1100 Shell Carrier

[Brian Payne]

Mod. 1100 getting ready for shooting. I have the easyloader on order, but have also heard that the normal shell carrier from the 870 will also work in this shotgun, you just loose the ability to have the last shot hold open feature. You are able to load the magazine just like the 870.

Any experience with this?

[wsimpso1]

Best thing to do is to install the 3 inch shell lifter with the EZ Loader. There are other threads on this topic recently.

I have never thought through the M870 shell lifter in a M1100 before, so let's go through that.

The M1100 has to lock open on each shot in order to give the magazine time to feed the next round onto the lifter. The M870 shell carrier (Rem's name for the shell lifter) does not have the parts or cuts for the carrier latch, nor does it have the pin hole to mount the EZ Loader. Without the carrier latch, the action bars and bolt would open and either close without a new round or jam up on the new round. So if you started with a M870 carrier, you would have to cut it for the carrier latch, drill it for the EZ Loader, and then you still would not have the benfits of the 3" Carrier. Better to invest in Sweeney's book and install the EZ Loader to a 3" Carrier.

This thread covers the topic fairly well. Sweeney's book is really good on setting up and taking care of the M1100 too. Good Luck!

http://www.brianenos.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26851

Billski

[Brian Payne]

Thanks for the advise.

I received the easyloader and have Patrick Sweeney's book on order. I became impatient and installed the easyloader, but everything works great. I had heard about the 870 carrier working while reading on the Shotgun forums on another site. Maybe they were talking about using it for trap shooting or something.

[Intel6]

I did this conversion to my Vang comped 11-87 Police after talking to Hans about it. I wanted something better than the factory set up but didn't want to use and easyloader. I use the EL on my competiton 1100 but I didn't want it on the 11-87P. It works great and now it loads just like my 870.

Neal in AZ

Mod. 1100 getting ready for shooting.  I have the easyloader on order, but have also heard that the normal shell carrier from the 870 will also work in this shotgun, you just loose the ability to have the last shot hold open feature.  You are able to load the magazine just like the 870.

Any experience with this?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[wsimpso1]

Hey Intel6,

More details please. This could be interesting. Did you do anything else to the gun to make it work? Is it reliable?

Billski

[Intel6]

Hey Intel6,

More details please. This could be interesting. Did you do anything else to the gun to make it work? Is it reliable?

Billski

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not much more to it. I noticed that Vang Comp was offering this conversion and so I called and asked them if there was anything more to do than just replace the 1100 shell lifter with an 870 lifter in the triggergroup. They basically said that is all there is so I ordered the lifter from Brownell's and installed it. The lifter pivots in the same place and they are both activated the same way (off the bottom of the bolt carrier) so it works just like it is supposed to and I have had zero problems with the function of it. As noted, you do loose the bolt lock back but that doesn't bother me on this shotgun as it is a dedicated defensive SG that is set up with ghost rings.

This is not a permanent conversion and while I haven't tried switching it back I know that it could be reveresd if you didn't like it.

Neal in AZ

[wsimpso1]

Intel6,

I do not know anything about "Vang Comp" - perhaps something in the action is modified?

I learned how the M1100 worked when I was a product engineering guy at Remington in Ilion (a long time ago). We were taught that a magazine spring of reasonable force just can not get the ammo stack shoved back far enough before the action bars start forward. Thus the carrier latch and loading button, which lock the gun open on every shot. Then when the next round hits the latch, the action closes. I have seen high speed film of this stuff - The bolt and action bars come back rather quickly, and the next shell floats back to the latch long after the carrier latch has locked.

So I am curious if the Vang Comp included some fancy action work to either slow down the action bar movement or speed up the magazine movements.

Billski

[Intel6]

Sorry about that, Vang comp is a common thing in some circles.

Here is the site: Vang Comp

Their main claim to fame is barrel work that lets you shoot buckshot in very tight patterns at longer distances. They recently moved here to AZ and have expanded their operation to now work on pistols and rifles. While they do work on shotguns they do not do anyting to the action.

The 870 carrier conversion on the 11-87 works fine and has noting to do with all that 1100/11-87 action stuff you talked about above. The shell needing to come out of the magazine at a certain speed is important to a regular 1100/11-87 but not to one that has an 870 carrier in it. As the bolt goes back it trips the shell latch which releases a new shell that needs to come back and hit the carrier latch as you said above. The carrier latch locks the lifter down which is what holds the bolt open. When the latch is hit byt he new shell the bolt carrier goes forward and it pushes that funny looking arm (don't know what it is called) which makes the lifter bring the round to be loaded in line with the bolt and chamber.

The lifter on the 870 works exactly the same way but it doesn't lock the bolt back. As you manually pump the action closed the bolt carrier pushes on that arm connected to the lifter and the shell that was released by the shell latch (as the action was opened) is brought up to be fed into the chamber.

There is no modification of the 11-87 action necessary. It works the same as before, the action of the lifter is different.

Neal in AZ

[wsimpso1]

Intel 6,

That using the M870 Shell Carrier actually works is kind of amazing to me. My problem is that when I worked for Remington at Ilion (1980-1981), I knew the people who developed the M1100. I, as a young engineer, suggested that all of these latches and stuff seemed superfluous (as they must now to you), and cited rifles and machine guns that move ammo around without latching open. Some folks there explained that they could not get the M1100 type shotguns to work with the range of ammo that they wanted to without the lock open type of mechanism. Shooting heavy waterfowl loads and full magazines were cited as delivering shells the slowest while the action was opening the fastest. They wanted to use the M870 parts, but justified the latch and loading button to both themselves and the bean counters.

In the course of being a product engineer there, I saw high speed film of M1100's operating. In these films, you can see the hammer fall, then the bolt unlocks and the action bars and bolt sweep open. After it hits the buffer, the bolt and action bars start forward but are stopped by the latched shell carrier. While the action bars are going aft, the next round is usually moving more slowly and would get to the back end of the shell carrier way too late to be loaded cleanly if the bolt and action bars were not waiting for the shell.

So I came to believe that the latch was not only a way to stand the action open when empty, but necessary for the gun to work reliably. You are telling me that M1100's work fine without the latches. Learn something new everyday... Sort of like trying to convince someone that metaphor is OK to use in interpreting the Bible when they are accustomed to literal interpretation.

I am still curious - Do you have any restrictions on the types of ammo or the size of the magazine that you can run and still have the gun function reliably?

Billski

[Intel6]

Billski,

I sure would love to see that video. Not being even close to an engineer I believe you (your analysis of the video is sound) that it shouldn't work but I have shot this SG for a few years now since doing the conversion so I have to go with my observations.

The gun that I did the conversion to is an 18" barrelled 11-87 Police model so it doesn't have the compensating gas system of the regular 11-87, it just has two gas ports like the 1100. It has the +2 factory mag extension and that is about it. Other than the barrel work from Vang Comp and a different set of sights it is stock.

As far as ammo goes, the 11-87 is set up for a steady diet of full power buck and slugs (used by LE agaencies) so it doesn't want to cycle the light stuff. I would run OO buck and slugs with no problems and 3 dramor higher shot loads with 1 1/8 th oz. or more shot. As I shot it more (and I think got broken in more) I was able to shoot it with my own reloads using 1 oz. of shot as long as I kept the power up to 3 drams or more.

Do you think that using a faster full power load might be helping it work? I wonder if I took the trigger group out of the 11-87P and put it in my 1100 would it work?

Neal in AZ

hat

[wsimpso1]

Intel6,

Hey, I am definitely not arguing that it works or not - You are shooting it and it works. Good enough for me, I am just trying to figure out what is allowing it to work.

In the early 80's we had film. High speed video just wasn't ready then. We shot a bunch of film when we we were debugging something, usually because it did not act up all of the time.

We also had a bunch of high speed film from destructive testing of rifles and shotguns, but that is thread drift. Just to finish the thought, these tests were intended to look at the results with blocked barrels (mud, cleaning rods, etc), wrong ammo (308 in a 270, 20 in a 12, etc), head seperations, and head splits.

As to the M1187 ammo keeping up with the action bars, well, cool. I wonder if the current engineers at Remington know about this. I do remember folks talking about how some of the other semi-auto shotguns of the era did not lock back until empty... Wish I knew more about it. Being as we have to chamber flag our guns now, we do not need to have them lock back when empty, and we should not be letting our guns go empty until the end of the string.

I do know that the lighter load guns do tend to need a higher average bolt velocity to be reliable, while the the heavy load guns need less "extra" power to be reliable, so maybe the bolt velocity is low enough that the ammo can keep up with it. We tried to always keep bolt velocity below certain numbers because when the action bars and bolt hit the back of the reciever, it hurt. We also were reluctant to increase spring oomph, either on the action spring or the magazine spring, because the gun became very difficult to operate.

I have a M870 in the rack, so I could check out the idea in my M1100. The differences are: No shell carrier latch; No carrier release button; Action bar lock. Something to play with when nothing more pressing is in front of me... Right now my M1100 cycles and loads flawlessly, so I am not messing with it. Just clean it and shoot it...

Billski

[bpowe]

We noticed a problem with our open 1100s with shells nearing max dram equivalent. The heavier recoil actually moved the shells in the magazine backwards, then sometimes the mag spring did not have enough energy to push the shells back hard enough to release the shell carrier latch... Bolt action!

Bill