question I often get is why I wear ear protection when using guns while I'm hunting but these are MSA supreme pros and they're made by sordin and they record all the noise around you so if I put them on now I can't that they're like normally if it had sort of muffs now I can't really hear anything sounds like I'm underwater talking but if I push this button here I can hear everything perfectly and all the noise around me is being picked up by these two microphones here and being played back to me instantly through my ears and I can look around I can hear the birds I can hear the ocean the only disadvantage of them is directional so because the microphones are pointing this way even though they pick up sounds around me behind me can be a bit distorted I can turn down the volume so the volume is quite low now I can turn it up to full and it almost gives you better hearing than you originally had when it comes to very light ambient noises but it's just the directional side of it that I've always found a bit of a disappointment with but that's probably because you've got to spend a lot of money these things weren't cheap they're about 200 pounds and that's a lot of money for ear protection but because I used to shoot all the time every week or every weekend those I are doing crop protection for various farmers me and my brother would be out all the time shooting doing clays on like little competitions and things it made sense to spend money on my hearing and for me 200 pounds to protect my ears is not it's not a lot of money I do wear gloves as well these are 511 gloves brand new pair got them the other day I always buy them slightly too tight and I soak them in water and we stretch them out and let them dry and he's a fantastic gloves 511 nfo I think they are tactical gloves good for cooking as well on the leather side to them as well so I wear gloves sometimes on my sheep I've got various things that I wear on my belt hold cartridges I've got things that are velcro so these are just things I've basically made with elastic and velcro you can Volk throw them onto various parts of your body you should have like a velcro plate hung off my belt and I'd stick these on there and I could organize whatever cartridges I wanted into them but nowadays I picked this up for about fifteen quid secondhand and it's a lovely bit of leather it goes on the belt nicely you can just carry a couple of cartridges on you I don't want too many one IMAX shooting someone after too much most of the time have a cleaning kit this is four for ten and twelve ball and I've got a variety of things in there including the original butt plate and a full grip holder when you're out on game days and you're shooting or not game days with clay days I think the pheasant shooting but I am are generally just rough shoot or I go down the clay range basically this is the original butt plate that comes with the twelve ball and see it's a nice piece of walnut there but I don't use that anymore I've kept it in case I sold a gun which you hope I never have to and I've got this and this slips on like so because what happens is when you've led off fifty cartridges in a row the barrels are red hot and you can't hold them anymore so you want to be holding something like that and that's nice if you're on a clay day and you've got a do you know simulated shoot and there's tons of clays flying at you and you're letting them off you know you see me going like this shaking shaking the heat at my hands if I don't have this on clay days I do also have a bit of suede that I've made and it just goes around the stock there and if I'm sort of navigating through horrible terrain like I am down here with all this golf's I don't want to scratch the hell out of my stock just for the hell of it so I put that on I have a gun sling here too really nice thing I picked this up on eBay for about Tanner never seen them since slips on just like that this part loops around here it's got a draw toggle there leather toggle it goes like that you can carry it on your back quite nicely put this leather part on and you've got a pretty well-protected good field gun to just get out there with and feel a bit of shooting and it's really nice great set up various other things in here like oils and I've got a ball scrubber this is for the breech and then a snake ball just to pull through and usually when I've scrubbed the breech just put a bit of oil in the breech and scrub it the breech scrubber to loosen the dirt and help lift it away too pulls through with the ball scrubber and it's literally like looking down at a mirror in those barrels say that's pretty much the extent of my gun cleaning although I do put oil in the action clean the action out have an old toothbrush they use for scrubbing things out getting it nice and clean and every soft and it's nice to give the guns a service take the action off see what condition they're in they pick up dirt and grime you can give them a clean-out and just check the components and then make sure they're functioning correctly but when I'm out in the field let's say I take the little 410 with me and I'm in horrible wet weather I've got a little pot here that has fatty and you've seen me use this a million times on the channel various fats that I use whatever I can get hold of I tend to like to use natural things if you do get an animal you can use the fat t so you maintain your tools but I really rub that all over the barrel so the water beads off of it and then gets pot rusting so I thought I'd just give you a bit of a run-through on the gear I used for shooting it's been a bit of a mishmash this video showing you different things but I kind of wanted to do it all in one as opposed to just draw it out into tons of different videos and to give you a bit of an insight and the kind of gear that I've got the shotguns that I use how they work why use them why I like them so I hope this videos helped out I will put helpful links in the description to shooting channels on YouTube things about getting shotguns the legalities about them things about getting permission how'd you get shooting Commission's and so on most of the permissions I've got for shooting I've just banged on someone's door introduce myself said you know can I do some shooting for five years down the line we've got a great relationship and you know I know them really well like like I do my friends and it's just the way you let things build up naturally so a lot of the time it's just like that but thanks again for watching I really appreciate you watching this video and I hope that's helped out answer any questions about the the guns are using the gear that goes with it and hopefully I'll see you again very soon in another video take care guys [Music]

Channel: MCQ Bushcraft & Wilderness Life

Views: 162,221

Rating: 4.9320283 out of 5

Keywords: woodland, forest, mountains, river, lake, tinder, Survival, Bushcraft, survivor, knife, knives, valley, axe, camping, tent, footwear, hunting, fishing, backpack, clothing, boots, primitive, nature, shelter, shooting, shotgun, rifle, rucksack, flashlight, torch, craft, plants, trees, education, wilderness, family, hobbies, fun, animals, game

Id: DKyfvzJQJQ4

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/gazzthompson]

Guy has some great hunting/camping videos .