you’re probably right. I like to enjoy the ‘outdoor’ experience as much as the hunting, so any type of static hunting is uninteresting to me. Following a bird dog to flush out game probably would be fun. Never did it. But that’s what my dad used to do with this gun and his short-haired pointers.
Good idea. I’ll keep it in mind, as I have a friend with 100s of acres of private land down south of Fort Benning, GA.
Glad to see that you got everything squared away. Being a close cousin to the Browning A-5, the Model 11 shares much of it’s robustness and easy of maintenance (very few parts interchange though).
I collect A-5’s and find that barring abuse, even the ones close to 100 years old operate well with just basic maintenance. Keep the magazine tube clean and either dry or very light oil.
If the gun has trouble cycling, if the rings are set up correctly (and it sound like you understand how they work) the next thing to check is chamber cleanliness. It can look clean, feel clean, and still be sticky enough to prevent proper extraction. Pull the barrel, wrap some 0000 steel wool around a bronze brush of the righs size, chuck the rod in a drill and polish away. That has solved extraction problems for every A-5 I’have had including my 1914.
Avoid lots of oil in the action, it’s not that necessary, and if you store the gun upright it will drain down the action spring tube and make the stock “punky” over time. Getting excess oil out of the wood is a pain.
That gun will outlive us all, no matter how much you shoot it. Please though, no steel shot, it will score the barrel and with a full choke, likely bulge the barrel as well. Stick to the softer non-toxics.