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By
Kyle Wintersteen, Associate Editor
“WINTERSTEEN!” yelled
Senior Editor Jeff Johnston from my office door. “I’m
about to make your day. You’re going on a western Illinois
whitetail hunt with a bona fide over/under.”
I loosened my tie. “Surely you aren’t
asking me to defile the sanctity of a fine double gun by shucking
slugs down its bore?”
“Wintersteen, you snob. It’s not a shotgun. It’s
Traditions’ new over/under muzzleloader, the Express Double
rifle.”
“A double-barrel smokepole? How much must that thing weigh?”
I asked.
“What’s important here is that two
shots are better than one,” he replied.
The Two-Barrel Advantage
The Express’ aesthetics could be described
like my overweight buddy’s ex-girlfriend—not exactly
stunning, but prettier than you’d expect. The Express is a
bit blocky, but its styling reminded me a little of a double-triggered,
boxlock shotgun. Many Traditions guns are CNC machined at a company-owned
factory in Ardesa, Spain, which at the time of the Express’
conception was also making over/under shotgun frames for Laurona,
a European arms maker. Traditions incorporated the Laurona shotgun
frames into the design of the Express ML rifle rather than engineering
an entirely new blueprint.
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Even without this insider information,
one could easily pick up on the styling cues shared by some over/under
shotguns and the Express—a pistol grip, tang safety, schnabel
fore-end with Deeley and Edge-style latch and top lever. But the
gun’s shadow-line cheekpiece, TruGlo rear sight, tapped holes
for a scope and the robust steel of dual rifled barrels confirm
that this is no wispy scattergun.
Traditions had some obstacles to overcome with
a double-gun design. The company is known for quality, budget-priced
firearms, but over/under and side-by-side rifles often come with
exorbitant price tags; it’s not easy to mass-produce a double
rifle that will poke the same hole at 100 yards with either barrel.
The solution was a hand-adjustable top barrel that tunes with an
Allen wrench to line up with the bottom barrel’s point of
impact. The regulating “barrel jack” has four adjustable
screws that encircle the end of the top barrel, allowing it to be
adjusted in relation to the bottom barrel. I found that each quarter-turn
of the four screws moved the bullet’s point of impact about
an inch at 100 yards.Getting the barrels to align was fairly intuitive:
I mounted a Traditions 3x-9x-40mm scope on the Express and zeroed
the bottom, stationary barrel at 100 yards. Then I simply adjusted
the second barrel until its groups were as close as possible to
those of the first. By the fifth group, I had the barrels shooting
an average of 2-3 inches from one another.
Another option is zeroing the barrels at two different
distances. For instance, I considered zeroing the first barrel at
100 yards, then adjusting the second barrel with my Allen wrench
to dead-on at 50. The Express is double-triggered, so you don’t
necessarily have to use the adjustable barrel as your second shot.
The Field Test
The Express Double is not a 300-yard or even a
200-yard rifle, but it was never designed as such; at 100 yards
with a scope or 50 yards with its open sights it’s more than
accurate enough for the task (see table). Using 100 grains of Hodgdon
Triple Seven (the gun is rated for 150), I got a least one group
under 2 inches with three different kinds of sabots. Frankly, the
numbers surprised me in spite of my biggest gripe, the rifle’s
poor triggers. Both had quite a discernible creep and broke at 7.5
and 8 pounds.
The whole rifle, at 12.5 pounds before optics,
is heavy for a deer gun. Unfortunately there’s little that
could have been done to trim such a rifle’s girth; the frame
and both barrels have to withstand the pressures generated by 150-grain
blackpowder loads behind slugs that can weigh up to 500 grains.
I think it would make an especially great gun for those adventurous
souls who are increasingly choosing to hunt Africa with a muzzleloader.
In the end, the Express proved an admirable performer
with an ambitious design. Some members of the flintlock crowd may
take offense to the notion that “two shots are better than
one,” but I enjoyed hunting with the Express and took peace
of mind in an insurance barrel during the muzzleloader season. Speaking
of which, my western Illinois buck-of-a-lifetime never materialized,
but I did take a doe.
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